Wow, it seems there is a wide variety of ways that people use MoneyWell. Unfortunately it doesn't seem like there is an ideal way for me to use MoneyWell for planning purposes without creating a ton of buckets.
Like many people, some of my bills don't occur every month and vary in amount over the course of the year. The problem I see with calculating an annual total and then allocating a monthly average to a single bucket is that I will have no idea how much money I could safely move out of that bucket if I needed to. For example, say I have a $50 Water bill that occurs every 2 months and a $100 Electricity bill that occurs every month. Using the annual average method, I would create a single "Utilities" bucket and allocate $125 to it every month. A problem arises when I get halfway through the month and I'm running low in another area and need to figure out which bucket I can take some money out of to compensate. If I've been allocating $100/mo for Electricity, it's very likely that my actual bill was somewhat less than that and I actually have a surplus of money sitting in this bucket I can safely move out. However, this surplus is now intermixed with funds that are earmarked for future bills and there is no easy way for me to figure out how much I can safely move. It seems to me that this method really only works if your annual expenses are pretty consistent and easy to estimate a year in advance, or if you are willing to over-allocate some buckets over the course of the year and just let the surplus sit in that bucket and never touch it. What having separate buckets for every bill enables me to do is set my spending plan for every bill somewhat conservatively (so I over- allocate a bit) but then when the bill is paid and I know the actual amount, I can immediately transfer the surplus to another bucket in need of funds (or to Savings). Unfortunately MoneyWell doesn't provide any way to add a comment or keep a history of changes to the "Spending Plan" amount for each bucket, so I guess I'm stuck using the Bucket's memo field. Since this field is common to all months (unlike the Spending Plan amount) I'm forced to decide between having a REALLY long memo that retains my notes from previous months for the whole year OR simply clearing out this field every month (and losing my history from previous months). I really wish there was a better way to handle this. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
