On Dec 12, 10:39 pm, Kevin Hoctor <[email protected]> wrote: > On Dec 12, 2008, at 11:23 PM, philco wrote: > > > > > I think this answered a question I had, but I just want to be sure. > > I currently use Budget, but I'm looking around since it's lacking in > > many areas. I find MoneyWell very well done. The UI does have a much > > better design to it then Budget, but I'm still having issues coming to > > grips with the Allocate Income. I guess a simple way to say it is, can > > I turn off the whole monthly window concept and have it be continuous? > > That is, no rollovers and have the Allocate Income dispense based on > > percentages? I was hoping if I set all buckets to the same priority it > > would do something like this, but it doesn't appear to. It looks like > > it tries to figure out where we are in the current month and it > > doesn't allocate all of the income. > > This is what I do currently. Since Budget is limited, I wrote a small > > Java app where I input our income and how much we want to go into each > > bucket each month. It then calculates how much goes into each bucket > > for each of our paychecks using simple percentages. I then input this > > into Budget. We can then just deposit pay and spend as we go. > > Sorry, I rambled a bit. > > Hi Phil, > > Why are percentages better than amounts? > > Basically, MoneyWell is patterned after the envelope budgeting method > where you create a spending plan and separate your cash into buckets > (envelopes) each time you get paid. You only fill each bucket with the > amount you have designated for that spending category and you only > spend what you have allocated. If you don't spend it all, it stays in > the bucket even after you put in the amount from your next paycheck. > > MoneyWell breaks it down into monthly views because the majority of > bills are monthly and most everything else can be seen in this time > period breakdown as well. I hope this helps. > > Peace, > > Kevin Hoctor > [email protected] > No Thirst Software LLChttp://nothirst.comhttp://kevinhoctor.blogspot.com
Kevin, Thank you for answering. The buckets still have amounts, it's how the money is allocated. Lets say I have five buckets, A, B, C, D and E. We make $1000 bucks a month, with this layout: A $100 - 10% B $200 - 20% C $400 - 40% D $150 - 15% E $150 - 15% So each time we allocate income it takes that percentage of the amount and places it into that bucket. Why do this? Because we don't always enter transactions and paychecks in a timely fashion. Even when we do, there is no "end of the month". Paychecks may get entered this month or next. Nor would we know if the other has entered all of their transactions when we need to rollover for the month. So we would need to have greater coordination around that period each month. We prefer longer timescales. The more I thought about it last night, I realized, that within your design, a better way to say the request is can the budget "period" be changed from monthly, to yearly or quarterly? This way we can randomly allocate money over this longer period of time and as long as the priorities of the buckets are the same they would all build up at the same rate. I know this "lazy evaluation" is not the normal envelope method, but the way we look at is like this. We put a baseline amount of cash into each envelope and call that the "target" zero. This amount is great enough that it can float the longer period of evaluation. Therefore we can go below "zero" at any point but we're still not in debt. The bucket amounts do have larger swings, but as long as it's under the baseline, all is ok. Thanks, phil --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "No Thirst Software User Forum" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/no-thirst-software?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
