Coffee heat rising

Excel vs. Quicken

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So…how’s the bookkeeping working, after a year of using Excel instead of Quicken for Mac?

Last January I switched to Excel for tracking my bank accounts, budget, and credit card charges. After years as a Quicken customer, I’d really lost patience: data vanished in the transfer from Windows to Mac, Quicken for Mac was clunky, and I’d long ago had it with having to upgrade to a pricey  new version every time I turned around. It appears I’m not alone in those sentiments.

Excel has its advantages and its disadvantages vis à vis Quicken. Biggest negative: it can’t talk to your bank or your investment house. Quicken lets you upload and download transactions and data from those august institutions. Nor does Excel care to converse with TurboTax, Intuit’s tax preparation software. Excel talks to you and only to you (or so we hope).

If you want to integrate your bookkeeping with your banking and investing, however, there are alternatives, some of them out there in the Cloud. Programs such as Mint.com (which, alas, was purchased by Intuit), Buxfer, MoneyStrands, Pear Budget, or Thrive sometimes do that sort of thing, and of course Mint will now interact with TurboTax. Not having tried one of these programs, I hesitate to state that any are better, worse, or the same as Quicken. But there they are: something to try if your patience with Intuit wears thin.

Excel has one helluva learning curve, especially for those of us with English-major math skills. After a year of working with it, I’d say my skills are no better than they were at the outset. A year of manipulating Quicken left me with a black belt in Advanced Quickening. However, a rudimentary understanding of Excel’s functions allowed me to build checking and savings accounts and to massage the data into something that I think will be intelligible for my tax accountant.

It’s useful to know that Microsoft now offers a variety of home and office financial  management templates, designed to work with Excel. But it’s pretty easy to build your own.

To build the new Excel workbook, I tried to ape the accounts and functions of Quicken. This entailed creating spreadsheets for each bank account, laid out in identical patterns, plus another spreadsheet for credit-card charges. The latter allowed me to reset the balance each month to the amount budgeted for discretionary spending (which is all that goes on my credit cards), so that the bottom line showed how much was left in any given month’s allowance.

Typical headers for bank account
Tracking credit-card spending against an $800 budget

Come the first of this year, I created what I hope is an intelligible spreadsheet for the accountant by merging data from the credit-card spreadsheet with the bank-account spreadsheet entries and then sorting all the data by category. This made it possible to summarize tax-related data while also making all the year’s transactions, organized by budget category, easily visible and transparent to her.

A number of revelations ensued as I tried to organize this material for the tax accountant. One is that it makes sense to number tax-related categories (1, 2, 3…), so a “sort” command will bring them up at the top of the “sorted” spreadsheet. For example,

1 Medical
2 Mortgage interest
3 Trade group dues

…And the like. When “sorting” data, Excel wants to put numbered items before alphabetical items; so, if you preface each tax-related category with a numeral, the “sort” function will gather all the tax-relevant categories together.

Yeah, I know there’s something called a “pivot report,” and yes, I do suspect it could solve all my problems. However, only a Druid could comprehend the instructions in Excel’s Help file. I gave up after several efforts at trying to call upon those spirits.

In addition to its impenetrability, Excel has the annoying quirk that the (very simple!) formula you enter to create a running balance sometimes comes unstuck for no discernible reason, giving you an incorrect balance. Occasionally I haven’t discovered this until I’ve tried to reconcile my books with the bank’s. Figuring out the problem can be really difficult, because it often results not from incorrect data entry but from some mysterious disjunct between what you’ve asked the program to do and what it decides, midway through the process, to suddenly start doing. When gut instinct tells you something like this is happening, the solution is to go up to a row where the formula is visibly working and then drag the “balance” cell’s qualities all the way down the column. This corrects the error, wherever the heck it started.

We know the irritants presented by Quicken. It’s bloatware. It’s vaporware. The Mac version is clunkware whose files can neither be read by the PC version nor converted to a readable version. Your accountant, you can be sure, uses the PC version. And worst of all, its maker Intuit forces you to buy new, ever-more-bloated versions every time you take a deep breath. IMHO, these are very, very large irritants.

So, of course, is the difficulty of learning and manipulating Excel.

For me, just now it’s a toss-up. For a brief, not-so-shining moment last month, I considered running out and buying the latest version of Quicken to restart my books in 2011. But, on reflection, possibly not. Quicken’s biggest advantage over Excel is its ability to commune with your financial institutions. I’ve never felt moved to use that feature; my financial manager does the buying and selling of shares, and it’s pretty easy to access the credit union, the IRA, and the brokerage accounts online. Comparing and reconciling them is very simple, and I don’t need a piece of intermediary software to perform the desired transactions.

