Working with Planned Spending Rollover: An Experiment

Update

I have now set up a Planned Spending rollover bucket for my annual fixed expenses following the same process as outlined above using a new parent category for annual fixed expenses and moved the fixed expense sub-categories into this new parent category and in addition I:

• I went through my list of recurring expenses and deleted all the annual/semi-annual recurring expenses. These included such things as annual subscriptions, annual insurance premiums, property tax, etc.
• Removing annual/semi-annual expenses from my recurring bills/subscriptions is not an issue because:
  • I have these expenses set up for auto pay out of the account in which I hold these funds.
  • I receive notifications from my bank and from the billers for these expenses in a timely manner so I can double check the funds to pay are available.
• By deleting these expenses from recurring bills/subscriptions, when they are paid, they will now show up in the Annual Fixed Expense bucket in Planned Spending and hopefully the roll over will show the accumulating funds for these expenses in the months they come due.buried?
• I clicked through the next 12 month's Spending Plans to see how my changes panned out. I had a couple of months that were in the red. These were months with annual recurring bills I had missed in my find and delet recurring step. Now all of the next 12 months are in the green.

As a result of these two changes, I now have only 3 Savings Goals one of which is for our annual travel expenses. Depending on how these changes to planned spending rollover work out I may set up our travel expenses as a rollover bucket also.

Stay tuned!

An Observation

When I sat down to look into transitioning another SG into a Planned Spending rollover category along the same lines outlined above, I discovered something I hadn't noticed or thought about with the two previous transitions.

As I was looking at the SG I'm thinking of transitioning, I decided to double check what SG funds are held in which real-world account. So, in the Savings Goal page, I clicked on the "By account" tab and suddenly I became aware that I no longer had an accounting of all of the funds held in various accounts.

One of the issues with preparing for non-monthly expenses, whether fixed or flexible, is the need to ACTUALLY set aside the real-world cash for those future expenses. With Savings Goals I had to designate which real-world account I was holding the cash in to cover whatever expense I was saving toward. The Savings Goal feature gives me a way to see the amount of funds set aside for SGs in the accounts list AND on the Savings Goal page "By account" tab. Even better, on the "By account tab," I can see specifically how much in each account is designated for each SG and how much cash, if any, is undesignated in any accounts used for SGs.

When I transitioned some of my SGs to Planned Spending rollover that accounting feature went away leaving me with undesignated amounts in various accounts and using the rollover feature I no longer have a way to see in Q-Simplifi how much and where the cash I am theoretically rolling over is being held.

This isn't necessarily a problem, but it was nice to see how the funds in various cash accounts had been accounted for and what those funds were set aside for. I'll miss that… hmm, maybe I'll make this a feature request. 🤔😁

Update 3

Now that I've had a chance to see how the Planned Spending rollover feature can work, I have converted my Travel SG into a Planned Spending expense category with the monthly SG contribution amount as the expected monthly goal and adding the current balance of the Savings Goal funds as the Opening rollover amount. I have withdrawn the balance from the Travel SG as a withdraw for another purpose and those funds are now free floating and available for future travel expenses.

A few more observations as I make these transitions:

• I will continue to use the same cash accounts to sequester the money needed to cover these rollover expenses in the same accounts I used for the SGs.
• Two sequestering accounts are HYS savings accounts, and the balances of these accounts should equal the amount available from month-to-month including the current months target amount once transfers are complete.
• These accounts are high interest-bearing accounts which will require me to adjust the monthly target amount by the amount of interest earned each month to keep the interest payments accounted for. This should be equivalent to my practice of adding the interest to the monthly SG contribution.
• Making these transitions shouldn't affect my overall Spending Plan since all the covered expenses were accounted for via SGs. Moving forward I anticipate these expenses being visible in my Spending Plan and better represented in my expense reports.

Yes, if you use subcategories for these expenses under Travel as the parent category, QS will include them for tracking purposed in your Travel Planned Spending bucket.

When I set up in Quicken Simplifi, my goal was to be as minimal as possible. I didn't want to get any more granular in my tracking than necessary, at least necessary in my mind. In keeping with that ideal, I don't break out our travel expenses beyond "Travel." I do have an Excelle spreadsheet book where I plan out our trips and this is where I'll do the more detailed budgeting work, but when it comes time to pay for the trip and track it in QS, I categorize all expenses as Travel. I do use tags for further sorting and keeping track of how much we have spent for each travel experience.

@Max1223

QS only allows one level of subcategories. I don’t have any subcategories under Travel.

This is how I’m set up.

• Annual Flexible Expense
  • Auto Service/Care
  • Gifts
  • Home Maintenance/Repairs
  • Health Providers/Pharmacy

What I was saying above is that to have subcategories under Travel it will need to be a separate Planned Spending bucket.

Update 5

Yesterday (4/30) I made the move to breakout my annual fixed expenses into separate Planned Spending categories with rollover enabled.

In the process, I was able to assess just how much of the unspent cash in my cash accounts is already spoken for and for what specific expense.

Some of these expenses have already been paid for 2024 basically using cash set aside in 2023 and the current year monthly rollover will, for the most part, be accumulating for the 2025 expenses.

All of these "rollovers" are covered by a monthly automatic transfer to an interest-bearing account. This allows me to keep track of what is set aside for these expenses sort of reflecting what QS does with Savings Goals. I will have to do some math to make sure the balance of the holding account matches the sum of these fixed expenses as the rollover amount increases month-to-month, so that will be something to keep an eye on.

