I’ve pretty much got Tiller where I need it. I’m still playing around with various templates and reports but I think the basics are in place.
My situation is that I’m retired and really don’t have much income. I’m using my retirement savings to fund each month. The approach I’m using is to create another category I’m calling ALLOCATION. I’ve manually entered this:
Each month I intend to create an entry like this in the register so the monthly reports will have more of a spending target than an actual income. It doesn’t represent real money movement, just a metric for my monthly budget.
Is this how others do it? Is it an OK workflow? Is there a best practice I should look at?
I’m in a similar situation and I do a “Transfer Out” (Type = Transfer) of my savings and retirement accounts, and on the other side I do a “Savings Drawdown” (Type = Income) into my banking accounts to cover my monthly expenses.
I would consider using a Category Group named something like Income - Tax Free for the ALLOCATION category
(and maybe categories for cost basis proceeds, cashback rewards, etc.)
And then use the Income group for real taxable income.
You may not have “much income”, but this would be a way to still separately account for taxable vs budget income.
Also, consider renaming the Memo column to Note, as the Tiller system recognizes/uses the Note column (e.g. manual/split transaction), unless you are specifically attempting to avoid that shared usage.
Are people tracking their stock purchases and sales in Tiller? I have my balances but none of the tranactions. I think of my bank accounts as part of my budget but my investment/retirement accounts as something separate that I refill my bank accounts from.
I can see I have a ton to lean about Tiller’s possibilities. That’s a good thing.
For now, I’m going to remove the ALLOCATION transaction. This turns my planned and actual cashflows negative but it kind of makes sense to me. I plan to spend $5000 (shows up as -$5000 in planned cash flow).
I’ll come back and look at this to see if it is working as expected.
Tiller doesn’t currently support investment holdings. Here is a somewhat recent post from Tiller regarding that capability:
But, stock sales and purchases are visible at some level with bank accounts and then it might be possible to categorize transactions to account for them. I mostly do what makes sense for me from a tax planning perspective, and not performance related.
For me, being in-retirement, I had the opposite need of tracking investments. I use Empower Personal Dashboard (formerly Personal Capital) for investment and tracking. Once I retired and on a fixed income, I needed a great budgeting and tracking tool. Tiller met all my needs in this way. I keep the two tools separate and don’t plan to bring in my investment data as Empower handles that quite well for me.
“More” for me would be educational webinars and a user forum category “in-retirement” for discussing budgeting strategies, tips, Q&A, etc… Tiller the tool is only one aspect of budgeting and tracking income and expenses for me. I would like to dialog with other users on what they have learned about budgeting, what categories they have found to be really needed and how detailed (low level) they track them at , what tips other retired users have for living on an fixed income, and finally a combined Q&A for using both the tool and processes around budgeting.
I also use some other tools (almost a duplication between Simply Safe Dividends and Snowball-Analytics), would like however Tiller to simply load investment account balances (a blend of qualified and non-qualified accounts at both Schwab and Tastytrade). Tiller’s data connection vendor seems to have major problems with Tastytrade, FWIW.
It is nice to have investment balances for the Balance and Net Worth sheets, but not have all the investment transactions imported. One option is to add the balances as manual accounts and update balances periodically. If you have a lot of accounts like I do, I created a workflow and template that you could check out.
Our “Planned Cashflow” is always negative as we are drawing down retirement account funds to supplement our life these days and those funds are not “new income”, they are simply transfers between accounts.
Our budgeted income comes from “new income” like pension/social security deposits, cash investment dividends, etc. The cash transfers to keep the checking account in a positive position are not part of the budget and I just use the “Transfer” category for that money movement.
Our budgeted expenses are our living expenses and they are greater than our income every month. However, as long as we are meeting our budgeted income objectives (for “new income”) and spending below our budgeted expenses, everything is ok. If we miss a monthly budget target, we look at why that happened and decide what/if anything we need to adjust.
We set a yearly budget total, subtract our projected “new income”, and then have a feel for what the draw against the retirement needs to be and when those draws need to happen. Some months are much more expensive than other months as we have a lot of once/year and twice/year bills.
Tiller has been great for helping us manage our retirement spending. My best recommendation is to keep the categories and transfers as simple as possible. The simpler it is, the more likely you will be to keep up with it.
: TRUE (my reconciled column)