Best way to track average monthly budget in light of many annual items paid once/year?

Hello and welcome @egsink!

There’s a solution that aims to help with this called Savings Budget. This sheet is similar to the Monthly Budget sheet. The best thing to do is go to that link and watch the video that @randy put together to get a sense of how to use it.

But a quick explanation is that you would download this sheet into your foundations template solution. Then, on the Categories sheet, set the Track column to Savings for those expenses that you budget for monthly, but do not pay monthly.

Then you just don’t make any purchases toward those categories until it’s time for the actual payments. The Savings Budget sheet will keep track of the money you budgeted toward the category for the prior months, but didn’t spend. That balance will be available for each subsequent month, increasing the “amount available”. Then, when it’s time to pay said bill, there is enough in the Savings column to cover it and keep the red lines from appearing.

They will still appear on other sheets, like Monthly Budget, but this sheet will kind of replace that one anyway.

2 Likes