Funds for month starting balance?

[ludaavics]

Is there a way to input a starting balance for the available funds? For instance, input a negative input balance, so I can have a "clean" starting point for a budget without having to physically empty out the budget accounts.

[polarmutex]

not right now, do you want a way to override a budget balance?

[ludaavics]

I basically want to budget $X/month without having the current balance on my account show up as available funds. I think one way to do that would be a one time substraction of starting assets in budget accounts from budget balance; but I'm open to other ideas!

On Sat, May 21, 2022, 10:23 PolarMutex @.***> wrote:

not right now, do you want a way to override a budget balance?

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[polarmutex]

not 100% sure, i understand

can you provide a simple example? thanks

[Tumetsu]

I'd like probably similar feature as @ludaavics which would be a possibility to decouple monthly budget's starting balance from an asset account.

For example in my real checking account I have lets say 4000€ while every month my salary is lets say 2500€. I'd like to budget that 2500€ to the next month, not the whole balance of the checking account which is 4000€.

So one potential way to solve this would be to add possibility configure something like this:

2022-06-01 custom "envelope" "monthly-budget" 2500

Which would then show up in the GUI for in the "To be budgeted for month" table.

This way I wouldn't need to create separate budgeting asset to my beancount which wouldn't reflect my real bank accounts. This way I would also easily see in the UI how much money I still have to be budgeted for the next month. Hope that makes sense.

However, I'm open for alternative suggestions on how to handle the envelope budgeting in this kind of situation.

[egetzner]

I think the extension here follows the same approach as other zero-based budgeting tools (such as YNAB), which is to only budget money you actually have and to give every dollar a job. When you start your budget, you have a certain balance in your checking account (4000 in your example). If you assign all of those 4000€, your "to be budgeted" amount should be 0 until the next payday. The next month/payday, you'll actually have the 2500 € to be budgeted (assuming you don't overspend).

If this is just about the initial assignment, you could just create a bucket for general savings / buffer and assign 1500, which would leave you with 2500 "to be budgeted" exactly.

I think the big advantage of the way it works right now is your budget is coupled to your actual income. This means if your income increases, you can budget more (even if it's just in a savings bucket), and if decreases, you'll notice it immediately rather than budgeting with you "projected" amount.

[Tumetsu]

Hmm, I guess that makes sense and using a savings bucket probably solves my problem well enough since in my case the problem is only the initial assignment. Thanks.