Savings Goals are counted twice in the Spending Plan

ajbopp

OS: Android 13
Browser: Latest Chrome

Steps to Reproduce:

1. Create a new savings goal of $200 with a target date for the end of the month.
2. In the Spending Plan, look at the current figure for "Available"
3. Open the Savings Goals portion and make sure that your new goal is there with "Not Contributed."
4. Now do the math yourself using the values in the Spending Plan. Start with income, subtract Bills, Subscriptions, Savings Goals, Planned Spending and Other Spending. Verify the answer is the same as what is listed as "Available."
5. Now contribute $200 to your new savings goal.
6. Notice that "Available" drops $200, and the Savings Goal total increases $200.

This means that your savings goals are counted against your Available before you've contributed to them, and then a second time after you actually do contribute to them, so your $200 a month savings goal is counted as $400 in your Spending Plan.

Coach Natalie

Hello @ajbopp,

Thank you for taking the time to post to the Community regarding this issue, although I'm sorry to hear that you're experiencing this behavior in Simplifi.

To clarify, when you set up a Savings Goal and elect to have it included in the Spending Plan, the 'Monthly Contribution' amount is what will be counted in the Spending Plan. However, if you make additional contributions during the month past the 'Monthly Contribution' amount, the additional amount will also be deducted from the Spending Plan. This is outlined in more detail in our Savings Goals Support Article here.

When testing this, I am personally seeing the expected behavior when contributing to a Savings Goal in Simplifi — contributing the $200 Monthly Contribution amount does not impact my Available total in any way. However, contributing an additional $100 for a total of $300 for the month deducts the extra $100 from my Available total. I am seeing the same behavior on a mobile web browser as well.

With that said, Simplifi should not be counting a contribution against you twice, and should only count extra contributions made during the month past the 'Monthly Contribution' amount, since the 'Monthly Contribution' amount is already included in the Spending Plan. Am I missing something from your description?

Please let us know so we can best assist!

-Coach Natalie

ajbopp

Although I'm not comfortable publishing this much info about my personal finances, I think this is a serious enough issue that it's worthwhile.

Here's where I start out

The Savings Goals total is 813.66 and the Available is $15.29.

When I contribute $200 to my Minimum Checking Balance savings goal…

And this is the way I have this Savings Goal set up…

I get this result…

The Savings Goal total has increased $200 and the Available has decreased $200.

The Savings Goals are being counted twice, completely invalidating the Spending Plan.

RobWilk

Am I doing math wrong? When I add up those savings goal contibutions, I keep getting $1100.95 — So where the total is $1013.66, $87.29 is still missing from the total, so probably automotive savings is not being included (yet).

ajbopp

@RobWilk Your math is correct, and I can't explain why it wasn't being included.

As a test, I edited the goal to be ignored in the spending plan, and that made no difference to the Available. Then I re-edited it to be subtracted from the spending plan as it was to begin with, and suddenly that $87.20 was applied to Available and the savings goals total. I can't explain why it wasn't being included to begin with.

ajbopp

So a kind of way to get around this and make the spending plan for the current month seem at all reasonable is to edit each savings goal to ignore as you contribute to it. But then that will mess up the spending plan for all future months, and as soon as the month rolls over, you'll have to edit all your goals back to subtract until you contribute to them again. Not an ideal approach.

ajbopp

Today I got my official March Monthly Summary report, so let's compare the Spending Plan for March to it.

and the Monthly Summary:

That's a $2025.92 difference between what the Spending Plan says I have available at the end of the month, and what the Monthly Summary says my net income was for the month. I would expect those two numbers to be the same.

And according to the Spending Plan, I contributed $2075.92 to Savings Goals. I don't know why there's exactly $50 difference between the Savings Goals total and the spread between the Spending Plan Available and the Montly Summary Net Income, but it seems a little too coincidental to not conclude that Savings Goals are, in fact, counted twice in the Spending Plan.

RobWilk

$2075.92 (savings goal contributions) MINUS $2025.92 (difference) indicates two things:

—$50 difference implies something that's $50 is not being counted right, this could be a savings goal contrbution not counted right, or it could be an expense hidden from spending plan but not reports

-But "Net Income" includes what you put into savings (that's income) whereas spending plan doesn't factor in spending savings money, so that explains most of the difference you're seeing.

ajbopp

I haven't found a single transaction in March for exactly $50. Also looked for $25 in case something was being counted twice, but I had no luck there either.

I'm not sure what you mean by your second point.

RobWilk

Second point was just saying "Net Income" ($1325.53) includes money put in savings…. Whereas the spending plan "left at end of month" number specifically excludes (subtracts) what you sent to savings.. It looked like you were expecting those two numbers to be the same, but they're a little different.

@Coach Natalie will have better answers, I'm just following this topic closer because I'm also using Savings goals pretty aggressively (maybe too aggressively) and seeing small math errors, or in one case perhaps delayed recalculations.

ajbopp

I think I'm still missing something. My brain isn't too functional on Tuesdays. The Available figure goes up down as I make contributions or withdrawals from the Savings Goals, so I don't see how the spending plan excludes that.

The Net Income does include money in the Savings Goals, but the Spending Plan includes double the amount put into Savings Goals (assuming you've contributed the expected amount.)

Speaking of math errors, I just noticed that the first screenshot I posted above has a different math error in the savings goals than you pointed out. In this case, the Savings Goals Total figure is exactly $287.29 short of what all the individual savings goals add up to. That means that both the Minimum Checking Balance and Automotive Savings goals were not being calculated in the total.

This whole page seems very wonky.

