Accounting for Rolled Over Planned Spending Cash

DannyB

Feature:

If it's at all possible, develop a way to "see" how much of a given account's balance is designated for future spending via rollover and where my rollover cash is being held. I'm thinking of something along the lines of the way Savings Goals track funds in Quicken Simplifi.

Rationale:

I find the way the Savings Goals feature in Quicken Simplifi shows me how much I have saved to date and where that cash if held in my various bank accounts. When I contribute to a Savings Goal I have to choose the account I contributing from. Then QS shows that cash as set aside in the accounts list and on the "By account" tap in the Goals module I can see the amount of the current balance in an account is designated, what it is designated for and how much remains undesignated.

This is not the case for the new currently being rolled out Planned Spending rollover feature. I can see in the Planned Spending rollover activated category how much I have available with rollover, but I don't have any way to know which account that cash is held in nor am I able to see in the accounts list just what part of the balance is set aside or designated for specific expenses or expense categories and is not available for spending.

Granted, I can see what I have available to spend in the monthly Spending Plan, but I am no longer able to see that a certain amount of my actual account balance is NOT available to spend in general because those funds have been designated for specific expenses in my Spending Plan.

insanenutman

When contributing to a goal, Simplifi opens a dialogue with a picklist of all accounts, displaying the balance next to each account. If the balance is zero, Simplifi prevents users from contributing to that goal with that account.

Now, with the option to rollover funds in planned spending, rolling over is similar to a savings goal in that leftover funds are held until later. For example, if I budget $200 for gifts in May but only spend $50, the remaining $150 rolls over to June. I want to ensure that this $150 isn't also inadvertently contributed to a savings goal.

Currently, the workaround is to create a new savings goal named 'Rollover amounts,' sum all rolled over amounts, and set that aside in the goal. This way, I avoid using that account balance for any other goal.

tazelahy

I'm new to the party so if this has been brought up already, please accept my apology.

I'm coming from another application where you can plan ahead with funding items. Getting up to speed in Simplifi, I have setup a lot of my Planned Spending items to have rollover enabled. I notice in the Account list when you have a goal setup, the account can be broken down into "Savings Goals" and "Available Balance." I would like to see if you could implement a "Rollover" section of the breakdown that would affect the AB bucket.

How this could be implemented is in your planned spending series, when you create a new expense and enable roll over, the opening roll over will let you choose your accounts like a split transaction in case your roll over is funded from multiple accounts. If you need to move money around in accounts like savings to checking or just in general for how you fund your roll over, you can go into change rollover amount and adjust that split of rollover and setup the split as needed or just have it all from one account.

Honestly, speaking of setting up a split amount at initialization, can that be added to the Goals.

I see that @DannyB brought up something about the roll over funds not to long ago. I'm not sure if this is something similar to his though.

Thank you.

Jenny T

I’m new to Simplifi and am trying to decide between rollover and savings goals. I feel like rollover makes more sense for most of my needs EXCEPT that I want the funds removed from available balances like the savings goal does. I had the same idea as others here to use rollover but to reflect it in a savings goal, which is probably what I’ll try initially since there isn’t an option to truly set aside the rollover amounts. Ultimately, what I want is to be able to automatically set aside a portion of less than monthly expenses and actually remove that from available balances in my account balances.

RobWilk

Rollover is not tied to a particular account or account balance; I'm not the biggest fan of it and have mostly avoided using it so far. If you can convince me that this will somehow make it more useful, you'll get my vote—but as of now, I'm just going to avoid voting.

Jenny T

As I mentioned, I am a new user and haven’t even set up my spending plan yet and am trying to decide the best way to handle my semi-annual and annual expenses. This could very well not be the best solution. Conceptually, this is what I’m looking for and combines features of rollover and goals. Honestly, if they just let you automatically contribute to a savings goal from a transaction and set a goal amount based on a percentage of certain categories of recurring expenses so I don’t have to do the math, that would work too! Right now it seems like both options are lacking for this type of sink fund. I could see how rollover would work better for things like gas, groceries and other flexible monthly spending. Time will tell as I continue to build out my goals and spending plan!

RobWilk

I added my vote then, this might be helpful to have.

DannyB

https://community.simplifimoney.com/discussion/comment/43642#Comment_43642

Hi Jenny, welcome to QS.

After playing around with rollover in Planned Spending for my non-monthly expenses, I reverted back to my original set up using Savings Goals. I do have one of my Planned Spending cats set up with rollover - Annual Gifting (birthdays, anniversaries, Christmas, etc). due to the frequency of our gifting throughout the year.

But for such expenses as annual subscriptions, annually paid insurances, irregular annual travel expenses, irregular auto and home maintenance expenses, irregular medical expenses, etc., I use Savings Goals. When these expenses are incurred, I pay them out to the SG and mark the transactions to be ignored in the Spending Plan since the monthly SG contribution has already been tracked in my monthly Spending Plan.

I did try the idea of creating a SG to "hold" the monthly rollover funds, but that quickly became an account process I just didn't want to do every month.

If the idea suggested in this Feature Request post is ever adopted and implemented, I might revisit rollover for more of these non-monthly expenses, but for now it's simpler for me to use the SG work around for non-monthly fixed and flexible expenses (gifting excepted 🙂).

I've been using QS for almost 3 years and have experimented with what you are currently thinking through. For what it's worth here is my current SG "structure."

First, I don't have any typical SGs at the moment - Saving for a downpayment on a home, auto, RV, world tour, etc. You know, saving up to one big spend.

What I do have is this:

• Annual Expenses
  • This SG includes both fixed and flexible annual, semi-annual, non-monthly expenses - property tax, annual insurance premiums, annual subscription services, auto repairs, home maintenance and repairs, irregular medical expenses. All the known expense that I need to cover in the course of the year. Some of these are fixed, known amounts, others are estimated based on historical spending.
• Travel Savings
  • My wife and I are both retired and are doing a bit of traveling for the next few years. This is money we set aside monthly and use to cover our travel expenses as we plan out each year. All travel related expenses are covered with these funds.
• Surprise and Miscellaneous
  • Ya know, stuff happens from time to time, and the best planning just can't account for every possibility. This SG is our contingency fund to make up for shortages and to help cover those completely out of the blue expenses.

Once again, welcome to Quicken Simplifi. I hope you find this tool as helpful as I have.

Jenny T

@DannyB I appreciate your feedback! Overall, I really love Simplifi so far. As with any software, there is always more you wish it would do! Simplifi is a giant step up from what I was using previously, which was basically a checkbook register app that allowed categorization of transactions. Looking forward to when I have everything set up and can really feel the benefits!

Jenny T

@DannyB Would you mind sharing how you set your goal amounts for the annual expenses? Do you just review your recurring expenses for the next year manually and set the goal amount for the approximate total of those and increase/decrease it as needed? Or is there a trick to find those totals in the system that I haven't found yet?

DannyB

https://community.simplifimoney.com/discussion/comment/43728#Comment_43728

Hi Jenny,

I am actually in the process of getting things ready for 2025 so it's no problem sharing the process. This isn't complete, but here is my worksheet for the process.

Fixed are easy enough to obtain from the various vendors. These are based on the current year's rates and will be adjusted when notified of changes for the coming year. Typically, any adjustments are minimal. Well, I say that, but our home insurance doubled last year due to the losses incurred by our carrier because of extra ordinary wildfires in the past several years in our state. We don't live in an affected area, but we are part of the pool so…

As I said, I'm just now starting to update my non-monthly/annual/irregular expenses and will be making a few changes to this worksheet, but this is the essence of how I estimate these expenses and figure out what I need to set aside monthly.