Financial Planning...What I'm Working On This Morning

It's a New Year and all my tax summaries have come in. I've been having my mom ( great accountant, strange bird business woman ) do my taxes since I came out of college. I've decided that I need to ween myself off of her free tax service this year or next year. In doing so, I have been listing all my financial accounts and goals. There's an interesting system pattern here...

My mom is like a legacy system, say a mainframe, who takes in summarized data, tax forms, and sends in my taxes usually close to the deadline in April. Aside from entering expenses in Quicken for the past 12 years, this is what my internal Financial System Architecture looks like.

I'm too cheap to hire a financial planner and to be honest, I'd rather have control of it. I've read or skimmed alot the different books.. Suze Orman, Robert Kiyosaki, the Motley Fool guys, the Millionaire Next Door. I'm thinking of building a better solution to my financial management. With 12 years of data in Quicken, you would think I could run some reports and get an idea of patterns in my spending habits. Also, I don't have one place where I can see how all my IRAs,401Ks,Stocks on Ameritrade are doing. I could probably build something for this. An ideal new replacement financial management process would consolidate all these "heterogeneous systems", provide real-time reporting where available, and spit out my taxes in early February by E-FILE.

Maybe I'll make this part of the book under have a side project, one of two or three case studies.