Troy,
On Apr 19, 2009, at 1:26 PM, Troy wrote: > Also, do most people download transactions from credit card companies > and match the individual charges up with their buckets? Troy, many folks do download the transactions from their banks and assign individual charges to the buckets. I prefer to type the transactions in manually. In any case, it's important to assign the transactions to a bucket to ensure you are staying within your spending plan. > How do most people categorize payments to credit card companies like > Visa and Mastercard where there can be purchases which would go into > dozens of buckets. If I pay $500 to Visa, that might be part of my > grocery, clothing and medical allowance for ex. Assuming you have been keeping track of credit charges throughout the month, you would not need to assign your credit card payment to a bucket, but because the expenses are already accounted for. Let me go into more detail.... Let's divide credit cards into two categories. Long-term and short- term. Long-term credit cards are credit cards that you have stopped using and are paying down the balance over time. Short term credit cards are cards that you pay off the full balance every month. When initially getting started, your starting cash flow should be all the cash you have on hand (including amounts in checking accounts), less the outstanding balance on short-term credit cards that you have. Now, when you make a payment to a short-term credit card, you do not want to assign the transaction to a bucket. On the other hand, payments you make to a long-term credit card should be assigned to a Debt bucket or some other appropriately named bucket. If you have a hybrid card, for example, you have accumulated $5000 on a card, are continuing to use the card on a recurring basis while you pay the balance down, it's much more complicated. In this case, when you make a credit card payment, you would need to split the payment. One part of the split would be the amount of additional charges accumulated during the month. These charges have already been accounted for in the bucket system, and you wouldn't want to assign this part of the split to a bucket. The other part of the split would be the remainder of the payment which you are using to pay down the previously accumulated balance. This part of the split should be assigned to a Debt bucket. If it's possible to avoid this arrangement, I'd really recommend it. It would be better to use two cards, one that you pay off in-full every month and another that you are paying down overtime, than to try to accurately split the payment each month, in my opinion. Grace to you, Blair > > Troy > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 no-thirst-software@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to no-thirst-software+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/no-thirst-software?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
