Transfer surplus funds to savings account

[pringle]

#4928

Okay, this might sound confusing, but hear me out.

While it’s very powerful to be able to see what your finances are likely to look like in the coming months and years, the further out you get, the more unrealistic the figure is. Part of this reason is that income and costs change. We can’t get around that, I know. However, the other part of that is that unexpected things come up.

Having one unexpected thing every couple of months quickly eats away at funds you might be expecting to have in your account next year. This can then cloud how the regular finances are looking.

My work around this is to transfer what ever funds I have left at the end of each month into a savings account. It makes sense financially, of course, but it clears the canvas each month too. The difficulty in this is that, if something changes during the month, I have to edit ‘transfer to savings’ entry. If something changes in the long term, I have to edit every ‘transfer to savings’ entry.

TLDR:

So, a nice to have feature would be to set a transfer transaction to transfer “whatever’s left” into a specified account. A spin off of this could to to “pay whatever’s outstanding” to another account too (like a credit card).

I understand the difficulties this may present in running calculations every time there’s an adjustment though. The workload on the servers may increase significantly as each month’s figures would have to be recalculated in turn once an adjustment is made.

I’d be interested to hear your thoughts.

[Eric Poulin]

#4929

The way I usually handle this is to create a “Miscellaneous” entry each month for the potential variance or for unexpected things. I usually set to this to $50-$100, which ends up being pretty accurate over time.
We have begun design investigation into a redesign of the main browser version of the app and part of that will be a major improvement to the way categories work, including what you’re suggesting – an envelop system or variant of that where excess budget funds can go towards the next month’s budget or into a “slush fund” of some type.

[Author]

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