Transactional Epiphany

It took the better part of the evening, but last night I finally tackled the chore of setting up Quicken 2010 to track my financial life. In the days following my previous botched attempt at automatic conversion of my Microsoft Money data, I arrived at a simple, yet powerful realization:

"I don't need to carry everything over."

I had more than a decade of account transactions in my MNY file. I had been allowing it to accumulate in size like a rolling snowball as I upgraded to progressively newer versions of Money, never bothering to archive and purge old data. Between ringing in the new year and switching to new software, however, I knew that this was an opportunity to start over. I retrieved the December 2009 statements from only my active accounts and used only those balances to populate my new QDF file.

Manual setup forced me to think about what I really needed to see -- and not see -- from this point forward. Accounts for long-closed store credit cards would only be zero-balance clutter onscreen. The historical graph of my fund balances during the 2001 dot-com bust isn't something I needed at my fingertips every day either. Perhaps most significantly, I didn't bother to copy over data for personal loans which realistically will never be paid back. I had mentally written those off long ago, but leaving them out of Quicken makes it seem more official now.

Eric Tyson authored some really good books in the "For Dummies" series that got me started with managing my own money long ago. More than ever, I now appreciate that the opening paragraphs of his personal finance book begin with a discussion about the emotions and psychology behind our relationship with our financial life. He warns against going to extremes. It's neither wise for a person to lose sight of their basic financial state, nor is it healthy to obsess over the disposition of every penny that comes into his hands.

Sometimes, letting go of yesterday helps us take control of tomorrow.