So. To the extent that one can be said to ♥ any software, I suppose I ♥ Excel.

What program do you prefer for bookkeeping, and why?

Stir-fry That Broccoli

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Okay, okay, broccoli-lovers take exception to my having cast asparagus at their favorite veggie. Several people remarked that the idea of stir-frying the stuff (my strategy for making it palatable) sounds pretty good. IMHO, it’s even better when converted into soup, a plan for which follows.

Here’s the thing: you can stir-fry a pile of bargain or garden-fresh veggies, let them cool, and then bag them in meal-sized Ziplock bags to use as the basis of future stir-fry meals, with or without  meat. Or you can just stir-fry enough for a single meal, either as a fully vegetarian dinner or as a side dish.

Here’s how to make broccoli more or less edible to go with a larger meal:

Get your hands on…

• a head of fresh, crisp broccoli
• an onion
• one or two large cloves (or three or four small cloves) garlic
• a lemon
• vegetable oil (olive oil is nice)
• optionally, a bottle of soy or Worcestershire sauce

Cut off the broccoli florets. Reserve the stems to make broccoli soup (below). Be sure the florets are fairly small; if necessary, cut the larger chunks in half.

Coarsely chop the onion. Mince the garlic. Slice the lemon in half.

I like to precook the onion a little because sautéeing it until it’s soft and even beginning to brown brings out its sweetness. But it’s not necessary. If you choose to do this, skim the bottom of the pan with some oil, toss the chopped onion around in it to coat, and let it cook gently, over medium-low heat, until the onion is translucent and sweet. Then turn up the heat to medium high, add the broccoli florets and garlic, and stir the veggies around until the broccoli is heated through and turns an even brighter green than it already is. If you decide not to precook the onion, just toss the whole mess into the oil in the pan and cook together over medium heat (this will give you crisper onion pieces with a sharper onion flavor).

As the veggies are verging on being done, squeeze half a lemon over them. If you like your veggies salty and Asian-flavored, add some soy sauce. Worcestershire sauce is a good substitute if you have no soy sauce in the pantry.

Serve quickly, piping hot.

To prepare a mountain of veggies for future stir-fries:

• a collection of fresh veggies, whatever strikes your fancy
• garnish-like additions such as bean sprouts and canned water chestnuts
• grated ginger
• an onion or two
• plenty of garlic
• vegetable oil
• optional: sesame oil

Clean the vegetables and cut them into one- or two-inch pieces. Gather them into mounds according to the amount of time they’ll take to cook. Onion, broccoli, carrots, and celery like take the longest, so they will go into the pan first. Bell peppers, summer squash, asparagus, Napa cabbage, and mushrooms take less time to cook; put them into the after the first round of veggies have been there for a few minutes. Finally, garlic, ginger, and leafy vegetables such as spinach, chard, or baby bok choy go in last.

So, skim the bottom of the pan with your vegetable oil. If you have sesame oil, add a few drops—a little goes a long way. Preheat the pan long enough to get the oil hot but not smoking.

Then start adding veggies in order, from the longest-cooking to the fastest cooking. The last things to add should be your leafy veggies; stir-fry these just until they’re wilted.

Since you’re going to store these in the freezer for future use, hold the soy sauce and tofu. These can be added when you bring out the veggies to complete the final meal.

To do this, you’ll need…

• the frozen veggies (defrost if they’ve clumped together; if not, you probably can toss them into the pan frozen)
• skinless chicken breast, reasonably tender beef or pork, shrimp, or scallops
• tofu
• minced or grated ginger
• soy sauce (or Worcestershire, in a pinch)
• hoisin sauce, if desired
• lemon juice, if desired
• little green onions, if desired
• bean sprouts, if desired
• cooked rice

Slice chicken, beef, or pork into thin pieces (about 1/4-inch thick).  Shrimp should be peeled; otherwise shrimp or scallops can be used whole. Dry the tofu on a paper towel or clean kitchen towel and cut into 1/2- to 1-inch pices.

Cook a pot of rice. When the rice is done, proceed with the stir-fry:

Again, skim a pan with vegetable oil; if desired, add a few drops of sesame oil. Preheat over medium-high heat. Working quickly, place the meat or shellfish into the hot oil. Stir as it cooks. Add the tofu. Add some soy sauce. Squeeze some lemon juice over the top. Add the frozen vegetables, stirring and tossing in the pan. While they cook, add the ginger. Add more soy sauce and lemon juice to keep the pan from going dry. As soon as the veggies are hot, add sprouts, and scallions, as desired.

