I Blew Up My Savings Goals - How would you deal with it?

ajbopp

I have a savings goal for furniture of $300 a year. My reasoning is that I have all the furniture my house can hold, so I'm not going to be spending a lot on new stuff.

Then the motor on my recliner died, with the recliner in a half-raised state.

Now, having saved just $109.09 in my furniture Savings Goal for the year, I find I have spent 4 years' worth of Savings Goals on new furniture.

How would you all go about dealing with this situation in Simplify? What I have done is borrowed from another Savings Goal - Minimum Savings Balance - which did have enough set aside to cover this expense, but now that goal is way off. Not necessarily a horrible situation. The reason I have minimum balance Savings Goals is to be able to recover from emergency situations.

Anyway, anyone have a better idea?

RobWilk

This may not be helpful, but i'm trying to be, I just don't know your situation…

Sadly, you can't go back and replan for today. Yes, you "have to" borrow from other savings goals (delay goal date) for situations like this…

Unless, If you've got credit (and are comfortable using it), many furniture stores let you finance at 0% for 'x' months, pay it off equally (or about that) and subtract that payment from what you would've put in your savings goals for the next 'x' months. Use your existing savings goal amount as either a down payment or a first payment. Not advice, just what i would do.

Or you could just better learn how to get in and out of your existing recliner since it's already reclined.

BTW: From experience— Make sure all the power is connected and no circuits or surge protectors popped or went off.

Flopbot

@ajbopp,

Robert is right; the way you handled it seems like the best solution. I recently had a $1,500 water heater go out and, unfortunately, didn't have enough money saved in my "Appliance Replacement SG". As a result, I had to deplete several other savings goals as well until I found enough money.

Certainly that isn't the ideal situation, but - without being able to (a) schedule Savings Goal transactions or (b) see a register of past savings Goal transactions - that seems to be the best solution in Simplifi.

Is there any way to break it further until it's reached the full reclining position? Then you'd be all set!

ajbopp

Ultimately, I ended up borrowing from other savings goals in the short term, but edited my Furniture SG to add in the cost of the new chair which increased the monthly contribution so that everything should balance out by year's end.

Currently the Furniture SG shows up as a negative balance in my spreadsheet, which I use to track SGs now rather than Simplifi, except in the most basic way. As @Flopbot says, lack of a historical transaction view, inability to edit past contributions or withdrawals, and inconsistency with the way monthly contribution targets are calculated makes the in-app SG module just too unreliable for me to use successfully.

ajbopp

Unfortunately it's only half recline, and it's terribly uncomfortable to sit in.

Thanks for the input!