Add ability to ignore individual Goal Contributions in Spending Plan

LtDan1912

The following idea came out of the "bug" reported here:
https://community.simplifimoney.com/discussion/comment/7716

In order to avoid the scenario outlined in the bug, one solution would be to allow individual goal contributions to be ignored from the spending plan.

This would be useful, for instance, if you are contributing funds that were just "released" from another goal. In that scenario, it is reasonable to assume that the contribution should not count against the spending plan as it is not coming from the current month's income.

Chris

I agree, but for a slightly different reason. I find it very annoying that if I make an extra contribution to a Goal, it gets subtracted from my Spending Plan. For instance, if I regularly save $400/month for an emergency fund (and that is established as a Goal) and make two $200 contributions plus an additional $100 contribution because I came into some extra money, a total of $500 is now subtracted from my Spending Plan. I believe Goals in the Spending Plan should only factor in the goal amount entered when the Goal was established (in my example, $400).

This could potentially be avoided if users were given the option to exclude entire accounts from their Spending Plan. In my example, if the funds are in a savings account and that's where the money is being pulled from to contribute to the Goal, the contribution won't be counted. The platform would simply subtract the expected contribution amount from the Spending Plan and leave it at that. For me personally, I don't factor my savings account into my Spending Plan. I use the Goals to factor in my regular savings just as a reminder.

kwimmer

Right now if you mark a savings goal to be ignored from a spending plan it applies to all future months as well as past months. This ends up skewing previous months plans to be inaccurate compared to actual contributions, as well as makes planning for the next month inaccurate without messing up the current month. Would it be possible to make ignoring contributions a month by month toggle?

RobWilk

Per month, in the spending plan, you can already "set custom amount" including $0 for that month.   Does this match what you were looking for?

kwimmer

RobWilk said:

Per month, in the spending plan, you can already "set custom amount" including $0 for that month.   Does this match what you were looking for?

No that does not do what I am looking for. 

Really this is a multi-dimensional issue.

First is not being able to directly link a transaction to a savings goal.
To get around this I when I have expenses that are tied to a savings goal, such as house maintenance, I have a spend category called "house maintenance" that those transactions go to.

Second is not being able to set a custom contribution amount for each savings goal for each month. 

For example, if I planned to contribute $100 to house maintenance but I also spent $100 on house maintenance in a given month I set the savings goal to be ignored and set my house maintenance spend category to $100. This allows me to maintain an accurate savings goal and still track spending that is related to house maintenance.

The problem is when I set the savings goal to be ignored (or even change the amount to contribute) it changes the entire series both past and present. So if I go to the previous month it shows inaccurate saving goal contributions because some goals were ignored this month that weren't ignored in the previous month, and the opposite is true as well, a savings goal I ignored the previous month may now be active this month. All of this makes past trends inaccurate as well as prevents future planning without messing up the current month. 

In an ideal world (which still blows my mind that it hasn't been done yet because it is fundamental to how sinking funds/savings work) I should be able to set a custom contribution amount for each savings goal for each month, as well as be able to tie a transaction to my spending goals to prevent my monthly spend plan from being impacted by spending from my savings. 

DannyB

kwimmer said:

Right now if you mark a savings goal to be ignored from a spending plan it applies to all future months as well as past months. This ends up skewing previous months plans to be inaccurate compared to actual contributions, as well as makes planning for the next month inaccurate without messing up the current month. Would it be possible to make ignoring contributions a month by month toggle?

I haven't paid any attention to adjusting SG contributions in a given month before I saw you comment.  But now that you have pointed this out I agree.  The selections in the dropdown menu for a given month should only affect that month. If I want to change the SG universally an "Edit Series" option is convenient, but otherwise the selections for the monthly contribution menu should affect only the current month.

 In your response to @RobWilk it seems like you are speaking to at least two different (though related) issues that come up a lot in this forum.  Some kind of rollover ability for the Spending plan has been and continues to be a requested feature.

Your comments about being able make monthly adjustments to a SG appears to be unique, or at least I haven't or don't remember coming across the idea in this forum.

ScribblyAnn

For the purposes of planning one month's expenses, I'd like to be able to exclude or decrease/adjust a savings goal for that one single month. Currently I can only exclude the savings goal from EVERY month's spending plan.

There may be months where I decide that one savings goal isn't a priority and I need to allocate that money to a different purpose. Being able to adjust the savings goal just for that month would be useful.

silentdream

request to add feature to be able to skip a savings goal contribution for an individual month that is included in spending plan. Also want feature to be able to reset start date of a savings goal after creation of goal.
Scenario where the “skip for this month” feature would be useful. Before I describe scenario, I know the workaround is to set an individual month’s savings goal contributions to manual, but if you are working an multiple goals then this just gets tedious to have to recalculate as you are pressure testing plans. Ok, here’s use case: you are working multiple savings goals that will last for months/years. One month, you have unexpected expenses like vehicle repair and need to plan for less savings contributions that month. Again, you can just put a manual value for total savings. But if I want to keep the view on individual goals and get recalculation of a savings goal target date or monthly contribution automatically, then I’d rather be able to choose an option to delete/skip a month’s savings goal contribution on one or a couple goals without affecting the other savings goals being tracked that month. Or have option to manually edit the savings goal contribution for each savings goal individually and not have that carry into future month (I.e. affect that month’s individual reminder and not the entire series monthly contribution amount).

Hope that makes sense. There’s workarounds but it is something that if additional features added to help add some of this flexibility then user experience would be improved. Thanks!