We want your feedback on the Spending Plan!
Comments
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Maybe a simple solution to the extra income question would be that when releasing extra funds towards next month, it should just adjust the amount of next months spending plan accordingly. So if I have $5 less this month, raise next month's amount by $5. And the same if I overspent, I'd like to "release" the negative amount to subtract it from next month's spending plan.
I'd prefer if this didn't need to be manual, but even that would be helpful.
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- I would use rollover as a budget yearly for expenses.
- Self-Employment Tax which I set aside monthly but pay in quarterly increments.
- Utilities which I budget yearly but vary seasonly.
- Home Improvement which I set aside each year, but pull from a various unset times.
- Vacation Expenses which I save for all year but spend in 1-2 places.
- Yearly Budgets for Kids School & Sports which are paid seasonly.
- Christmas Budget which I save for throughout the year but spend in the last quarter.
- It would allow me to see how I am tracking with expenses in the above categories throughout the year and if I have planned and budgeted well for it.
- The ability to view subscriptions and bills but not take them from the overall planned spending.
Thanks
2 - I would use rollover as a budget yearly for expenses.
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I would like a Spending Plan report tab in the Reports section with the following views:
- For past months, compare planned spending to actual spending based on a selected period. This would be very similar to the Net Income Report, but would be comparing planned income/spending to actual income/spending. Could select month ranges, custom dates, or even a year as can with the Net Income report.
- Could have a view for future months, showing planned income v. planned spending. Could see by month or in total for the year.
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Want some way to fund some spending for the month from savings. This way, if I have a large planned purchase for the month it won't completely blow my spending plan. I know I can eliminate the transactions for the spending plan, but that is not what I want to do. I want to show it as planned spending and track the actual. For example, if I plan to make a significant purchase in March and fund from savings rather than monthly income, I want to plan it that way without the spending plan looking like I way overspent.
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@Ed Rizzolo have you tried using the Savings Goals? It pretty much works thay way.
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Does it? I'm not seeing how it does anything to stop a major purchase from blowing out a category in the month it happens or adjust that month's spending in that category automatically. It just lets me virtually set aside funds towards it each month (via manual transactions). But my actual transactions that happen will still hit my spending plan's planned spending category.
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@Wedo778 yes you are correct that it is virtual and there are some other manual things you need to do
- Contribute money virtually in the Savings Goal, this should show up as spend in Spending Plan in Saving and show up against what account you used
- once you make the actual transaction, you have to Withdraw from Savings Goals to adjust the virtual contribution
- finally go to the actual transaction and hide it in Spending plan so its not double accounted
Not ideal.
This requested feature will help if they execute correctly, vote for it if you like.
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@Max1223 Yea, I'd personally prefer not to have to do all those manual steps. It would be much easier to just adjust the single month's planned spending in that category.
But this is why so many of us are voting for the rollover functionality. It essentially gives us this without any additional steps to take.
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Just moved over from mint.com. Simplifi's Spending Plan does not allow rollover, does not handle variable expenses well, and does not handle any period other than monthly expenses (does not handle quarterly, bi-annual, annual) expenses. For my purposes, static monthly expense budgeting doesn't seem terribly useful.
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Exactly!
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I actually am getting the feel for the Savings Plan and like it outside of those manual steps. I came from Mint and used Rollovers as well. I do like the way Spending Plan at any time of the month shows your Bills/Subscriptions/Savings and whether you have money left over or not.
Just waiting to see how Simplifi will integrate these features if at all.
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On using savings to offset spending plan expenses, most of the time I don't have a saving goal. I save up money each month and at some point decide to spend some of it on something. When I looked at the saving plan before, it seemed more oriented to setting money aside each month towards a goal of x amount by x date in the future.
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How would you use rollover abilities in the Spending Plan?
I used this all the time in Quicken Classic for monthly discretionary spending or a budget that I wanted to set for the year. For example, if we wanted to spend x number of dollars on restaurants each month for eating out, if we ate out a little bit too much one month, we would want to see that we should eat out a little bit less the next month. We would also use this for categories like gifs where we would want to spend x number of dollars for the entire year on gifts and see the amount in the plan spending go down over the year as we use it up.
How would having rollover abilities benefit you?
This will help me save a lot of time and make this more enjoyable to use. This will also help us with our budgeting to get a better understanding of what we can and can't spend to make this more meaningful to us.
What other features/abilities would you like to see added to the Spending Plan?
Not having the annual budget view from Quicken Classic has been a pain. It would be great to be able to edit and see (or at least just see) the year budget (or the next 12 months) in a table.
I prefer tracking itemized paychecks instead of net paychecks. It would be great to have more control over adding gross income and tax categories in paychecks and having that appear neatly in the spending plan. That would even be fine if there was a new category along bills and subscriptions callef taxes.
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I want rollover. I know I'll be spending a few of my budget items, but I don't know the exact month.
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For non-monthly expenses as long as they are regular I have found Simplifi handles them better than Mint did (or I was just using Mint wrong all this time). I have things like property taxes, vehicle registration, homeowners insurance, etc all set up as annual bills. This then shows up in the months' plan that bill is due, letting me know I need to have a balance prepped and saved to be able to pay that much that month.
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But ideally you are saving for that all year, not just the month before no?
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Will you be transferring funds from a savings account to your checking or credit card account to cover this purchase?
If so you could make the side of the transaction on the receiving side to be visible in your spending plan. This should add these funds to your available funds for the month you made the purchase and this should keep your Spending Plan in the green.
