R.E. Tell us how you plan to track your vacation in Simplifi

DannyB

Back in June 2021 @Coach Natalie posted this…

Tell us how you plan to track your vacation in Simplifi!

This was before my time but thought I'd share how I'm tracking my vacations/travels in Simplifi.

We budget a certain amount each year for travel. These funds are set aside monthly and are transferred into a HYS account at a bank where we also have a travel rewards credit card. To keep things simple we use this credit card exclusively for all our vacation and travel expenses and pay it off from the savings account we have with the same bank. This keeps or vacation/travel money completely separate and makes it easy to know how much we have available for our travels.

In Simplifi…

• I created a Savings Goal for our vacation/travel fund including what we already had plus make a monthly contribution of 1/12 of the total we budget for the year.
• I created a Vacation/Travel category. Even though I exclude all vacation/travel expenses from the Spending Plan, this still allows me to see in reports how this money is spent.
• I have create tags to identify which expenses are related to which trip in the course of the year.

Since these expenses are all vacation/travel related, I don't use my day-to-day categories for them. For example, rather than categorize money spent on gasoline for a road trip under Auto: Gasoline as I would when filling up one of the vehicles for normal day-to-day use, I categorize gasoline purchases for vacation/travel under Vacation/Travel and tag it with the particular trip tag, gasoline tag and a year tag. I don't really need any of those tags except to compare our actual expenses for a given trip with our budget for a that trip (we use a spreadsheet to plan and budget for our trips each year).

Using one cc for all vacation/travel expenses further simplifies keeping track of these expenses. As these expenses come into Simplifi, they all end up in the transaction list for that cc and I can easily exclude these expenses from the Spending Plan. Unfortunately, this can't be done as part of a bulk edit, but I don't have to keep track of expenses scattered among other accounts and scattered across multiple categories.

Keeping track of the SG for our vacation/travel expenses is also simplified as I can simply make a withdrawal to spend on goal equal to the payoff of the balance each time we travel.

Coach Natalie

@DannyB, that's a great way to plan for vacations — thanks for sharing!

-Coach Natalie

Flopbot

@DannyB , thanks for sharing this, interesting. I love seeing how you do stuff in Simplifi. Since you withdraw a set 1/12 of your yearly budgeted amount for travel each month - I’m assuming not the actual, officially spent amount - I’m curious how this affects your Spending Plan. I’d guess there are some months you spend more than that amount on travel and some months you spend less. Do you ever find yourself needing to make adjustments to the 1/12 amount or does it ’all come out in the wash’, so to speak?

This seems like a reasonable balance granted where Simplifi’s current build is regarding Savings Goals.

DannyB

@Flopbot

The money we are spending this year on travel was saved in the previous year(s). The money I contribute this year will be for next year along with any money left over from this years funds. Does that make sense?

How this works in Simplifi is still a bit of a smoke-and-mirrors kind of thing using the Goals feature. Since this is a Savings Goal function, when I actually spend the money it gets excluded from the spending plan as it has already been "spent" via monthly SG contributions.

If/when we exhaust what we have saved we will have to take a break from traveling until our travel fund recovers - no money, no travel! 😎