On May 1, 2009, at 11:54 AM, Druzyne wrote: > Handling savings with the Bucket system seems to be a thorny issue, as > there seems to be a few different camps of thought for how to best > make sense of savings. I will make my allegiance clear upfront, by > saying I am a user that prefers to only use buckets for designating > money I plan to spend. I therefore like to have a Savings bucket as > part of my Spending Plan, and quickly "spending" the money so that it > is no longer available for other buckets. It really helps my saving > goals by giving myself less to work with. > Hi Drew,
I don't think it's that "thorny" at all. The problem comes in when people try to use buckets to manage savings balances instead of just managing the cash flow to savings. By nature, the bucket (envelope) system is designed to set aside money so you don't spend what you don't have. This includes savings because you should be allocating part of your paycheck to savings each time and then transferring (spending) that money to your Savings account. If you see this as a way to take part of your income and make sure it gets to savings then this is very straightforward. > Currently, this spending on savings is accomplished by attaching a > savings bucket to transfers. This means there has to be a concrete > movement of money between accounts to have the Savings bucket > depleted, as pseudo-transfers won't reconcile with the bank. It seems > silly to me to create a bunch of transfers with my bank in order to > get my bucket amounts where I want them. Moreover, there seems to be a > lot of confusion as to how to correctly apply a bucket to a transfer. > The basic goal of this process is to reduce the amount of money > available in buckets for spending, so it would be nice to accomplish > this without involving the banks. > I'm not sure why it gets confusing but it does. If you think of your transfer to savings in the same way as your spending at a store then there is really no difference between assigning the withdrawal from your checking account to your savings any different than a withdrawal to buy groceries at your supermarket. > The best metaphor I can come up with is a specialized Savings bucket > that works a lot like a Trash bin for bucket money. Some of your > paycheck can be allocated to it, and if other bucket amounts seem > higher than what you actually want to spend, you can "trim the fat" > and flow it to this bucket. Then, as often as you want, you just empty > the bucket, and the money isn't there to spend or allocate anymore. If > some sort of log kept track of these purges, and possibly allowed you > to undo them, that would be amazing! > > I'm simply throwing this out there as an idea, for others to kick > around. If anyone has a strategy for reducing bucket amounts without > too much transfer or splitting wizardry, please let me know! The ability to take leftover cash in a bucket and flow it to a different selected bucket is coming. This will let you assign pipes to your buckets so you can tell MoneyWell where to send money remaining at the end of a month. Some buckets may send cash to savings, others to debt reduction, and others may just keep their money. Pipes have been on the future feature list since 1.0 and I'm really excited to see how people use them. 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