Danny
Simplifi user since 01/22
”Budget: a mathematical confirmation of your suspicions.” ~A.A. Latimer0 -
I am, but not explicitly. I am not marking off $X in a ledger somewhere each month to ensure I have saved enough to pay them. If I were, the Savings Goal might be of more use to me. I am just generally looking at both my monthly and annual planned expenses (and yes an annual view is something I think is missing) and ensuring that my spending isn't going to go over that. To OP's point, I do want rollovers. Just not for fixed annual expenses. More for variable monthly expenses.
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I don't see anywhere to upvote getting a rollover feature, but this is absolutely a basic requirement of a modern budgeting tool for me and very disappointed to discover that it is not available.
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Upvote rollover here. It is in progress.
Simplifi User Since Nov 2023
Minter 2014-2023
Questionable Excel before 2014 to present
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Why are the planned spending tiles so large? There is so much whitespace. I know my laptop screen isn't that large, but I can only see 6 categories at a time.
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I think for item 1 and 2, my use case would be similar to others: identify unspent funds in M1 that I can push to other expenses/spending plan items in M2, M3, Mx.
as for additional function in Spending Plans: can an account be selected for each Planned Spending item so as to determine future monthly total expense? For example, I have Spending Plan categories that vary month to month that I would pay for with Credit Card (Meal budgets for kids, gas and transportation costs, etc), I would like to see my approx credit card balance in future months, so as to plan payments from say my checking account in the future and get a good idea on cash flow.
Hope that makes sense.
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I'm not particularly a user of rollover spending. I would however, like to create savings buckets of the rollover that can be allocated in other ways.
I would really prefer a view of the spending plan as an overview of how much I've spent and how much I've budgeted in one glance for the month and then for each category. And not have the whole "release your spending" bit at each month's end which is really confusing. Rather than having a "left at the end of the month" I need to have a breakdown of total budgeted, total spent, total left or unused at the end of the month.
Once I release my funds for the month, currently, I no longer see what my actual allocated budget was anymore for that particular month. It makes tracking my spending really difficult because I'm just going off memory as my budget amounts change overtime. Again since Im an underspending with a really tight budget, I need to be able to see how much I had budgeted to spend and how much I actually spent.
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I'm not a fan of "rollover spending" or at least the version of how Mint implemented it. In Mint if you did rollover spending on categories it would apply to THAT specific category only. For example, say you're shopping budget is $500 month, and you only spent $300 instead, in Mint the shopping category for the next month would start at -$200 and say "-$200 of $500" spent. Which logically to me doesn't look right because how do you spend a negative amount of a budget that should start at $0, this implementation would also start messing up the overall budget amount for subsequent months. So, if "Rollover spending" is added to spending plans then that should be a line item above "Income" and outlines where the rollover is coming from. Whether that's itemized and detailed or just an overall summary could be a thing to see. One thing that might be useful is also stating the original budget, how much was actually spent, and total left that was unused.
Another useful item that "Spending Plan" should have is a category/bucket for "Retirement Contributions". Right now, the best way to track that is creating either a monthly expense or one-time expense to track that into the budget, which can be tedious to add manually for specific months and others remove it and they really aren't a "planned spending" item either. Retirement Contributions also aren't a consistent line item either as some accounts (i.e. Roth IRAs have a limit for yearly contributions). Goals might work here, but goals require being tied to specific accounts which retirement accounts can't be part of.0 -
spending plan is terrible, went back to regular Quicken
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I have same problem: quarterly pay that's automatically deposited and that's different amounts each time. Saw some good suggestions in the posts, but here's my "solution ": when my quarterly paycheck appears in spending plan income, I delete it, then "pay" myself 1/3 each of the quarter's three months. Example: say i get a January 15 paycheck for $21k net. I delete it and set recurring income of $7/mo. When the April 15 quarterly paycheck arrives, we'll say it's $24k net, so I delete it and change the recurring $7k monthly income to $8k monthly income.
Should work with one-time bonuses too.
I'm fairly new to simplifi, so folks do you think this will work?
Thanks!
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A theoretical solution to this would be if Simplifi would allow us to choose a custom amount to use as the starting point for the month (it could offer suggestions based on historical income). That could help people in your situation, or people who get paid every week or two which doesn't line up with the monthly spending plan.
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Yeh that's sort of what I'm doing I think. I spread a hypothetical quarterly paycheck equally as income over the the next 3 months. I used the "manual" selection for adding income, not the "calculated" selection. Seems like you could do same in your example of varying-amounts irregular paychecks, even over a year. Take your 2023 total salary, divide by 12, then use "manual" to "pay" yourself equal monthly income amounts. If it looks like after a few months that your income estimates were somewhat off, just re-do the process, with revised monthly amounts spread over the number of remaining months.
Use manual selection, because if you have additional recurring monthly income (like someone's repaying some money they owe you, at $100/mo), you don't want the manual pay to override that additional monthly income. Using manual, spending plan will add that monthly $100 to the manual income.
I'm definitely not an expert at all this! It's just that I happened to fit in this apparently uncommon situation that QS isn't particularly designed for: non-monthly income in varying amounts.
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That makes sense!
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In last couple days, I concluded that it's better to simply exclude the actual quarterly paycheck amount from the Spending Plan than to delete it. Deleting it also removes it from Transactions, which I don't think really makes any real difference for me (I don't use QS for taxes), but if you want Transactions to show the same items as your bank checking account, then choose Exclude from Spending Plan instead of delete.
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