We want your feedback on the Spending Plan!

Yes I use this too. However it is notable that once the month begins, that number completely disappears and is replaced by your actual spending. So on Jan 1, you'll be at $0.00 just as if you had never used it (feb forward will still have values). It won't be telling you that you have spent $47/600 discretionary dollars which I think is what a lot of us want.

What might work better, with minimal change on their end, is allowing multi-category selection in the Planned spending. I can say I plan to spend an extra $500 a month, but it wont consistantly be in the same area. One month its home furnishings, the next month its electronics, the next month its travel, etc. If I could just group all those random categories together into a discretionary bucket it would go a long way.

@UrsulaA Yea I do the same. And then I also have a redundant "everything" watchlist to see my overall spending averages since Simplifi doesn't have rollups.

And yea there are some improvements over Mint. Like forecasting, I missed that dearly when I switched from Microsoft Money to Mint and have been doing it in a spreadsheet for the last decade.

Seconding everybody calling for rollovers; if that's too complicated to implement, a partial solution could be to have the option "Release to Savings Goal" at the end of the month, rather than to general spending. (For instance, if I spend $250 instead of $300 on gas one month, I can automatically put that money into a "Gas Overflow" savings goal with one or two clicks instead of manually setting the savings goal contribution every time.)

As for other features/abilities, it might already be there and I just haven't found it, but I wish there was a way to "unrelease" money if you release it too soon. I.e., I've spent $200 on groceries out of my $300 budget by the 25th of the month, and I'm not planning to go to the grocery store again until next week, so I release that $100 to general spending. Then on the 28th, I'm at the pharmacy and notice they have a great deal on seltzer, so I stock up, and spend $40. I have plenty of money in general spending still, but because I've released the $100 to General that should have been Groceries, it now shows the Groceries category as $40 over.

1. How would you use rollover abilities in the Spending Plan?

I would use rollover to "build up" fund to use for restaurants, etc. I also have come from Mint recently and used rollover to track allowance funds for my kids. I think I just used it for several things—gas too. Some months we travel more than others and so the gas/fuel rollover helped even things out.

1. How would having rollover abilities benefit you?

It would just make it so much simpler to track funds while budgeting.

1. What other features/abilities would you like to see added to the Spending Plan?

I would like to see the option of budgeting for expenses that are less than monthly—e.g., I pay all my insurance (auto, home) annually, magazine subscriptions, and even subscriptions to some streaming services since it's cheaper to pay once a year. In Mint I was able to indicate how frequently an expense would happen, and then it would automatically break it down per month to account for in my monthly budget. Then, the month that the bill was due, it would show how much had been built up in that category and make it available for spending without it seeming like I had to reduce other categories to still meet my budget. It was brilliant.

If I'm reading correctly, what you essentially want is rollovers which a lot of us are requesting. So that your overage or underage rolls to the next month's budget and auto-adjusts what you have available to spend. Its reportedly in progress but not there today.

What I do to compensate is I have created matching Watchlists. These don't do the exact same thing, but they do show me a YTD total and a 12 month average spend. So those are other useful ways to know if over a long period I am on budget or need to adjust. Its just not as immediate as "I really should only eat out once this month because I ate out so often last month".

I wouldn't use the Rollover spending. I like that I can set up spending for certain categories. Can I mark transactions per category? I want to know how it was able to come up with $380.00/month for Groceries. That is higher than normal for my grocery spending.

I'd like to be able to choose which spending plan categories have rollover. That also solves the "what to do about historical data" issue since by default, all spending plans would have the option set to off.

Another approach would be that at the end of a month, let me see which categories I went over/under, and have an option to release those extra (or negative) funds towards next month's spending plan. Along with that it might be nice to have an option to use that same choice for future months.

They already have a manual "release unused funds" option on the spending plan. It wouldn't be complicated to give option to add remaining balance to the following months available spend.

However, my guess is that doing so could interfere with the fundamental structure of how the software processes income. It wouldn't be hard to automatically route remaining balance to an "excess income " bucket and then allow future categories to draw from both that and new income (while passing the remaining category balance forward month). But idk how this app is structured.

I get your point and agree with you, but I'm still flummoxed as to why a solution hasn't been developed in the last several years. Feels like even with all of the testing necessary it should be straightforward to implement in some capacity, even as a beta feature, if devs just prioritized the work.

I use Savings Goals and like the concept of it. Especially that it sets aside money from any account I select. @nanoviking you can set a date for when the goal ends, so it doesnt have to be end of the year. Since I havent gone through a cycle yet, I'd like to think Simplifi would ask if I'd like to reset the goal once complete.

Manually adding money the goal works for me as it mimics how I would use a savings account or piggy back. Here is where Savings Goals can improve, Simplifi can automate the Add with a confirmation from my end. Much like setting up a monthly rule to add money to savings, I just select OK or make some adjustments before the transaction happens. This is a nice to have for me. The larger issue is manually removing the money, while it mimics real life is what I feel is lacking in that I can't tag an actual transaction to reduce the amount of savings. If Simplifi could add this, Savings Goals would be great and likely eliminate the need for rollovers for me. It seems all the data is there to do this. Earmarked money, Accounts, Goals tab, Goals in the Saving Plan, the actual expense transaction. Not saying it's easy to do but…

Maybe a simple solution to the extra income question would be that when releasing extra funds towards next month, it should just adjust the amount of next months spending plan accordingly. So if I have $5 less this month, raise next month's amount by $5. And the same if I overspent, I'd like to "release" the negative amount to subtract it from next month's spending plan.

I'd prefer if this didn't need to be manual, but even that would be helpful.