On Jan 3, 2009, at 10:37 AM, Jaysen wrote: > I am still struggling with Q categorization mentality and MW > bucketing. Here is the scenario > > Cash account is +100 as that is what I had in my pocket on 1/1 start > date. > Allocation from paycheck left "personal care" at 0. > I spend 10 from cash on a hair cut. > > Now when I entered the cash spend I put it in the "personal care" > bucket. I now have a -10 balance in that bucket. I think the immediate > fix is to adjust my starting "income" by +100 and allocate 10 to > personal care. > > The larger issue that I am trying to understand is the "when to > bucket" question. I still a little confused by the CC use/payoff > discussion and think that the hair cut example is a symptom of the > same confusion. I my mind I think that I should be assigning a bucket > to each spend. This would be CC, cash in hand or check/debit. > > What am I missing here? Am i even making any sense?
Jaysen, If you are starting your cash flow tracking on 1/1/09, you should have included that $100 cash in with your total amount to spend in your bank accounts and assigned that total to your primary income bucket. Here's the example: Available Cash: Checking Account = $1,400 Cash Account = $100 Total Available = $1,500 I use Edit > Change Cash Flow Start Date and enter 1/1/09 in the date, 1500 in the amount, and set the bucket to Salary. Now I can allocate this money to my expense buckets for spending. If I wanted to get a hair cut for $10, I'd make sure I had $10 in the Personal Care bucket. If not, I drag and drop the Salary bucket to it and put 10 as the money flow amount. Remember, it doesn't matter what account (or credit card) you get the money from, you still have to make sure the cash is shown as available in one of your buckets. With a credit card, you are still spending money from a bucket so if you used a Visa card to pay for that hair cut, you'd still need to put money from some bucket into that Personal Care bucket and then you'd have to move some money into that credit card account to cover that amount as well. This transfer doesn't need to be assigned a bucket because you already tracked the hair cut and you are just moving money around. Think of it this way. If you withdraw $100 from an ATM machine, you wouldn't assign that money to a bucket because it's just going in your wallet. Instead, you simply make it a "cash only" transaction and that money is transferred to the cash account. As you spend money in that cash account, you assign buckets to each of those transactions. Peace, Kevin Hoctor [email protected] No Thirst Software LLC http://nothirst.com http://kevinhoctor.blogspot.com --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
