On 21 September 2017 at 09:50, Phil Longstaff <phil.longst...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I find envelope budgeting good for some expense types but not as good for > others. For something like groceries or rent which are even over the year, > it is good. For something like a trip which has 0 expense for most months > but a large expense in 1 month, it is not as good because to make it work > out over the year, you need to budget the expense over 12 months. On the > other hand, if you think of the budget as "put money away for the upcoming > trip", then it does work out. Put $200 per month into savings and then when > it gets big enough, spend it on the trip. > > I've taken a more direct tack with envelope budgeting. For example, assuming the savings account Assets:Current Assets:Savings Account represents a real bank account, I have also created Assets:Current Assets:Savings Account:Travel, and have a monthly auto transaction that transfers money to the Travel subaccount from its parent account. This goes in my budget as a monthly transfer (stashing cash in an envelope) and then comes out in large chunks as its spent on trips. This also works well with other expense types where I have to make absolutely certain that an amount of money in my accounts is clearly "reserved" for a specific purpose, but where there isn't a regular monthly expense (e.g. property taxes, which are billed six times a year here, at apparently irregular intervals). In the accounts list, comparing the "Balance" to the "Total" columns shows the difference between what's in the real bank account vs. what's "unreserved" (or, not transferred to a subaccount). The only thing I haven't worked out is Present is to Total as ____ is to Balance. This would be helpful for distinguishing the two when future-dated transactions are in use. _______________________________________________ gnucash-user mailing list gnucash-user@gnucash.org https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user ----- Please remember to CC this list on all your replies. You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.