I just recently switched over to the saving budget template from the old envelope budgeting template which I have used in some form for several years. And I’m still struggling to make it work exactly as I would like.
My current quandary is in regards to surplus or short income. I am paid hourly, and sometimes do side work, so my income is budgeted based on the minimum expected. However, when I earn more than that, which theoretically is most months, I need a simple way of dealing with it.
In the envelope model I would simply set the income categories to rollover to the emergency fund or slush fund depending on how I was doing over all, so all my overtime, side hustles, or bonuses would automatically would pad the months I didn’t work as many hours. By the end of the year I would have a decent envelope to spend on Christmas, or vacation, or whatever.
In the new savings budget I’m not sure how to proceed. To begin with it appears that I have to set each income category as a savings ‘track’, to even see the rollover. But then I have no way of dispersing that rollover. I don’t want to have to enter manual transactions each month to disperse that surplus, or to make up the shortfall from my emergency fund. Further, if I did use manual transactions I would throw a wrench in my income tracking as to look at “income” in the category tracker would then include negative transactions, thus failing to accurately report my earnings over any given period.
Does anyone have any suggestions as to how to deal with this problem?
I am not adverse to writing a little code, but I’d rather not as I tend to forget how it works in the months between writing and modifying.
Thanks!
Have you tried the Modifying a Category Savings workflow?
I think you’ve got everything setup properly (with the categories set to track and the budgets set at the minimum). I recommend that at the end of the month you just enter a negative savings adjustment into the salary category and then positive savings adjustments to redistribute that into categories you want to use it in. This is essentially the same thing that was happening with the automated “rollover-to” in the old budget.
The TCS add-on will make the change in the Budget History sheet and no “manual transactions” are required.
Or you can just leave the surplus in your growing salary category until you’re ready to spend it.
Good luck.