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DaveVT · November 2

Hi, I'm Dave. I decided to try Simplifi in late October because my income has dropped by about a third, and I now must track my expenses much more closely. My savings, checking, credit card, and IRA accounts are all integrated with Simplifi. Some questions:

Some of my expenses are recurring, but paid only once/year, such as home-owners, auto, and personal liability insurance. What's the best way to set these up so that I can see them coming, but not affect my month-to-month planning? I usually draw from savings accounts to pay them when the time comes. (One of my income streams goes directly to a savings account. Everything else goes to checking.)
I have a vacation planning goal of $25000. I want to be able to afford it in the spring of '26. There is no way my current monthly income can contribute enough to meet this goal. Is there a way I can virtually commit some of my IRA?

Thanks for your help,

Dave C

RobWilk · November 2

Look into Savings goals, they are virtual hold money aside with monthly contributions kind of thing..

DryHeat · November 2

@DaveVT

Regarding annual expenses … there are various suggestions for this, mainly using Planned Spend rollovers vs. Savings Goals.

I've linked one below on using Savings Goals. If you search for "annual" or "quarterly" you'll probably find a discussion on using rollovers.

https://community.simplifimoney.com/discussion/11527/using-savings-goals-for-quarterly-semi-annual-and-yearly-bills

SRC54 · November 2

One thing I did was switch my insurance to State Farm who will bill you monthly and not charge a fee. Others do this as well or it is a very small fee. I could afford to pay annually but it evens out the Spending Plan. 😀

As for your $25K vacation. It sounds nice!!

DannyB · November 2

You can use an investment account with Savings Goals so virtually adding funds from your IRA won't be a problem. Once set up you can "contribute" from any connect account you want.

I've been using Savings Goals for my annual/semi-annual expenses since I started almost 4 years ago. When rollover was added to Planned Spending, I experimented using that feature for a couple of my annual expenses, but the drawback is that there is no way to see where the rollover funds are held the way you can with Savings Goals.

DryHeat · November 3

@DannyB

Do you delete annual savings goals when they are completed+drained? Or do you just leave them in the list and create a new one for the next year?

Or do you reset/restart the same goal for the new year in some way? If you do restart, how do you do that?

DannyB · November 3

@DryHeat

Good questions. I did a "fresh start" at the end of last year to begin this new year. As a result, all former SGs were wiped clean along with everything else up to that point. I imported 90 days of historical data form 2024 to give me a basis for my Spending Plan and created new SGs for my annual/non-monthly fixed and flexible expenses.

In the time I've been using QS, I've never paid attention to the effect that deleting and SG had on past Spending Plans as you point out here. Not sure how that will change my practice, but it might, meaning if I ever do complete an SG, I'll just let it ride in the Completed section of SGs.

OK, keeping in mind that this is not what Savings Goals are designed for this is what I do:

For my big-ticket SG, I go ahead and make adjustments to the goal amount and target date, in anticipation of the next time this expense will come due. In this sense, I never actually complete this goal, and they remains in the Active Goal list.

Example: I pay our auto insurance premium annually in September. I made the payment directly out of the real-world savings account and once the payment cleared and my savings account balance was adjusted, I updated the SG with a withdraw via "Spend a custom amount." Then I made an adjustment to my goal amount by adding in what I paid out and adjusting the target date to Sept 2026. I will make my property tax payment in the next few weeks (I pay in full when first instalment is due) and I will at that time make the same adjustment to this goal moving the target date to Dec 2026. Then, in April, I'll pay our property insurance premium and this time the target date will move to April 2027. This keeps my monthly contributions evened as I go along. I don't know if this is the best way to do this, but it seems to work for me.

My irregular flexible spending SG is trickier, and I will bring it to an end in December and set up a new goal for 2026 rolling forward any remaining funds from this year. In the past, I have deleted the old SG when replacing it with the new SG, but again, I never paid attention to how this impacted prior Spending Plans. I do have an upper limit for this goal that if reached I will stop making contributions until needed to replenish the goal amount. In this case I believe I would have to mark it as "Complete" and then creating a new Goal when I needed to replenish it. I haven't actually had to do this so far.

DryHeat · November 4

@DannyB

Thanks for the explanation. I can see how this works for you.

Just to make sure I am understanding, let's suppose you had an annual Savings Goal called Pig Insurance with an amount of $1000. You contribute until you reach $1000, then when your Pig Insurance is due in December you withdraw $1000 via "Spend a custom amount." Then you increase the amount of the Goal to $2000 (with $1000 already contributed and spent) and start on the next year. Is that right?

That would avoid the buildup of finished Goals and would function correctly, I think. You would just end up with some Goals with nominal amounts that are kind of weird. (Pig Insurance would be $5000 by the end of the decade.) But it would work.

DannyB · November 4

Yep, as I said, keeping in mind that SGs are designed to work for what I'm using them for, I do end up with some weird numbers.

I don't really need to use SGs at all and should probably give up on the whole project. I've used separate savings accounts for years to accumulate funds to cover our annual/semi-annual expenses. Since these expenses are paid for outside of the monthly Spending Plan as it now exists, I could just as easily work something out with the recurring transfers in the Spending Plan without the extra work involved in using SGs. When I started using QS I incorporated these transfers into monthly SG contributions. But, again, I'm not sure it's really necessary to do this at all and I may drop the whole SG project at the end of this year.

Like yourself, I am a lazy person and don't want to do any more work than necessary to manage our personal finance and trying to make SGs do something they're not designed for is work. 😁

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