Update 6

As May winds down I find that my experiment with the Planned Spending rollover feature is working well in all instances I have created Today I have taken the final step of transitioning my Annual Flexible expenses to individual rollover Planned Spending categories.

• I no longer have any multi-category buckets in any of my Spending Plan.
• My Savings Goals are all appropriately focused on specific one-time expenses.
• My Spending Plan more closely matches my actual pencil and paper worksheet (OK, it's a digital spreadsheet, but you get the gist… or maybe not - I can imagine there are some members of this forum who have never actually used pencil and paper to do this kind of stuff 😎)

At this point I will declare my experiment a success.

@Max1223

I don't know if this answers your question exactly, but the only other place to see my overall spending is in Reports > Spending. For what it's worth here's what my Expenses report looks like:

I have 8 parent categories. Most of these 8 parent categories have child categories. You mention the Auto category that I call for no particular reason "Auto & Transportation" other that habit. I use 4 child categories under Auto & Transportation: Auto Insurance, Auto Registration, Auto Service/Care, Gas & Fuel. In May I had transactions affecting 3 of these child categories.

Gas & Fuel is set up as a straightforward Planned Spending bucket since we plan to spend a certain amount each month on gasoline with no need to roll over any over or under spending. Auto Registration is properly a recurring bill that I would more "properly" fit under Bills in the Income after bills and savings section. But since I want to accumulate money to cover our three annual auto registrations, I went ahead and set these up as a Planned Spending bucket with rollover enabled and set the monthly planned spend at 12th of the total for all three bills. These are, in turn, NOT set up as recurring bills. Auto Service/Care also fits in the Planned Spending section and, in my mind, is what the rollover feature is most properly suited to. These are irregular regular spending that needs to be planned for but is not necessarily or easily done month-to-month like gasoline or groceries, etc. I pay my insurance policy annually and have this expense set up as rollover planned spending.

So, to your question, "outside of creating a Watchlist, do you have other ways to rollup Categories since you've broken out Auto Expense?" I think the Expenses report page does this nicely. In the primary screen I am giving a summary of my spending by parent category, i.e., a rollup of all expenses related to Auto. By clicking on the Auto category in the primary screen I open a second screen that shows me the details by child category.

I understand and use the Spending Plan to do my monthly planning and tracking and Reports gives me a summary of my expenses as the month unfolds.

@Max1223

Yeah, under the current configuration the only option I can think of is to include all your transportation related expenses under one Parent category if you want all those expenses tracked as a group. But as far as including them in your monthly Spending Plan I don't think it matters as much since the individual expenses can show up in different sections of the Spending Plan.

I don't see the Spending Plan as primarily (if at all) set up to be an income/expense tracking tool. It's a planning tool… and believe it or not one of its key functions is to show the user how much they have available to spend AFTER the user has accounted for all fixed and flexible monthly expenses along with any active savings goal contributions. I think this is what throws folks off when they come to QS from a different platform that is set up for budgeting and tracking in the same screen.

QS provides what is for me an outstanding and eloquent planning tool that, IMHO, far surpasses the more traditional budgeting strategies offered in other platforms. The QS Spending Plan really is a different animal.

Sticking with the Auto and Transportation expenses, for planning purposes some of these expenses are fixed monthly expenses and are included in the Bills or Subscriptions section of Income after bills & savings. Other auto and transport expenses are more flexible, and I have set up Planned Spending buckets for each of those with monthly target amounts. Of these flexible Planned Spending buckets some are also set up to rollover under/overspending to following months and some do not roll over into follow on months. In addition, one of my Savings Goals is for auto replacement which is a child category under Auto & Transport. But this is handled via a Savings Goal with the monthly contribution visible and deducted in my Spending Plan, but this contribution is not technically an expense paid to an outside vendor and thus does not show up in the Auto & Transport report.

All of these expenses are categorized as Auto and Transport expenses and the total spending for this parent category will be reported in the Expense page of Reports and if I have a Watchlist set up for the whole category there also with additional details. In the expense report I can drill down to see the how much I've spent in each child category.

In your situation, if I wanted to have all the Auto expenses and all the Transportation expenses tracked together the only solution I can see as QS is currently set up is to create an Auto & Transportation parent category and put all the child categories you have under your current set up under the one new all-inclusive category. This won't change how you have the expenses sorted out in your Spending Plan, but it will change how you see them reported.

Update 7 addendum:

According to my June Spending Plan, I have a certain amount of available cash left over that isn’t needed for any of my outstanding bills, subscriptions, tracked transfers, tracked SG contributions or set aside for potential Planned Spending for designated purposes.

For the past 30 months I’ve not used that available letting it slip into oblivion at the turn of the month. This is true even though I’ve wondered about “where” that supposed “available/left at end of month” abides in the real world, asking what others do with it, making suggestions about how to “capture” it and even “tracked” it outside of QS with a spreadsheet.

As I reviewed my Spending Plan this morning I noted that my Available is more than adequate to cover what I am over in my Auto Service & Repair because of my set of tires purchase. Since I can do whatever I want with that available undesignated money, this becomes another source to cover the overage and will allow me to “catch up” now instead of 4 months from now. If I use the Available to supplement what is already sitting in this bucket for this purchase, I won’t need to dip into my Surprise funds when it comes time to pay. In essence, I supposedly have some cash laying around and now I’m going to gather that cash up and spend it.

This will be a test of how realtime my QS Spending Plan actually is.

Done. I just edited this month’s Auto Maintenance & Repair target amount adding the amount of the overage and now my Available has been reduced by that amount. Of course this “blows” my Plan for the month but on the other hand I would have “lost” the available funds anyway at months end.