Let me pick a specific example so I can better understand what I'm doing wrong.
Let's say I have $100 in my "Car" bucket as of 26-Feb. Now let's say that on 26-Feb, I make an $80 car payment via my bank's bill pay system but due to the processing delay, the bank dates the payment as 3-Mar. I enter an $80 payment into Moneywell dated for 3-Mar and as we have discussed, the "Car" bucket total will not change because it's still February. Now let's say that I need some gas on 27-Feb and I quickly glance at my "Car" bucket to see how much gas I can afford. It says I have $100 available so I merrily run over to the gas station and put in $25 of gas. When I get home I enter a $25 payment into Moneywell dated for 27-Mar and as we have discussed , the "Car" bucket total should now say $75 is available. When a few more days go by and it's now 1-Mar, I am now shocked to see that I'm $5 overspent in my "Car" bucket even though at no time did my bucket total lead me to believe that I was out of money. What should I have done differently? On Feb 25, 11:24 am, Kevin Hoctor <[email protected]> wrote: > On Feb 25, 2009, at 10:00 AM, Mikey wrote: > > > But payments for this month might be dated for next month. Are you > > suggesting that I set the date for such future payments to be this > > month anyway, despite the fact that the bank lists them in the future? > > No, I'm suggesting that you keep all payments dated for the dates you > expect them to happen. Why do you want to have future payments taken > out of your bucket this month? > > Maybe the confusion is that you are looking at the bucket totals as a > total known expenses but they are not. The buckets are the equivalent > of a physical envelope in the envelope budgeting method. In that > scenario, when you get paid, you divide up your money into all your > envelopes and then pay your bills and expenses from each envelope. > Once an envelope is empty, you stop spending for that category. > > So let's equate this to car payments. For this month you may have to > pay $500 for your car payment. You would then take $500 from your > cashed paycheck and put it in the Auto Loan envelope. When the loan > bill comes, you take that $500 out of the envelope and pay it. You > don't take 10 months of payments out of your paycheck today and put it > in the envelope because that would probably cause you to have no money > left for your other bills. > > Does this help? > > Peace, > > Kevin Hoctor > No Thirst Software LLC > [email protected]http://nothirst.comhttp://kevinhoctor.blogspot.com > > Check out our MoneyWell video > tutorials:http://nothirst.com/moneywell/tutorials/ > > Join our user forum to learn about new > releases:http://groups.google.com/group/no-thirst-software --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
