Spending Plan Redesign: Share your feedback here!

What has happened here? Some of the previous months spending plans which used to show ‘Left this month’ as $0.00 now show $NaN since the update.

@Max1223

I rarely use the Per Day number, but I see it as a potential useful number tool because it quantifies the magnitude of spend that could throw off your plan and push you to negative if you spent that each day for the rest of the month. For example, if running a tight budget one month with only a small amount in the left available then your Per Day allowance may only be $1-$5 per day which means the decision to grab a snack or coffee on way to/from work actually matters in the context of that month’s spending plan and needs to be more closely considered than if you have more flex in your plan with a $10-$50 per day allowance.

Have you heard of Nick Magguilli’s new book “Wealth Ladder”? He has a heuristic (the 0.01% rule) where you divide your net worth by 10,000 and that gives you a sense of the daily discretionary spend that you could probably spend without messing up your overall financial picture. For example, he says the Level 2 net worth ($10,000 to $100,000) as when you get “grocery freedom” in sense of if you want eggs and ice cream that week then you can buy them if you want. By the 0.01% rule says, an extra $10 per day of discretionary spend isn’t going to make a big difference on your wealth at Level 2 net worth.

Those are the kind of thinking frameworks where I can see value in the Per Day number because it helps you focus on the magnitude of expense that actually needs scrutiny and frees you to worry less or not at all on smaller expenses (unless they add up which would be reflected by an erosion of that Per Day number until you are clued in to pay attention to those small spend decisions).

@DryHeat I use rollovers for things like Vacation and Education/Classes. Other things like Auto repair expenses are in Spend as rollovers.

I have an annual budget each, divide it by 12 then roll it over each month. so yes, month to month it varies, but shows where and when the money went. I try to manage to the total per year. This way, the year is planned and hopefully minimizes the Other category. When i start to see consistent "others" I think about how to incorporate into the Spend.

I think both ways, rollovers in Spend or seeing the expense in Others work…personal preferences!

Oh, just now noticed that the "left per day" is back.

I do too, have a Planned Spend for dinning out. I don't use the Per Day number in this way. This was more of a tongue-in-cheek response. I'm set up a lot like you are. I have all my spending in the Spending Plan and keep Other Spending as near to zero as possible. @DryHeat gives a good use example that is a more practical usage.

OK, I'm being a bit verbose here, but one more comment related to the actual topic of this thread - Feedback on the new Spending Plan design.

It's been several days now and I'm still in the transition phase, but I find myself wanting badly for the Transfer section to be more readily accessible.

I have 7 automatic transfers set up at my various financial institutions and these are set up in QS as recurring transfers with additional non-recurring transfers during any given month. Yes, these are all excluded from the Spending Plan and Reports, but they are there, and I do like to keep track of them as the month progresses.

In keeping with the new design, I find myself "expecting" to see "Transfers" in the master list on the left. I understand that due to the nature of most transfers being excluded from the Spending Plan and/or Reports, that they don't impact the Available and Per Day numbers like the other sections do, but these are substantial movements of funds and it's good to keep track of them. Another option would be to keep them with "Bills" but go back to something like the original Spending Plan layout with a summary bar and dropdowns for "Bills," "Subscriptions," and "Transfers/Credit Card payments"

@Coach Natalie I think I'm having carry over issues as well, but different ones than above.

In July, I was overspent in a few categories and in Aug, only SOME of the overages carried over.

July

Aug reset itself

I DO have other categories that were OVERSPENT July and the overage WAS reflected in Aug.

It seems a little random why some categories reset themselves and some carried over the overage.

Thanks

@Coach Natalie

The overspent error on iOS mobile version is continuing even in the new month. It appears to only be referencing the set maxes for each category at the beginning of the month and fails to update when you update each category after the beginning of the month. Product team will need to troubleshoot and fix this new bug.

@DryHeat I'm not a frequent user of pie charts as well, but I'd guess a lot of people like them. As designed, the different colors make sense.

The color coding is used on transactions in Bills and Income but I agree not especially meaningful.
However, I do value the pie chart personally as it gives me the sense of how on track I am at a glance. And “Other Spending” is meaningfully color coded in a friendly pink color (less aggressive than the angry orange-red color your pie chart turns if you overspend your income in the month). My spending plan is setup such that as Other Spending (I.e. unplanned spending) goes up Savings usually has to go down. Sometimes there’s some flex in my Planned Spending but I’ve got that total pretty well dialed in to my lifestyle & habits so even if individual category amounts change the monthly total doesn’t change much.
Overall, I think having different colors for the different spending buckets is a good feature and shouldn’t be changed to a single color that would make the pie chart useless and monitoring the different spending buckets less intuitive. Also, reports assign random colors to spending categories as it is. You have to in order to see the different expense types and how they build-up into the total expense number.

Edit: I will say I have no real preference for what colors chosen other than them being different for the different buckets.

Edit edit: a past month example of the kind of pie chart I want to see each/most months. The pie chart does help my monitoring