Categorizing and accounting for upcoming months with large, planned expenditures

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First, hello. I’m new here so be gentle. LOL.

So we use a 50/30/20 budget (roughly) but with Tiller, we use quite a few categories. It just seems best that way.

I’m getting the hang of it but this year, we have some months in which we’ll have large, planned expenditures. We’re planning on roof and solar upgrades. We intend to pay for this from savings, savings which are linked in Tiller money feeds.

All I can come up with at the moment is to enter them into the categories, in the month they are planned to spend. Then in that same month, show “income” which is actually just a transfer from our Savings Account. However, everything I’ve read to date and my gut says no, that is a transfer not income. Is the only solution that in those months, we’ll be over budget in that month, and likely for the year as we won’t have been saving up in a focused, directed way.

I’d like to effectively account for those future expenditures in our budget and am looking for ideas on how to best do this.

Thanks!

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We are retired, so our situation is a little bit different.

We have “income” that comes from investments and pensions. We have “transfers” that move money from IRA and investment accounts to the checking account to help pay our monthly budgeted expenses. Therefore, our expenses are always greater than our income. We track what we are spending in our monthly budgeted categories and don’t worry about the annual totals that show our expenses exceeded our income. As long as our expenses and budget are close, we know we are on track.

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You could create a category just for ‘Home improvement’ or ‘Roof Replacement’ and not allocate any budget to it so it since the funds won’t be coming from your normal income stream. If your reports get out of wack with these big expenditures, you might even mark the categories as hidden so they don’t show up in the reports.

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