The problem is in the initial setup. You assigned $400 to the Salary bucket (which means "I can spend $400 now"), but you only have $300 if you sum the balances of all your accounts (credit card balances count negative since they are debt). In general, the sum of your account balances (the amount of money you own) should equal the sum of your bucket balances (the amount of money you can spend). The problem is that you can have money in your hands that you don't own anymore (that is the case with credit cards, as you keep the money in your Checking although you already spend it by paying with the credit card). The trick is to not let yourself be fooled by that.
Walking through your example again, let's assume you also have a savings account with $500 (it's not too important, but just to illustrate the concept). Initial balances: Checking $400 Savings $500 Credit Card ($100) This sums to $800. Now you can either assign the initial balances to some bucket or set a "Start Cash Flow Amount" by clicking "Edit -> Change Cash Flow Start Date...". Anyhow, your Salary bucket should contain $800 now. You might want to move $500 to the "Savings" expense bucket to indicate that you have $500 that you *can* spend but do not *want* to spend right now. This leaves you with $300 in the Salary bucket. After allocating money to other buckets you have $100 in Salary. When you pay your credit card bill, you simple make a transfer from Checking to Credit Card. Don't assign it to any bucket because it does not affect how much you can spent, you are simply just moving money around. Instead, you spend money when you pay something with your credit card (although you still have it in your Checking). You want to track that, i.e., everything you pay with your credit card will be a transaction which is assigned to the Dining/Automobile/ whatever bucket. Also, if you are not paying the credit card off the first month and have to pay interest, you have to assign this interest to some bucket, because you are spending this money for being allowed to keep a negative credit card balance. For example, it can be an additional transaction on the credit card assigned to a "Bank Fees" bucket and then you add a simple transfer from Checking to Credit Card with the total payment amount. Hope that helps, Christian On Jan 1, 12:26 pm, SpiralOcean <[email protected]> wrote: > Just set up new accounts today. A checking and a credit card. > > I put in an initial balance in the checking and credit card. For > example purpose: > Checking $400 > Credit Card $100 > > I took my initial starting balance in my checking account and placed > it into the income bucket of salary. > Salary $400 > > I created buckets, assigned monthly allocations, and flowed the cash. > The amount of money in the Salary bucket went down as expected: > Salary $200. > > Checking $400 > Credit Card $100 > Salary $200 > > I paid off my credit card by dragging from my checking into the credit > card: > > Checking $300 > Credit Card $100 > Salary $200 > > This is a bit scary to me because my Salary staid the same. But I > should have $100 left to allocate in the Salary? > > I went to the transfer smart bucket, and dragged that transfer to my > salary bucket and the salary bucket went down by $100. But only if I > dragged the transfer from my checking account. If I dragged the > transfer from my credit card account then my salary went up $100. > > This is scary to me because I don't feel I can trust how much money is > in the salary bucket to allocate? > > Is there something I did wrong here? --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
