Credit card payments/balances savings budget

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1

Hello,

I’ve been familarizing myself with Tiller for the past year plus. I’m a former Mvelopes user. In the meantime I’ve also been using Faithfi. Tiller, I know, will be a much more powerful/simple way to handle my finances overall and I’d like to make the move permanent.

The thing that is holding me back is not fully understanding how to deal with credit cards.

I used Mvelopes for nearly 20 years. They had issues, but i didn’t have a lot of extra work to put money into my savings envelopes.

I put nearly everything on a credit card. We use the cash rewards for vacations and I have no plans to not use the credit card. We never carry a balance forward and I use the current month’s income to budget for next month.

I have been using the Savings Budget template and I think I have the hang of the regular categories now. What I was hoping would work that is not is the following:

  1. When I have a charge (say $10 to starbucks on my Citi card) it comes off of the avaiable “savings” bugdet page category labeled coffee.

What I would LIKE to happen is a positive amount ($10) go into my “Citi card” transfer category, so that I know that money is set aside and will be paid off when I pay off the bill.

However, that is NOT happening…I have to manually change the balance on those transfer categories. So I think I understand how the transfer works when I make a payement…I assign the bank withdrawal and the credit card payment to that transfer folder and it evens out…So that aspect works well.

I’ve searched the topics, but I’m nto sure anyone is doing anything like this. I did download the ultimate envelope sheet, but I could never figure out how to adjust my envelopes. It was too complicated.

I have many many categories…some of those categories stay negative for a month or so while I wait to be reimbursed. I mentally ignore those categories because I have enough money in my checking account or savings to cover it. We have two main checking accounts we use for bills and a couple of savings and move money around from time to time but I don’t have one specific bank account set for any specific expense categories and would likewise not want to change that.

Does anyone have a work around for managing credit card transactions so that I always have money “allocated” for the charges I have made and I dont’ have to do it manually every time a transaction is made? I am a large blended family with several teens, so I run probably 150 transaction or more on any given month. I need something to simplify this process.

Thanks for any insight!

2

Hmm. I’m not entirely clear on the question here. Like you (and many of us these days), I use credit cards for just about every purchase. Like you, I pay off my balances every month. So for me, the credit card part of all of this is just a trivial pass through. It’s the underlying transactions that I care about. Now, I do use the Credit Card Settings sheet to keep track of my pending balances on my cards (just to make sure that I move any cash around if I need to in order to pay the bills), but I think you’re asking for something different but I don’t quite understand what it is.

3

I’ve only used Tiller since December, but it sounds as though using Tags and the Tags Report might give you the functionality you want, both for keeping up with credit card charges and your reimbursable expenses.

I use a category of Reimbursable for both the expense and the repayment of the reimbursable expense, but I have them only occasionally. If I understand your dilemma, it sounds like using Tags would would work for you. For example, tag the expense “dinner,reimbursable” (no comma.) or simply “dinner.” Then you could filter the Tags Report to view your totals.

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4

I think what you’re saying is that you want to predict the balance of your credit card so you know what you owe? Is that correct? E.g. as the charges accrue, what am I going to be on the hook for?

If that’s the case, then you should just review the Balances sheet for the actual balance of the account, there isn’t a way to automate this in the transactions and savings budget, which are completely independent of the balances for accounts.

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5

I do like the Credit Card Settings sheet that I referenced above for this. It helps divide credit card balances between those due on a statement that has closed and those still pending for a future statement. Indirectly, it’s also a useful sheet for crosschecking that all of your credit card transactions are correctly downloading (by seeing if the statement amount in the sheet matches the actual credit card statement).

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