Expenses vs. Savings in the Savings Budget

Google Sheets
1

Hi all! New Tiller user here and I’m super happy thus far. I’ve read everything I can find on using the savings budget and do not think I’ve found a good solution for this topic, but if I’ve missed it sorry about that!

Overall question: Is there a way in the savings budget for the available column to show what is left of your budget vs. monthly actuals (budget - actuals) instead of including the savings amounts [(savings + budgeted) - actuals)].

  • I know the foundations sheet monthly budget will do this for me, but the issue is that some of my budget relies on sinking funds and those categories benefit from having the savings depicted in the budget sheet.

Example:

i have (1) a goal fund for my down payment savings, and (2) a sinking fund for subscriptions that recur on an annual basis. As per prior posts I read, both should be categorized as expenses, and then I chose to Track them as savings.

For (1), I start off with X amount of dollars, and add Y every month. X + number of months*Y will always be in the savings/rollover category until I actually use the funds towards a downpayment.

For (2), I added up the total cost of all my annual subscriptions and divided it by 12, and fund it with that much each month - i.e. a sinking fund for annual subscriptions all lumped together. For the first few months I needed to make sure I “seeded” this fund with enough to cover any subscriptions that do not have a full year of time until they are due. Each month some subscription will be charged to this, so money will come and go every month and the overall balance that rolls over each month will be much smaller than for (1)

Either way, I do not want to use ANY of the funds in (1) or (2) for other categories of my budget since if I take from there it will under fund future needs.

I like seeing these un the savings budget (as well as the savings/debt) sheet, but dont want their funds to be counted in the total available.

Any thoughts?

1 Like
2

just bumping this, any ideas? Thanks all!

3

I am looking for this answer too. I use sinking funds in both ways you listed and would like to see if Tiller has a more automated version than me manually plugging it in.

4

Sorry for missing this @avweipert & @allison91.

I think the easiest way to have that view on Available is to run the Monthly Budget in parallel with the Savings Budget. Other than a modest performance hit, these budgets are compatible and can run concurrently.

If you want to remove the Savings contribution from the Available column, you would do this by removing the contribution from the Balance column (AQ) from the formula in AR10.