Rollover unused Spending Plan money [edited] (10 Merged Votes)

Thanks for answering! When you spend on snow removal, how do you link that transaction so it subtracts from the amount in the savings goal?

I'm trying this out now with one category but the transactions still show up in Other Spending since they don't fall under a Planned Spending category. Do I need to manually hide them from Spending Plan?

@EL1234 What i guess I mean is, I have a spending category called "Snow Removal" and I have a Savings Goal called "Snow Removal. " Writing a check with the category matches nicely with the withdrawal from that particular Savings Goal.

I guess if I was going this route I'd probably withdraw the amount from the savings goal once per month, not once per transaction. But it would be a lot more seamless if I could link transactions (via categories) to the savings goal.

@EL1234 what would be the advantage of withdrawing from the savings goal once per month? And for that matter, during which months would you withdraw from? And why?

But i agree that there should be a direct link between transactions and savings goals.

The advantage of withdrawing once per month would probably be for categories that have a lot of smaller transactions, vs something like snow removal which you might be only paying once or twice a month.

Take something like clothing, my spending tends to be a lot higher during certain months as the seasons change. So on the months when there's a lot of spending, I'd see that in "Other Spending" (since it doesn't have a spending plan), and I guess withdraw that amount from the Savings Goal and mark the transactions to be ignored from spending plan?

I'm still not sure if that's the best approach. Maybe I should just have a Spending Plan for clothing and adjust the amount based on the expected amount of spending each month… especially since I like to amounts in Other Spending to be low because those are things that I technically didn't "plan" for.

"So on the months when there's a lot of spending, I'd see that in "Other Spending" (since it doesn't have a spending plan), and I guess withdraw that amount from the Savings Goal and mark the transactions to be ignored from spending plan?"

Exactly. That is the very best approach.

I got it! Sounds like a workable approach.

But I still think it'd be easier if I could accomplish it without a savings goal. If I could put an average in the Spending Plan, and then at the end of the month, instead of releasing available funds to the rest of the current month's spending, if there was a way to release them to next month's Spending Plan for that category, then I could save up in the quiet months and then easily stay within budget (spending plan?) on the busier months. That would be a lot fewer steps and exactly why I voted for a Rollover feature.

@ajbopp @EL1234 certainly feels more complex that it has to be, marking each transaction as ignored, creating some kind of report to see how much was spent on the goal, then manually withdrawing from Savings Goals.

Where goals are truly a one time transaction, this isn't too much effort, but for other goals where, amounts, number of transactions and when they happen are not predictable, the current Spending Plan/Savings Goals approach is quite tedious. Vacations are another example of the non predictable, unless you plan each vacation separately and create a separate goal for each. I guess that would work for some. But for me, I just have an annual travel budget/goal, save $xxx each month and plan trips as they come. Some are more predictable than others.

With that, I use Watchlists as sometimes the big trip comes early in the year, so the watchlist is the a way to see what has been spent BUT, it falls short as you can't adjust dates like just see this year (to be fair, it does show a YTD number). So go to Reports, that will show me this year…but I have to select Vacations each time and can't save a report. That's a whole different topic!

I think that having it apply retroactively to all spending plans would be complex and not a good idea, but letting us roll over on a per spending plan and possibly even on a per month basis shouldn't be nearly that complicated.

yes! We need this rollover feature!

It appears that what many proponents of rollover functionality really want is a monthly view into an annual budget, which is a very different thing than what is generally being asked for.

Q-Simplifi doesn't look at finances that broadly. That is, it doesn't have you set up an annual budget so that you decide how much you'll spend in some months rather than others over the years. Or so that you can see if you overspending this month you need to adjust what you spend the rest of the year.

Trying to twist the existing product into something that seems like it does that, without actually doing that, is likely to be unsatisfactory and frustrating. And counter-productive to effective home budgeting.

Savings Goals are an excellent use for that purpose

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I also need this feature. I have a water bill that is once every two months, and a phone bill that is once a year. I also don't buy things like toilet paper every month, but when I do, I buy in bulk, meaning that my toiletries/consumable goods is sometimes $200, and other times $0. I think I'm going to leave simplifi because this is pretty much a dealbreaker when it comes to budgeting, and seeing as how people have been asking for this feature for 4 years, it doesn't bode well that quicken/simplifi has any interest in providing this feature.

Coming from Mint and this is my biggest issue with this platform. Enough that this just may not be the best budgeting tool for people coming from Mint