And voilà! Dinner is served! Mound some rice in the middle of a plate and top with a serving of stir-fried meat and veggies.

What about all those woody stems from the broccoli?

These are the makings of a killer broccoli soup. You’ll need this stuff:

• broccoli stems
• another onion
• maybe a little garlic, if you please
• chicken broth or water
• maybe a little sherry, if you like
• milk or cream
• butter, if desired
• olive oil or vegetable oil
• salt and pepper to taste
• a blender or immersion blender

Cut the stems into manageable chunks. Coarsely chop the onion and the optional garlic. In a stock pot or large, deep frying pan, sauté the onion in oil, very slowly, until it’s well cooked and soft, even beginning to caramelize. Add the cut-up broccoli stems. Stir these around in the oil until they’re beginning to cook. Add garlic if desired.

Then add enough chicken broth, water, or both to cover the vegetables. Turn up the heat to DayGlo blast and stand there (do not leave the stove!) until the soup just starts to come to a boil. As bubbles start to roil, immediately turn the heat down. If you’re using an electric stove, you’ll need two burners for this trick: bring the soup to a boil on one burner. Meanwhile, have another burner turned on to “low.” Move the pan to the burner with the lower heat as soon as the stock comes to a boil. Adjust the heat to keep the broth at a steady, slow simmer.

Now let the veggies cook until the broccoli stems are soft all the way through when poked with a knife or fork. When they reach this state, turn off the heat and allow the food to cool a bit.

Run everything through your blender, a cup or two at a time, and collect the purée in a big bowl or large pan, or use your immersion blender to purée the soup in the cooking pan.

Finish the soup by adding milk or cream to taste, and, if desired, melt some butter into it. A dash of sherry gives the soup some panâche. Season with salt and pepper. It’s very nice when served with a dollop of yogurt over the top.

Image: Broccoli and Cross-sections. By Fir0002, flagstaffotos.com.au. GNU Free Documentation License.

Solitude Is Precious

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Isn’t it interesting, the number of widowed and divorced women who choose to stay single? One recent study showed that among Europeans, a man lives longer if he’s married and a women lives longer if she’s single. Whatever the reasons, a lot of women seem to intuit this and, about midway through life, begin to prefer a state of onliness. There’s something to be said for solitude.

Over at Surviving and Thriving, Donna Freedman holds forth eloquently on the pleasures and challenges of aloneness, spinning off a post from a site called The Quest for $85,000. If you haven’t run across the Quest blogger yet, you should definitely pay a visit—though it’s yet another of those sites where the person documents a struggle to get out of debt, there’s some very engaging writing here.

In a similar vein, NicoleandMaggie generated a lot of commentary with a lively post suggesting some people are not cut out to be stay-at-home parents.

On other fronts, take a look at the pretty bowls Bargain Babe scored at Anthropologie for dollar-store prices! She shares her secrets for how to snare amazing deals from that glitzy store.

Money Crush has a thoughtful post on pursuing what you love for a living.

Mrs. Accountability asks readers to weigh in on the benefits of cash-back vs. buying things with rewards points.

After a decluttering frenzy, Mrs. Money pauses to consider seven so-called “superfoods” you can afford—and they’re all delicious (ohhh, welllll…maybe with the exception of broccoli, the only subject George Bush and I ever agreed upon).

Over Forty and Loving It emits a cri de coeur over the Republicans’ determination to do us all out of any  kind of sane healthcare system.

At My Journey to Millions, Evan describes his accounting scheme to describe his progress on net worth without having to reveal information he prefers to keep private, and then emits his own cri de coeur about people who bellyache about money while they diddle away enough to beggar King Midas.

At Brip-Blap, Steve considers ways to handle fear, and in doing so describes an amazing and hair-raising situation he had to cope with while living overseas.

Five-Cent Nickel and his readers share their worries about keeping sensitive data secure.

OMG! Did you know you can now buy divorce insurance? Jim at Bargaineering asks for readers’ take on this product…when you look at the terms he describes, it looks like yet another scam. The most coverage you can buy is 25 grand. My husband spent that much per year during the time he was paying me alimony. The insurance is pricey and it doesn’t cover enough to matter.

