I posted this as a comment in "We want your feedback on the Spending Plan!", but I think it's really more of a separate request: when releasing funds from a Spending Plan category, it would be great to have an option to put those funds directly towards a Savings Goal instead of releasing to general spending. I think this would be helpful in a couple of different situations:
- It would mimic a rollover feature with (hopefully) less difficulty in coding it: you could release unspent funds in the Gas category to a 'Gas Overflow' savings goal, and then withdraw from it in a future month if you needed extra funds for gas.
- It would make it simpler to see the progress when saving unspecified amounts: suppose I want to cut back on the amount I'm spending on restaurants so that I can afford to take a trip to Florida. I don't have a particular date for the trip in mind, and I'm not sure how much I'll save on restaurants each month when I set up the plan, but I know roughly how much it would cost. In this case, I could release unspent money from my Restaurants category directly to the Florida Trip savings goal, and whenever I hit the target I can plan the trip.
3a, sort of, because this would require a separate coding effort: an option to contribute all unspent funds at the end of the month towards a goal. Currently we don't have an option to backdate goal contributions, so if I'm dedicating all unspent funds at the end of the month to my emergency fund, I have to log in exactly on the last day of every month to allocate exactly that amount (and then avoid any late-night online purchases). Otherwise, if I had $200 left at the end of November, and went in on December 2nd to allocate that to my emergency fund, it would instead count as a contribution for December (and put me over my Spending Plan if I would otherwise have had $150 left instead of @$200).
