December Wrap-up - Simply Delightful

DannyB

OK, that's a wrap! Not only for December, but for 2022 and my first 12 months using Simplifi as our Money Management tool.  As I (subjectively) reflected here, "I am personally quite satisfied with Simplifi as my basic day-to-day money management app...."

Income after bills & saving:

• All planned and (un)expected income "Received"  The (un) is there because December ended up including my wife's "delayed compensation" (read Bonus) check. Also, due to certain tax code regulations and 401(K)/457 contribution limits she had several routine pre-tax deductions that were NOT taken, thus her net regular income was, well, more than usual. Oh, and it was a three payday month. 
• Expected bills show green "Paid" all the way down the list. I really like the whole Spending Plan feature and I especially like the Bills, Subscriptions breakdown of our monthly planned FIXED spending. As I have shared elsewhere in this forum, this way of managing my monthly expenses just works for me.  It is much easier and less "stressful" to see my spending laid out this way rather than sorting everything into various categories and subcategories and then trying to keep track of that spending. Property taxes were paid in December and I had the money for that non-monthly recurring bill set aside in a Savings Goal so no stress there! 
• Subscriptions - All PAID!  With a full 12 months now in the books with Simplifi, I have confidence that I have all my "subscriptions" accounted for.  Through the year I was surprised by a few annual subscriptions that I had neglected to keep track of.  Having these payments pop up in Simplifi under "Other spending" gave me, 1.) a reminder I had open auto-renew subscriptions floating around out there and 2.) gave me the impetuous to cancel and receive refunds from those I was no longer using or no longer needed or wanted.  
• All savings goals contributions made in full! Ah, Savings Goals! 1. My second property tax instalment was paid in December. The money for this semi-annual recurring fixed expense was set aside in a SG, thus no stress paying this out. 2. We had plenty in our Birthdays & Christmas SG to cover our final gift giving for the year with some left over (I' certain I didn't categorizing all the gift purchases made in December and missed several others during the year designating them as gifts and marking them to be ignored and making withdrawals from this SG... ah well, it all worked out. 3. All the SGs I used to cover these expenses I consider complete as of December 31 and I went ahead and deleted all that were complete and spent.  This released any unspent funds set aside in those SGs back to the accounts they were held in making those funds available as we move into 2023.
• See below "Back to Savings Goals" 

Planned Spending

• I now have 7 categories in Planned Spending.  This is down from the 13 categories I set up last January.  At this point I am very comfortable with how we are tracking our flexible spending and have adjusted what we plan to spend to match what we typically spend in each of these categories with some cushion to cover the occasional overspending.
• I didn't have to make any adjustments in December in any of my Planned Spending categories.
• The glitch I experienced with my Planned Spending categories appears to be worked out with no issues since mid December.

Other Spending

• Scattered through the month different items would show up in Other Spending only to "disappear" when Simplifi made a connection with a planned expense or I corrected the category.  At the end of the month I only had two small expenses remaining in Other spending.
• One of these I understand why it remains, the other, not so much.

Summary
All income and spending was accounted for in our December Spending Plan and we ended the month with a whopping 80% surplus in our "let at end of month."  I added up all our "left at end of month" since January and compared that to the amount of cash on hand in our various cash accounts... and not surprisingly the two amounts don't match up. Not that I expected them to, but I still remain curious about how to account for that left at end of month amount.


Back to Savings Goals
I have rethought how I am going to use SGs in 2023. 

1. I have reduced the number of SGs by consolidation.  
2. All my non-monthly fixed expenses will go into one SG reducing Five separate SGs into one.  These funds will be held in one account out of which I can pay these expenses.
3. In 2022 I had five non-monthly flexible spending SGs. I will consolidate three of these into one SG for the coming year.  In actuality this SG is already fully funded as a result of closing out my 2022 SGs and moving the released funds to this new goal. This will leave me with three SGs for flexible expenses in 2023 instead of the five  
4. Overall, I will only have to manage four SGs this year instead of the dozen or so from last year for my fixed and flexible non-monthly recurring expenses.

It is my hope that our development team is looking at and working on ways to either enhance Savings Goals or a way to better integrate non-monthly recurring fixed and flexible planned expenses into the Spending Plan.