Welp, speaking of aloneness, there’s nobody here but me to fix breakfast and feed the dog, so I’d better get up and start moving. Have a great weekend!

The High Cost of AARP Delta Dental

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Well, I expected the AARP Delta Dental plan I enrolled in last December to cover little more than the occasional cleaning, which, when paid for out of pocket, is $93 at my dentist’s office. But what I didn’t expect was to have the plan effectively land me in a hole that would take two years to climb out of.

Here’s how this comes to be:

You pay $450 a year for dental coverage. Each year, this is supposed to give you three “free” cleanings—each of which costs you a $20 copay. After a full year’s waiting period, you’re eligible for a discount of about 50% on crowns and other expensive procedures. However, in addition to the waiting period and the copays, there’s a $100 deductible that has to be met before even a routine cleaning is covered.

I need a new crown to replace an ancient one that’s been broken for years. Delta will not cover a crown until you’ve been in  the plan for a full year.

So, to arrive at the point where you can replace a broken crown, you have to spend $450 for the first year’s premiums, then re-up for another year, to the tune of another $450, and pay $200 in deductibles. Then, the most that will be covered for the crown will be half the price. Think about that.

My dentist charges $1,150 for a new gold crown. His charge for a routine cleaning, which one would normally do twice (not three times) a year, is $93. Over the course of two years, then, a patient with decent dental health but who needs an old crown replaced would pay $1,522 for cleaning and a new crown. What would this cost if you purchased AARP’s Delta Dental coverage, compared to what it would cost if you were uninsured?

Interesting. You pay $233 more for the same services and products, and for the privilege of having to wait a full year to get your crown fixed. The cost to get the crown plus routine medical care, if you just decided to pay for it, actually would be $186 less (i.e., $1,336), because you wouldn’t have to wait a year to be eligible for the Delta’s 50% discount.

Clearly, you’d be ahead to simply put aside $450 a year in a fund dedicated to paying dental bills. Assuming, that is, that you have decent dental health—no gingivitis, cavities, or teeth about to fall out of your head. If even a single year passed without a major dental event, the amount that would accrue in savings ($714) over the two years you have to subscribe to be eligible for coverage on a crown would cover two-thirds of the crown’s cost—not the measly 50 percent (if you’re lucky) that Delta covers. At the start of year 2 (assuming you fund your savings with a lump sum), you would have $714. If the second year passed with no dental crises, then at the start of year 3 your dental savings fund would have a beginning balance of $978.

Hmmm….  Makes the $50 tab for that Braun electric toothbrush that really keeps your teeth clean look like quite a bargain, doesn’t it? It pays to take care of your teeth!

I just canceled the Delta Dental plan. Since I signed up for it in December, even though I’ve never used it, they’re gouging me for premiums through March.

If you’re retired, think twice about Delta Dental! And remember, just because a product has the AARP brand associated with it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the best choice for you.

Ad Lib Whole-grain Oat Bread

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Lately I’ve taken to buying bread at Costco, because it’s as good as what I can make and a lot more convenient than baking bread. But the other day the whole-grain loaves ran out. Not about to make a special trip to that zoo for two loaves of bread, I decided to try to make my own whole-grain bread.

Except…oh yes. I was out of whole-wheat flour. Come to think if it, I was out of most goodies. So I improvised, using whatever was in the house. And the result was surprisingly delicious. Check this out:

You need

2 cups water
About 3½ or 4 cups unbleached white flour
About 1 or 1½ cups rolled oats
1 tablespoon yeast
1 tablespoon salt
a fistful or two of chopped walnuts or pecans
cornmeal (optional)
butter for the pan

This loaf is based on a recipe that calls for two cups water to 5 cups flour, so the proportion of water to the flour/oats combo should be about 2:5. Obviously, you can add other stuff if you have it around—sunflower seeds would probably be good, wheat bran, whatever. Raisins or other bits of dried fruit could be nice. If you have whole-wheat flour, by all means use it.

I use a bread machine to knead my dough. Simply put in all the ingredients except the nuts and turn the machine to “dough” (which is usually setting 9); let the machine mix and knead the flour, and leave the dough in it for the first rising. A bread machine will pulverize the nuts, so to mix those into the dough, try this:

Sprinkle some flour on a cutting board. Spread a handful of nuts on top of the flour. Turn the risen dough out of the bread machine on top of the nuts. With floured hands, spread out the dough to flatten it a bit, and then sprinkle a few more nuts across the top of the dough. Knead to distribute the nuts through the dough. Add more nuts as you’re going, as desired.

