To ignore transfers or not to ignore transfers. That is the question.

Flopbot

Greetings,

I still don't get the nuances of the new transfers functionality in the Spending Plan.

Spending Plan > Income after Bills & Savings > Transfers & CC Payments

When should I ignore something, when shouldn't I?

For my 0089 CC, I consistently pay it off in full every month. When the new feature was first implemented, Simplifi defaulted to ignoring only one side. Before, both sides were ignored automatically.

My questions:

• Should I ignore both sides? Or only one and if so which one?
• What's the logic behind this decision so I can apply it to the future?

Thanks!

RobWilk

I generally, and personally, would always ignore credit card payments — Unless i'm paying down long term debt, in which case I want the payment to count as an expense this month.

As per savings→Checking account transfers, when I use a savings goal, I would typically unhide one side of that so that the money saved in that goal counts as 'income' for the current month when i'm using the goal.

Coach Natalie

Hello @Flopbot,

Great questions!

It depends on whether you want to track your credit card payments as an expense. Since you pay off your balance each month, you'd most likely want to ignore both sides since you've already tracked all of the charges made throughout the month as expenses. This is what I do as well.

I think the added flexibility with Transfers in the Spending Plan is because some users want to track monthly transfers to their savings or investment accounts, etc. as expenses without having the receiving side offset the amount.

Here are some Idea posts around this added functionality that may give you some additional insight:

https://community.simplifimoney.com/discussion/426/spending-plan-should-include-recurring-transfers-edited-8-merged-votes

https://community.simplifimoney.com/discussion/3897/ability-to-mark-just-one-side-of-a-transfer-to-ignore-from-spending-plan-edited

https://community.simplifimoney.com/discussion/844/subtract-recurring-investment-transfers-from-my-spending-plan-amount-edited

And here's an article on the Transfers section of the Spending Plan: https://help.simplifimoney.com/en/articles/5142302-how-credit-card-payments-and-transfers-are-handled-in-the-spending-plan

I hope this helps!

-Coach Natalie