RobWilk

By excludes I meant subtracts (I put that in parenthesis i think) not ignores - meaning it takes it away from income… But the monthly report net income includes savings contributions aa a part of net income (it doesn't 'exclude' or 'subtract' that from income). That is if you make a $100 savings goal contribution, that $100 will be subtracted from your available income for spending plan —- but that money is still 'net income' and won't be subtracted as spending for the purposes of your monthly report, so that amount should be $100 higher.

For net income purposes, transfers have virtually no effect on the balance because it isn't income or spending.

This explanation could probably be given better (more clearly) by someone who's had at least two cups of coffee, I'm still waking up, so I apologize for any lack of clarity.

Coach Natalie

Hello @ajbopp,

Thanks for posting back with additional details!

When it comes to the Monthly Summary Report, I believe this Report only uses transactions, so you wouldn't see Savings Goals contributions included here, whereas you will in the Spending Plan. When viewing my Monthly Summary Report for March and comparing it to my Spending Plan for March, the 'Net Income' numbers match. However, I didn't have any Savings Goals for the month, nor did I have any transactions being ignored from Reports. I also didn't have any one-sided Transfers (all of my Transfers were two-sided and would therefore offset each other). At any rate, if you feel like you're seeing an issue with the calculations in the Monthly Summary Report, you'd want to create a separate post to outline it.

For the issue at hand with Savings Goals contributions being counted twice in the Spending Plan, this should definitely not be occurring. As you can see from my video above, making a contribution to a Savings Goal that's included in the Spending Plan that is less than or equal to the 'Monthly Contribution' amount should not impact the Spending Plan in any way.

With that said, does the issue only occur with this one Goal of 'Minimum Checking Balance' or are you seeing the issue when contributing to other included Goals as well? If the former, have you tried deleting and recreating the Goal to see if doing so helps to clear things up? Also, if you use Simplifi from any other location, such as the Mobile App, please attempt to contribute to the Goal from there to see if the behavior differs. Another thing you can try is contributing to the Goal in incognito mode on Chrome.

Please let us know how it goes!

-Coach Natalie

ajbopp

I have been seeing this with all of my spending goals since I started using simplifi in July, but I didn't realize until a couple of days ago exactly what it was I was seeing. My spending plan "available" has consistently ended the month several hundred to over a thousand dollars in the red, yet I have much more money in the bank today than I did 8 months ago.

DannyB

Hi @ajbopp

I'm certainly not an expert here, but this is indeed strange behavior and I have no idea what could be going on.

I've never seen this behavior in my spending plan. There have been various glitches that have been worked out, but this is one I've never experiended. I've been watching this thread and checking my spending plan as you have posted about this issue.

I want to make one observation about your last post having to do with the connection between the spending plan and real world bank accounts. My first thought was to write, "There is none." but that's not true. My second thing I thought to write was, "It's tenious." But that's not really accurate either. "It's complicated." no that's not quite right either. The spending plan is focused on and concerned with only what I expect to receive as income and what I expect to spend in a given month - thus spending plan (this isn't anything surprising and I'm quite sure you know this also). Then as the month unfolds and I receive actual income and incure actual expenses my spending plan records these events giving substance to the plan and allowing me to see that I am on track with my plan. The key is the "in a given month" aspect. This month (whatever month is current) I will receive this much money as income and I plan to spend that income in this way. What I have in my actual accounts on any given day is not taken into consideration - the only thing that matters is what I plan to receive and what I plan to spend this month. Making contributions to savings goals that I have included in my plan are part of that plan and are taken into consideration in the plan and like all other planned expensed/expenditures they are deducted from my available anticpated/actual income for the month and I have not experienced these contributions as being doubled up like you are seeing.

The "Available/Left at end of month" is a number significant to the Spending Plan for a given month ONLY and is not something I can find in relation to my actual real world accounts. That's not to say that money isn't there in my real world accounts, it's just to say that it's not an actual ledger type entry though in relationship to a given months income and outflow (including money I'm contributing to specific savings goals) that figure should reflect the reality of whether I am in the black or in the red given that months income and expenses whether planned (at the biginning of the month) or actual ( at the end of the month).

Anyway, my meanderings don't address your issue, but this conversation got me to thinking about the spending plan once again and thought I'd do some of that thinking in writting here.

I'm hoping to see this issue resolved for you soon.

altChristopher

@ajbopp - I tried to recreate by going contributing partial, contributing over, contributing the exact amount and Simplifi never incremented my gross Savings & Goals number like yours did in the Spending Plan. It was similar to the screen recording from @Coach Natalie . The only time that number was a larger expense (negative number got bigger) was when I over contribute.

I would be really frustrated if I were experiencing what you were.

A couple notes on my side…
I am using Safari
I have early access turned on
My goals were created after February 1st 2023

I am just adding in case it helps figure out what is going on.

ajbopp

Well I'm stumped. I'm no longer seening the behavior I was three days ago. I have seen multiple cases where a particular savings goal was not included in the savings goal total in the spending plan, but when I contributed to it then the total was adjusted. I believe this is the problem I was seeing before and misinterpreting as counting the savings goal twice, although I'm not 100% convinced of this.

In any case, the screenshots above definitely show that for some reason not all of my savings goals were being included in the total savings goals figure, even though all my savings goals are configured to subtract, not ignore. But with all the fiddling I've done the past couple of days I can no longer reproduce even that issue, and have nothing but the screenshots above to prove it happened,

Coach Natalie

Hello @ajbopp,

That's great that you're no longer seeing the issue!

Let's keep an eye on things moving forward to see if things continue to behave as expected. If you notice any oddities in the Spending Plan or with Savings Goals, let us know and we'll take a closer look at that time. But fingers crossed that things keep working properly for you! 🤞

-Coach Natalie