I am a Mint transplant and wanted to see if there is anything equivalent to Goals in Tiller.
I see that there is Savings Goal Tracker (Beta) but it does not allow multiple accounts against a single goal and I regularly used to group accounts so that I could track progress towards big goals like home down payments, emergency funds etc.
Trying to go down the path of Docs: Savings Goal & Debt Tracking Sheet requires me to be on top of my categories and budget whereas all I am after is a way to allocate select Accounts to a set of goals and see how I am tracking over time without having to worry about changes to my monthly budget. Maybe I am confused on what the tool is supposed to do since obviously the monthly performance to a budget will impact how close I am tracking to my goals similar to in Mint where I had the ability to provide dates and the platform being able to tell me how much money I should be putting aside to meet those goals and whether I was on track. As I understand it right now, I need to go account by account in the top right corner and check whether I have enough funds. I am trying to see if a solution exists where I can have a single snapshot of goals vs how much money is accrued into the accounts that I have marked against those goals.
If I understand what you are trying to do correctly here (I’m not a former Mint person, so not sure if I do), you might be able to use the Savings Budget to do this. You could create categories in the Savings Budget for certain goals and then allocate money each month to those goals.
I’m coming from mint here too and I’m looking for this as well. Maybe a use case will help clarify. Imagine my goal is retirement but I want to tie in my 401k, my IRA, and my Roth to one single goal. I’m not as concerned with tracking the individual transactions or amount going in but just the balance. This served as a nice gut check. The savings goal tracker is almost there but it’s missing the ability to assign multiple accounts to one goal.
Maybe I’m not understanding, but why not put those retirement accounts and their categories all in a Retirement group? If all you want to know is the aggregate balance, then you could see that for the group in the Balances sheet. It won’t have a goal there to compare it to, but it’ll give you the balances. I have a Retirement Accounts group and a College Savings Account group that serve these purposes. I can easily look at the Balances sheet and see how I’m doing on both. This wouldn’t work as well for short-term goals where you are less likely to have dedicated accounts, but that’s why I like the Savings Budget sheet for my workhorse monthly budget sheet.
That’s a good suggestion but it’s just trying to go back to something Mint had. As another example, I had a goal to pay off the house and that could be from accounts that are savings as well as investments. In the Balances sheet I like to see them that way (savings together and investments together), but for the house payoff I like to see them together and the % towards goal, etc. That’s because I know there’s more fluctuation/volatility in investments vs. savings, but they’re both going towards the same goal. Hope that makes sense.
Another use case could be saving for college. I have a 529 but let’s say I will be short and want to devote a savings account towards that goal too. I could change the grouping in balances, but I like seeing it different ways for different purposes.
I haven’t spent much time with the Savings Budget but it felt like a lot of setup, but maybe the answer lies there.
Aha. That’s helpful, and I think I get it now. I’m not sure the Savings Budget would work so well for that since it’s really designed for month-to-month budgeting, not accruing toward long-term goals involving investment accounts. Not sure there’s a Tiller sheet that does what you’re looking for or at least that I’ve found.
Last week, somebody put in a request for Tiller to support SoFi “Vaults” (Ally has “Buckets”) that allow you to put cash away toward a goal without opening distinct accounts to do so. The response was that it’s not in the data architecture at the moment, but it seems like that’s a system that could work to put cash accounts together with investment accounts in the same group. Alternatively, if you’re at a bank that has free, no-minimum savings accounts, I suppose you could open additional accounts into which you allocated cash for different goals. But that’s probably more than any of us what to keep track of.