> A question about the allocation of income. If you have two salaries > you would like to track as income buckets and then allocate money from > each of those to certain expense buckets, how can the automatic > allocation be used effectively? My wife and I have separate checking > accounts. We divide up our bills so that she is paying all of some > things I am paying all of others. Then we have buckets that we each > contribute money to from a budgeting perspective. For example our > 'Automobile: Gasoline' bucket we budget $400. My wife $200 and me > $200 monthly. In this case, we would allocate $200 from her income > bucket and $200 from my income bucket. I see no way for the automated > allocation to address this... unless I am missing something. The only > way I could see for this to work is to be able to dictate for a given > bucket the percentage of the spending plan and which income bucket to > get it from. It seems to me that the automated allocation pulls from > one account until its gone then pulls from the next income bucket > (assuming they are part of the combined income). > > I assume we could open a joint checking and pool our income and this > would not be an issue, but that is not how we prefer to operate. Does > anyone have any suggestions or do anything like my wife and I are > doing?
If you're both pulling from the same bucket, and you're allocating all your income, it shouldn't matter which salary bucket filled it, and to which percentage - the bucket just needs to be filled. If you don't allocate all of your income, you could allocate the regular way, and then flow the appropriate portion of the "leftovers" to the bucket that was drained first. > Another question around allocation. If you have some expense buckets > set up for the first half of a month and some for the second. What is > the intended method to allocate each half of the month since the > allocation approach will only do one half at a time. Is it intended > to do the first half... save the allocation... then come back in and > do the second half and save the allocation again? This isn't very > clear to me how this is intended to work. Being paid on a monthly > basis, I would like to have all the expense buckets allocated at the > beginning of the month so that I know how much income is left > available. I'm a monthly allocator too. There's a drop-down list on the Allocate dialog box for how to allocate, and you want to choose the timing for the second half of the month. > Lastly, I saw a post where it was suggested that when allocating > income to the expense buckets each month, the remaining or overspent > balance should not be considered and that the planned allocation > should be the same each month. My question would be why would you > want to ignore the surplus'. It seems to me the fiscally responsible > approach would be to only allocate enough to meet the monthly plan and > take the "extra" (the amount left in the bucket that wasn't spent) and > put it in savings or contribute it to paying off debt. Just curious. I think most agree that a Spending Plan should be flexible, and it may take some time to get it right, or your priorities will change. There's no problem with changing your plan, and there certainly isn't anything wrong with flowing any surplus into Savings. Sounds like the Pipes feature that is planned will work well for you (this feature automatically flows any surplus at the end of the month to a different bucket of your choosing, like "Savings"). //Drew --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
