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buckets / application

Buckets Desktop Application
https://www.budgetwithbuckets.com
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Let me categorize a transfer #335

Open iffy opened 5 years ago

iffy commented 5 years ago

ability to categorize a transfer (if I buy big stuff like a new fridge or power tools I additionally track them in an off-budget account to have something like an inventory / list of assets)

Limezy commented 5 years ago

Nice idea to have such kind of list of assets as "off budget". Could you tell us more ? Do you take into account the fact that this fridge may have to be replaced in 5 years for example ?

fred777 commented 5 years ago

Yes, exactly - and it's also useful for tracking the lifetime of these assets.

(This ticket is a quote from an email of mine...)

Found this pretty useful in YNAB4. But there, we have a distinction between payee, category, and memo, and transfers are specified via payee. => some changes required for Buckets => another +1 for https://github.com/buckets/application/issues/101 ;-)

Limezy commented 5 years ago

Yeah, I'm really waiting for the #101 too ! About the asset as "off budget", it's quite tempting in theory, but were you really using them on YNAB4 ? I mean was your asset list really updated on a regular basis and up to date ?

fred777 commented 5 years ago

Good point.... I'm using YNAB4 since 2014 and whenever there was a transaction related to a big purchase, I declared it as a transfer to the assets-offbudget-account (I have two of them - clothes and household-contents). And I have another one for deposits (silver coins, etc.). So yes: they are up-to-date. This wasn't much effort because I had to categorize these transactions anyways and YNAB4 as a nice auto-complete feature for payee and category....

metabubble commented 4 years ago

I use off-budget accounts for investments accounts. With Ynab4, I used to put a transfer with a category. Category was "Investment", so I'd have budgeted for investing and I'd have the cashflow mirror the reality.

With buckets I need to put a transaction from my bucket "Investment" and then I have to add an unspecified inflow in my Off-Budget account.

I guess this is not an issue at the moment since transfer transactions aren't linked...

drbawb commented 3 years ago

Just wanted to echo the above comment from metabubble, I use off budget transfers primarily for the exact same thing. (In fact, coming from YNAB, I was very surprised that a transfer off-budget did not require a category.) The way I see it if money is leaving the budget, it needs to be accounted for by that budget. As an example:

Now I don't want the investment account on-budget, thought I think that would solve this issue, because my investments are not liquid. (I don't think the grocery store would be happy if I tried to pay w/ shares of stock.) However I do like having the investment account in my budgeting software: since it's a convenient place to chart the performance, record statements, etc.

Also this same feature was very useful for paying off long-standing loans. My "loan payment" was a monthly budget item, and I tracked my progress (interest, principal, etc.) in an off-budget account representing that loan. Payments were therefore just "transfers" between the two accounts.

diktomat commented 2 years ago

I just imported few years of nYNAB and noticed the same: I have my investment account as tracking, and my savings plan is in YNAB as recurring transfer to this account, categorized as "Investment" in Checking and with payee "Transfer: Checking" in the investment account. Buckets imported all these transactions as Transfers. So one would expect my Investment category to be overfull, but actually it holds only the amount of a single month.

If I manually categorize the transactions as "Investment" (only in the checking account), the Investment category goes red, even though there should be more than enough money in it.