September Wrap-up: So Satisfying

DannyB · October 2022

September - that's a wrap! This is our 9th month using Simplifi and I continue to appreciate this neat financial management tool.

September Spending Plan Review

Income after bills & Saving

All expected income was received!
It's nice seeing those growing interest deposits as the balance in our HYS account increase
Bills are a green Paid all the way down.
OK, this is a bit cheesy but once again I anticipate October 8th to see if maybe this month I'll receive the "Prompt Payer" achievement badge. I have yet to receive this fairly recently added badge even though, as far as I can tell, I meet the requirements for it. Perhaps September will be my month :-D
Subscriptions are all paid and we have whittled that list down from 11 to 5 and cutting over $100 out of our monthly expenses since we started using Simplifi.
All Saving Goals received at least the scheduled contribution. I'll be making some more adjustments to how I am currently using Saving Goals in the coming months. This will mainly consist of setting up one Saving Goal for several of our non-monthly fixed expenses. This will simplify my current usage and make managing my savings goals more efficient and less complicated.

Speaking of Saving Goals, we celebrated two birthdays in September and we have two more to go, one this month and one in December along with Christmas. I mention this to highlight the use of one of my savings goals - Birthdays & Christmas. There is much discussion about the desire for rollover ability in the spending plan in this forum. While waiting for this feature, I am like many others using SGs as a work around including my B&C funds. At first I included these funds in one of my transfers to our savings account and after a couple of months decided this was simply not necessary making something more complicated then it needed to be. I adjusted one of our transfer amounts to leave the B&C money in our checking account. Buy leaving these funds in our checking account I only need to mark the transaction ignore in spending plan and make a withdrawal to spend on goal from my B&C SG balancing everything out. Real world bank-wise, I don't have to do anything. I know that is still not ideal, but this is in essence what having a rollover feature will do.

Planned Spending

Received expected notifications for our most often used PS categories as we made our way through the last week of September.
We went over in one category by a small amount and I made an adjustment moving money form and underspent category to the overspent category.
Along with having a rollover feature it would be fantastic to be able to make these adjustments from within the edit menu of a PS category card.

Other Spending

Nope! We didn't have any expenses outside of our anticipated expenses this month.

Available

We ended September with a 22% surplus.
These surpluses will go away beginning in February 2023 when we change over to our retirement plan and our income will more closely match our actual spending.
I've been using the ability to plan out for 12 months to reflect this next stage of life.

Thanks again to the Simplifi team, coaches and developers, for designing, supporting and evolving this excellent tool.