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Virginia,
Here's the key: use Quicken and set things up so that everything is entered for you. That is, use your credit card for all purchases (pay off balance each month of course), and have Quicken download your credit card information every month. Pay all bills via your credit card, too.
You can set up Quicken so that it recognizes that transactions that start with "Chevron" are gasoline purchases, for example.
You can also download your financial investment data to Quicken so that you don't have to enter each dividend manually.
You can get a snapshot of your spending and investment performance at any time. Also, I found that once I started doing this, I found that my true expenses were different from what I had estimated.
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