Setting up for 2024 - A Just for Fun Post

DannyB

This is a "Just for fun post." I would have posted this a couple of weeks ago, but we spent the first 9 days of 2024 in Hawaii 😎🍍🌴🌊🏖️🌅😎. Thank you Simplifi for helping us stay on track so we can do stuff like spend the first nine days of the new year in Hawaii!

In December I started looking ahead to 2024 and assess any changes I would need to make for the New Year. Now that 2023 is in the books and I've had time to evaluate our 2023 actuals I have updated our Spending Plan for the new year.

Income after bills & savings

• Bills and Subscriptions: There are a few changes to our fixed expenses to account for premium increases, canceled services, new bills/subscriptions but for the most part '24 will be much like '23.
• Income: Based on the above analysis and updating I was prepared to consult with my financial advisor to confirm just how much we will draw from our retirement accounts. We decided 2024 will remain the same as 2023. SSA received a COLA so that's nice. My pension will remain the same.
• Transfers & credit card payments: I decided a few months ago to disconnect my investment accounts from Simplifi (except my g-kids custodial accounts). The reasons for this have to do with, 1.) all the work required to keep up with editing all the transactions! It's just not necessary for me to keep track of investment transactions in Simplifi so why bother? 😏 2.) The only transaction I really wanted to keep track of from my retirement accounts is my monthly draw. I don't need to be connected to track this transaction since I could and did set it up as a monthly recurring income transaction and it is now tracked in the Income section rather than as a transfer in the Transfers section. I do keep my transfers to my g-kid's custodial accounts visible so that those funds are accounted for in my Spending Plan since those transfers affect my net worth. All credit card payments remain excluded from Spending Plan.
• Savings Goals: I have settled on five Savings Goals for 2024.
  • Two of these SGs are long term savings carried over from the past two years and are doing nicely for what they were created for.
  • The other three SGs are for Fixed Annual Expenses, Flexible Annual Expenses and our 2024 Travel Fund. I did carry over unused funds into all three of these accounts and set the monthly contributions to 1/12 of what I need(fixed) or plan (flexible) to spend for these expenses in 2024.
  • Emergency Fund: My financial advisor considers all funds in all cash accounts as my emergency fund, and he really likes seeing the accumulation of funds month-to-month in these "savings goals".

Planned Spending

• I will keep all the same planned spending categories going into 2024. I have made some adjustments to expected spending based on last year's outcomes.
• I don't use a lot of planned spending categories - eight total, one of which see below. The seven main Planned Spending categories include two that are perhaps rather broad - General Expenses and Other Fun Stuff.
• Three are narrower more "traditional" planned spending - Groceries & Household, Gasoline, Eating Out.
• We spend a lot on books, so much so that we have a planned spending category to keep track of that spending 📖🤓📚️! This category also includes DVD/BD/UHD purchases, but we haven't bought so many of these in the past couple of years with the advent and expansion of streaming on multiple platforms.
• "Petty Cash" for want of a better title is where we "track" our cash spending. We don't really track our cash spending. Instead, we allow ourselves $200/month in cash to be spent however wanted without having to keep track. Of the $1200 allowed for in 2023 we actually only spent or withdrew $700. But I'm not going to make any adjustment this year just because!
• The eighth category tracks only one monthly expense. This particular expense would typically be counted as a monthly recurring bill but the way it's paid it's not currently possible to track it as a recurring bill.

Other Spending

I've become much more relaxed about allowing "Other Spending" for that spending that is finally other. Because of my two broad "catch all" categories, not much shows up here. All my uncategorized and any expenses that for some reason Simplifi can't manage to associate with a recurring expense or one of my planned spending categories end up here of course. This gives me a quick way to review and categorize any stray expenses. It also gives me a place to keep track of SG spending since most all of that ends up in Other Spending also.

Conclusion

So that’s it, we are all set up for the new year and all that's left is to get on with all the good stuff!

UrsulaA

My Simplifi setup for 2024 is:

Income after bills & savings: Checked if all my bills and subscriptions are entered. Reviewed the list and cancelled a service I am not using.

Planned spending: Focused on setting targets to parent categories, examples Dining & Drinks and Shopping.

Other spending: Vacation and gifts usually fall here as these are not monthly and do not have bills. I tag them if needed and ensure they do not eat my monthly income. For large expenses here, I have some savings, fortunately.

I also created watchlists to track progress on bills, subscriptions, planned spending, and other spending. There is a feature request to show summary totals in the spending plan versus expected/planned totals but until then the watchlists provide me with useful data.

Finally, I have a watchlist for all expenses and all income to see my averages for the past 12 months. That helps me tweak my spending as needed.

Thanks for starting this thread, @DannyB . Hawaii sounds delightful, it is one of my dream vacations along with Bali, Indonesia.

DannyB

@UrsulaA

When I first started using Simplifi I set up 9 top categories and all our spending takes place under one of those categories. As I got to know Simplifi over the first couple of months I did set up watchlists to monitor those main categories as a way do keep track of our overall spending, but our month-to-month income and spending are now so stable that monitoring is… well, I can't remember the last time I actually intentionally looked at my Watchlists.

Still, in the spirit of being a learner, I have added a couple of new Watchlists based on what you have done.

New Watchlists:

• Income - a watchlist that captures all income.
• The Whole Pie - all our expenses from all top categories.
• Interest Income - a just for the fun of it watchlist because of our HYS accounts. Interest income is also included in the Income watchlist.

A fun story: A couple of years ago, my doctor told me to start drinking 2 glasses of wine. I had just started using Simplifi so I set up a watch list for wine purchases based on a "Wine" tag. For the next 12 months I meticulously split out any wine purchases and tagged them. After that first year I presented this information to my tax preparer as a medical expense sense it was "prescribed" by my doctor. She laughed at me! Soon after that I went in for my annual check-up and shared with my doctor how much I spent on her wine prescription. She laughed at me too telling me her wine budget is like 10 times what I spent! She buys a lot of wine or I buy cheap wine… I'll let you guess which. She also laughed about my not being able to write the expense of on my taxes. I have since deleted the Wine Watchlist.

UrsulaA

Love the wine list. I deleted some of the watchlists I created last month as I felt they were overkill. I may get rid of some of the ones I have. I am still learning how to use Simplifi to fit what I want to see.

Marky D

I like the Watch List for tracking category buckets — Restaurants, Groceries, Utilities, etc. Because I can get in trouble at Costco, they have their own separate Watch List so I can monitor where I am against my self imposed monthly Costco budget. 😀

DannyB

@Marky D

As noted above, I set up Watchlists for my top categories and have since set up a few more for various reasons. I just don't pay much attention to them. Toward the end of each month, I will get one or two notifications that I'm approaching a Watchlist limit, but that is to be expected if I have planned my spending appropriately.

I pretty much use the Spending Plan exclusively for all my planning and tracking since for me the SP is, as I've said elsewhere, the crown jewel of Simplifi. 👑