We want your feedback on the Spending Plan!

Since I just completed my first month with Simplify, I really like the spending plan for the most part.

I don't understand the release funds option under planned spending or at lease have the option to automatically release the funds at the end of the month since this is normally a rough budgeted amount for some categories (food, groceries, gas, etc.). Similarly if I have a bill that doesn't get spent that month it seems to just go away instead of showing as unpaid, which seems backwards from the planned spending release standpoint. I would prefer any unspent planned spending dollars get auto released and unpaid bills remain and/or have an option to release those bills. I like the idea of using the bills section to be able to track if there is ever an error with automatic payments for certain bills.

Thanks,

1. This would work best in tandem, in my mind, with the Planned Spending categories. Many planned expenses are not necessarily static throughout the year. For example, gasoline. I fill my car up when it needs gas. I may "average" $100 a month, but depending on which specific days I need to fill up I may get 4 tanks of gas this month and 2 next month. I'd like those overages and underages of my Planned Spending of monthly gasoline to roll over and impact what my plan is for the following month. Similarly this could work for bills that are not the same every month like electricity.
2. I'd have a more accurate picture of what I expect to spend each month. I am currently not putting a ton into the Planned Spending categories because so many things are sporadic. I'm not buying furniture every month. But I do want to be able to budget $X a year on furnishing my house. I cannot realistically put that in my spending plan unless I am retroactively adding an item to the plan after I have already decided on a specific purchase that individual month. The result is that every month I just have this big bucket of $2500 to spend throughout the month without any indication of where I planned to spend some of that and how much discretionary spending I can actually do.
3. I'm not sure how I am "supposed" to be managing credit card payments in the Spending Plan. It seems that if I include them in the plan I wind up double-counting my spending. I pay a $1000 CC bill (which is what I charged last month) and then I spend $1000. I actually only spent $1000 this month but if I were to include the CC transfer then it thinks I have spent $2000. Also, and maybe this is more of an recurring items thing, but the upcoming CC payments are just my guestimate as to my monthly average CC bill. You have a link to my actual bank records. You can pull my actual balance. Why can't you update my next CC bill to be its actual statement balance automatically?

Yea thats what I do. I guess I'm just confused as to why including them would even be an option in the first place is all.

I would love to see a spending line graph for the month showing if current spending level for the month and a comparison of my current spending to previous months spending as well as current spending to budgeted spending for the month. Simplifi seems to be the only finance app I’ve seen without a monthly spending graph. Thanks!!!

You can create a savings goal for your annual, semi-annual or otherwise non-monthly expenses. Mine is called 2024 Expected. I know the total amount I'll need for these for the year. Start the goal Jan 2024 to end Dec 2024 and divide the total amount by 12. You'll see the contribution to this savings goal in your Spending Plan beginning Jan 2024.

Please add the ability to rollover categories and see an annual or 12 month view of spending. Thanks

Agreed I think rollups might even be more important than rollovers. And food is a great example.

I have a budget for food. This can be eating/ordering out or it can be groceries. if I eat out more, I need to buy less groceries and vice versa. But I still want to know and track how much I am spending each way. The spending plan doesn't let me do this. Neither does a watchlist (or three separate watchlists with a massive tile card each). This is the biggest thing I miss coming over from Mint.

Yes I am aware I can make two separate items and then manually move them up and down each month as I spend more or less. The point is, with rollups you don't need all that manual intervention. You also have one nice, easy spot to see "money spent on food" without losing the tracking of where your food money is going.

Thanks for asking.

Former Mint user here, and I generally used their budgeting functionality to track only incidental spending like restaurants, groceries, gas, coffee shops, etc with specific amounts allotted to each. But the spending plan doesn't seem to do what I need. I don't want monthly income, credit card bills, or other fixed costs to be factored into my spending plan. since they generally don't change, and don't have any bearing on my incidental budget.

I think the spending plan would be much more practical if I could just:

1. Set a monthly custom spending target (rather than just having the spending target be my total income minus my savings goal).
2. See the progress I'm making on my planned spending categories all in one view (as others have noted, a more compact view would be great—see Mint screen capture attached).
3. Be able to hide the "Income after bills & saving" section entirely, since it's not useful to me.

Thanks for all you do for your subscribers!

As I attempt to learn how to use the Spending Plan as implemented, I've noticed that you cannot make a "withdraw from goal" if you don't have the funds (manual add to "contribute to goal"). While conceptually, I understand why that might be as in the case of a real bank account, this might throw a wrench into automated "take from" actions. If you don't have the fund, it might not let you "take".

I'll have to say, as is, to make the Spending Plan work for me, I'm doing work arounds and they are not ideal:

• not being able to select multiple categories in a given Planned Spending group forces me to not include bills and subscriptions. So why even have that "automated" or part of my "income after bills and savings". As implemented, it would be more simple and clear to just state "Income" as all my bills and subscriptions are built into my "Planned Spending" categories.
• not having roll over features in Planned Spending. So now I cannot include things like having a monthly contribution toward Gifts that rollover each month. So I create Gifts as a Savings Goals but the lack of automated "take" makes this a difficult, manual entry experience.
• Strict Savings goal rules around "withdraw.." and "contribute" as mentioned above, which forces me to artificially manipulate contributions if I want to track all contributions and withdrawals. The workaround is I just create a Watchlist to track gift spending and hope my average monthly matches my goal. Watchlists are great but in this case have no impact or calculations relative to the Spending plan or Saving goals.

Which in the end, I think I'll abandon Saving Goals, "exclude" all subscriptions and bills in the income section and use watchlist to track expenses.

So Simplifi uses both Plans and Goals together and I agree about needing flexibility since its unsure. With that, I still don't see why the SW can't offer a check box to "take" out of your savings and what you spend against it vs needing to create a watchlist to add up what you've spent, then go in a subtract, finding after its too late that you over spent and now need to make adjustments. Maybe you can actually manage through a couple of "minus" months and make up for it, which rolling spend achieves. Flexibility for things that are uncertain.

As of now the Spending Plan tab could be much more simple.

@UrsulaA nice find, though it seems to swing completely to the other side of having no categories, almost too simple!