Trying to move available money into goals at end of month...

dandy13

Since there's no rollover, I tried to make use of Savings Goals to allocate "extra" money before the end of the month.

I put $305 dollars into our Gifts goal. But that didn't subtract from the Available amount. It didn't add to the Savings Goal contribution total. The Gifts goal is set to be subtracted from the Savings Plan…am I missing something here? Or is this just a glitch?

(We do have an issue with our previous months' goals, so maybe this is an extension of that issue.)

Also, can I decide to have individual goals subtract from or be ignored by the Spending Plan each month? If not, will it retroactively affect previous Spending Plans? I know it's not actually moving money around within our accounts, but in trying to understand the application, I want to know what will happen when we make changes. Sometimes we have extra money to fund a goal, and sometimes we don't. Maybe we'll figure out the exact budget later, but it's not set in stone at the moment. It would be nice to ignore as needed, from month to month, so we can see at a glance how our budget is doing.

ajbopp

@dandy13 In my experience, if you withdraw "for another purpose" from a savings goal and that amount is more than your contribution, it will still tell you that you haven't contributed for that month. I assume because the net gain is still a negative number. If you contribute more than you withdraw, but the net gain is still less than your expected contribution, it will tell you you've made a partial contribution.

I don't believe you can choose month to month to subtract or ignore, but if you do change it I am pretty sure it will not change your historical spending plan - just everything from now into the future.

MattB

I struggle with this as well. Have kind of stopped using goals for now until I figure out as the flow in and out of them leaves me confused. Hoping othes post feedback here to help clarify.

dandy13

@ajbopp I haven't withdrawn any money, so I'll keep your reply in mind for when I do. To recap: we added money to a goal, we didn't subtract any money, but I saw no change in the Available Balance. ???

I mean, if I'm getting extra free money from the universe, that's awesome, but…

Coach Natalie

Hello @dandy13,

Thank you for posting to the Community regarding this issue, although I'm sorry to hear that you experienced this behavior when contributing to a Savings Goal in Simplifi.

As long as the Savings Goal is set up to be included in the Spending Plan, the Monthly Contribution amount will automatically be deducted from the Spending Plan, and then any additional contributions that are made during the month will also be deducted from the Spending Plan. This is what I'm seeing when testing, and this is what our Savings Goal Support Article says:

"When electing to include your Savings Goals contributions in the Spending Plan, the 'monthly contribution' amount will automatically be used, however, if you end up contributing more in a given month, the extra amount will also be included in the Spending Plan.

When it comes to withdrawing from a Savings Goal, withdrawing to spend for the Goal will not impact the Spending Plan. However, withdrawing for another purpose will remove the funds that have been withdrawn from the Spending Plan up to the standard 'monthly contribution' amount.

Please note that this only applies to Savings Goals that are being included in the Spending Plan, as ignored Goals will show as grayed out in the Spending Plan, and their contributions and withdraws do not impact the Spending Plan in any way."

With that said, it sounds like you may have experienced a glitch. After making the contributions at the end of the month, did you refresh the page and/or sign out and back into Simplifi to see if the numbers were then updated? Unfortunately, since it's now a new month, there won't be any way to allocate those leftover funds from last month to a Savings Goal, and we wouldn't be able to further test to see how making extra contributions would impact the Spending Plan for that month. However, please feel free to do some testing this month to determine if you are now experiencing the expected behavior.

Additionally, although there is not currently a way to ignore individual Savings Goal contributions in the Spending Plan, we do have an existing Idea post available here requesting this ability; I'd definitely suggest adding your vote and feedback.

-Coach Natalie

dandy13

@Coach Natalie thanks for the reply. I added my vote to the idea post.

I ended up making a test goal, just to prevent our other goals from wrecking our Spending Plan numbers (they have high monthly contributions, and if we can't ignore them a la carte…it won't look good). At least for this month, when I contributed money beyond the monthly amount, I could see that reflected in the Spending Plan. Not sure why March was funky. Hopefully the glitch stops there.