Spending Plan Versus Budget

UrsulaA

Check out the Reddit post by simplifiDev, a moderator for the SimplifiMoney Reddit sub dedicated to Simplifi. This adds some color as to how to think about the spending plan. I bolded some items.

I find my spending plan to be simpler than my prior Mint budget, with fewer lines to track. I like seeing the bills and subscriptions separate, I even cancelled some I forgot I had.

simplifiDev post 1

First of all, thanks for your comments! They’re very insightful into how people think about Spending Plan when first entering the product. That said, Spending Plan is not intended to be a Mint-like budget. It is intended to be an overview of your finances for the month. We intentionally have not put limits on your income and spending and instead wanted to allow you to see things from a holistic level. The question to ask is how much will I spend this month? And hopefully, we will help you find the answer. If you go back to the previous month, we will hopefully answer the question of how much did I spend last month? Your 'left over' spending should be the same as your 'Available to spend' in spending plan.

Again, the lack of limits in income and spending is intentional in Spending Plan. If you do want to set limits, I'd recommend (as others have) using watchlists to set limits. We will even notify you if you are approaching your limit there!

Thanks again for posting, hoping I added some clarity.

https://www.reddit.com/r/simplifimoney/comments/183hl8b/comment/kb6fr72/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

simplifiDev post 2

First of all, thanks for your comments! They’re very insightful into how people think about Spending Plan when first entering the product. That said, Spending Plan is not intended to be a Mint-like budget. It is intended to be an overview of your finances for the month. We intentionally have not put limits on your income and spending and instead wanted to allow you to see things from a holistic level. Your “other spending” is intended to be your “everything else” spending. Planned spending is the closest thing we have to a budget, but we try to accommodate you if you do go over. I agree, we could redesign planned spending to allow for more planned items on the screen.

We also automatically take out your planned items from your overall budget because we want to show you how your planned items fit into your overall spending for the month. Starting from 0 will not happen because that isn’t the intent of planned spending. We want to allow you to think about your plan before you have actually spent anything.

If you want to have something akin to a traditional budget, you can definitely use watchlist and track your spending in your category, tag, or payee, including income. But yea, Spending Plan is not a budget, it’s a plan!

https://www.reddit.com/r/simplifimoney/comments/184izwk/comment/kb5qrkh/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

Flopbot

Interesting post. Thanks for sharing for all the non-Reddit-ites like me.

SRC54

I definitely like the Spending Plan over the way too complicated budget in Quicken Classic. And yes, if there are items you want to keep an eye on, Watchlist is a good way to do that. I use that too.

Thanks for the post!

UrsulaA

I use the spending plan to track broad categories with rollover and the watchlists to keep an eye on specific categories and to have a bird's eye view of expenses, income, and net income. I enjoy the Simplicity of tracking about 10 broad categories in the spending plan and not tracking each sub category like I used to do in Mint.