If you’re  not using a bread machine, then you can add the nuts when you knead the dough before the first rise, or, if you prefer, take a little extra time to knead them in before the second rising.

To make free-form loaves, divide the dough in half. Then just flatten each piece into a rectangular shape and then fold the edges over envelope-style to form a long artisan-style loaf. Butter a flat cookie sheet and sprinkle some cornmeal over the buttered surface. Set the loaves on top of the cornmeal; cover with a clean kitchen towel and allow to rise a second time, about 30 minutes.

Meanwhile, preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Bake about 40 or 45 minutes, until the loaves sound kind of hollow when you pick one up and rap it with your knuckles.

Few things are more economical than home-made bread, and none are more gratifying. I used walnuts, and it made an awesome loaf of bread. It’s especially delicious when toasted.

Winter Doldrums: Workman Waltz, Round 2; Taxman Cometh

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{moan} The wind whipped at about 30 to 40 mph all day yesterday and all night long. It was supposed to freeze last night but did not—fortunately. I couldn’t keep the covers on any of the plants; everything blew off in the wind no matter what I did to try to weight them down with rocks and bricks or to clip them with clothespins. But today an arctic air mass is riding in on that cold wind, and temps are supposed to drop into the 20s tonight and tomorrow and maybe Friday, too.

Whenever the headache subsides, which it will after breakfast and a long stand under a hot shower, I’ll have to go out there, saw up some sticks from the defunct trellises, pound them into the ground, sew lengths of twine onto the cloths with an upholstery needle, and tie everything down. Boy. That sure sounds like fun.

The roofing guys are back, tromping and banging overhead again. What a rough bunch that crew is! Holy mackerel.

Yesterday they scraped the old roof off and started hammering the new shingles down. Cassie the Corgi went ballistic. I ended up leaving her at La Maya’s house when I went to campus, for fear that she would make herself sick if she were left here alone in such a frantic state.

These guys lack the tradesmanlike skill of my old roofer. They’re just rough-and-tumble laborers. They yanked off the flashing around the deck, which the last guy didn’t do. Bila had painted the flashing to match the house, so now that will have to be redone, by guess who. Then there’s the shingles, which are darker than I realized they would be. I asked for a deep brown, which these are…but very deep. From a distance, they look black. And they’re pretty ugly against the light brown slump block on the house.

I’m not 100 percent pleased with the new heat pump, either. When the weather is mild (i.e., when you don’t really need the heat on), it works just fine. But when it gets cold, a heat pump loses efficiency and struggles almost nonstop to deliver warm air. In fact, at times it will blow icy-cold air into the house. I finally got tired of listening to it run last night—even set at 63 degrees the unit wasn’t shutting off, and it never fell much below 40 outside—so around 3 a.m. got up and turned the damn thing off.

As a result, it’s might’ crisp in here. Cassie’s little feet, the only part on her that’s not swathed in a three-inch-thick fur coat, have turned into small blocks of ice. I huddle in front of the computer wrapped in a fleece jacket and dread the prospect of having to step out of the shower later this morning. Sure am glad I don’t live back east, though!

More crap than Carter has oats has blown into the pool, there to join the debris tossed off the roof by the workmen. What a mess to clean up! No one expects roofing to be a tidy job, but really, it’s not necessary to throw your pop bottles and your garbage into the customer’s yard.

Spent a couple of hours with the new tax accountant last night, figuring out my taxes. She appears to be very good. Clued me to a lot of things about the way an S-corp works that the retired tax lawyer never bothered to explain. As it develops, the Copyeditor’s Desk can pay for some things directly related to its business activities that I’ve been paying out of my personal account, one of them being the Internet connection and another being subscriptions to publications directly related to and supporting Funny about Money. It’s not very much, but relief of even a few dollars in the monthly nondiscretionary budget will help a lot.

Looks like I may be about to pick up a new client. The executive director of a trade group I belong to referred the University of Arizona’s agricultural college to me; they’re looking for someone to freelance some stories, all of which look entertaining and interesting. So that will be a nice break from the freshman comp grind and will help to fund CE Desk so it can cover these proposed extra expenses.

At any rate, after talking with the CPA, I now can see that setting up the S-corp was quite a good idea, much better than I’d realized. It would’ve helped if someone had explained its benefits to me in detail, rather than dismissing my questions with a short answer of the “you must be a moron” variety. {sigh} I thought my ex-husband’s ex-law partner was doing a good job on the taxes, but apparently she could’ve been doing better.