Allow for More Customization of Non-Goal or $ Amount Oriented Savings Transfers in the Spending Plan
I would love to be able to set my recurring automatic transfers from my checking to things such as - savings accounts, IRA’s, or Investment Accounts - as ‘bills’ or transfers that, by default, reflect in my Spending Plan, specifically in the ‘Income after bills & savings’ tab.
Like many others trying to grow their wealth, having recurring auto transfers to a savings account, IRA, or investment accounts, is money that is never factor into monthly budgeting allowances. It follows the mentality of ‘Paying yourself first’ before paying bills or spending on wants/fun money items. Many of those who do automatically transfer money into their savings have it set to a specific $ amount that remains the same, so there should be a feature to have those transfers accounted for when viewing ‘Income after bills & savings’ on a monthly basis.
Because those auto transfers are not factored in when looking at ones available monthly balance, it is rendering the Spending Plan feature useless for someone like myself, since it is misrepresenting the available spending money that one would be able to consider when using the ‘Planned spending’ feature.
I know there is the savings goals feature, where you can have those factor in to your Spending Plan, but for a lot of users, our savings goals are VERY different than our auto savings transfers. For example, I occasionally set savings goals for myself where I want to put extra money aside for things, ex. Moving costs, Vacations, Large purchases. BUT if I do not currently have any specific savings goals I am working towards, I am still continuing to put away money on a weekly/monthly basis automatically to continue building my nest egg. There is no ‘goal’ or $ amount that I am aiming to achieve with my auto transfers, I am just practicing good financial wellness by putting away money every month to build my wealth. The savings goals also affect the way the available savings/balances are shown when linked to a goal, which is not what we are trying to achieve by this. It is not an available savings or a certain number we a trying to met, yet we are restricted to those short-term savings goals when it comes to current tools in place for factoring in savings into our monthly Spending Plan.
Currently, Simplifi defaults any transfers to not show in the spending plan, which I understand as being an option, since it’s not affecting your ‘net worth’ as it’s just transferring your money to another account that is in your name, but when I set up those transfers to savings as a weekly recurring series, and I select to NOT exclude the series from the spending plan, they still are excluded from my spending plan. The only work around is to manually adjust every reminder within that series to show in the spending plan. This is super cumbersome and not user friendly, as I just want to set the entire recurring series to always show in my Spending Plan. The whole point of using budgeting tools for me is so the tool works to do all of those manual processes automatically.
One way I see this working, which would be a more manual but MUCH more user friendly way currently to include these planned auto transfers to our Spending Plan, is by including options to add custom ‘Savings’ the same way you can add custom planned spending categories. In the ‘Planned spending’ tab, users are able to easily input their own allocations to certain spending categories, and that reflects the total planned spending budget for the month. If there were a tool where I could just press ‘Add Auto Savings’ and manually allocate how much money I am setting aside from my monthly income to savings, and have that reflected in my ‘Income after bills’ that would be AMAZING.
Please consider giving users more flexibility when it comes to setting up Bills + Auto Transfers in their ‘Income after Bills & Savings’ tab. Even if it is by giving the user an option to manually input allotted amounts of money (maybe ones that say aren’t linked to transaction history since those default to not show in spending plan) a month as ‘Savings’ in that tab. This is an incredible tool when it comes to financial insights and budgeting, but this one feature alone is rendering most of the tools offered useless.
Thank you for the consideration!
Comments
-
Hello @cassrdgwy,
Thanks for reaching out! We went ahead and moved this post out of Feature Requests. It looks like you are probably experiencing this known issue:
You can include only one side of a transfer in the Spending Plan. For example, if you would like to have it show in Income, you can use an income category and for the other side of the transactions use the "Transfer" category. Otherwise, it will show in Transfers as income. I hope this makes sense!
Thanks,
Coach Jon
0
