Introducing the Tiller Savings Goal Tracker

[heather]

Originally published at: Introducing The Tiller Savings Goal Tracker  - Tiller

Ever wonder how your savings goals track against your real-world account balances?

Many neo-banks offer the option to set up goals, funds, or buckets within their apps. However, these are typically disconnected from your accounts at other banks, where you’ve also been growing savings for a rainy day, vacation, down payment, or retirement.

Today, we’re excited to release the Savings Goal Tracker template for Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel.

The Savings Goal Tracker is simple to set up and easy to understand. It allows you to set specific goals and decide which accounts are funding those goals.

Since Tiller can pull all your balances into one easy-to-find and consistently organized place, you can see all your goals at a glance and always know how far you have left to go until you achieve each one.

Goals are organized by account and reflect the latest balance Tiller automatically pulls in, mapped to your real-world account balances.

When you’ve fully funded one goal, it’ll show your progress toward funding the next goal assigned to that specific account.

You can set and customize the ranking for each goal to see the order in which they should be funded.

Tracking savings can be challenging, but focusing on real-world balances eases the pressure of budgeting. With the Savings Goal Tracker, you can manage goals ranging from holiday spending to retirement planning, all in one place.

To start using the Savings Goal Tracker, simply click “Add & Manage Templates” in the Tiller Money Feeds sidebar.

If you have questions or run into issues, check out the help article or reach out to the Tiller Support team for help. You can also share feedback and ask questions here in the Tiller Community

[david]

Hi Heather,

Thank you for the information about Tiller Savings Goal Tracker. It may be a perfect tool that I can track multiple CDs and other savings.

I’ll check it out and get it today.

Thanks,

David

[nicholasewhaley]

Love it, adding this now! time to track for this house down payment!!

[charlotte]

Nice idea, but I really want to attach multiple accounts to the same goal, like retirement where I have a 401k, rollover, and roth that should all be counted. Hopefully a V2 will do this!

[romeroag]

100% need the ability to attach multiple accounts to a single goal. Exact same issue as described in post, multiple retirement accounts need to tie to single retirement goal.

[cbra]

I was hoping this would help tie together multiple accounts to one goal as well! I have a sheet that does a lot of heavy lifting to pull in totals of accounts per “group” I assign them- retirement, emergency fund, car fund, etc. With the Savings Budget community tool, I make a monthly effort to “true up” what I have in savings vs the actual totals of the account balances. The difference just goes to a single “savings” line.

I think a future build of this would be really helpful in automating my monthly process if I can flag which accounts go to a consolidated savings goal.

[nicholasewhaley]

I am able to track my savings goals for Down Pmt and Emergency fund which come from one account (yay).

Other people’s points here about having multiple accounts flowing towards one goal does hold true. This is a great tool so far, but you will have to add that functionality at some point. I am only 25 years old and have 4 Different retirement related accounts that lump up to my retirement goal. i can only imagine what others have who have been in the workforce for 20-40yrs.

[jdinning]

I am a bit confused about how this works. For example, if I have a checking account with $25,000 in it, and I use that account for many things such as paying bills, mortgage, etc. Now I want to assign some portion of that account to a savings goal (e.g., a $10,000 car purchase fund) where I have $1,000 allocated to that goal today and plan to allocate $500 per month going forward. How do I tell the report that I have $1000 allocated so far and how does the report know when I have saved $500 each month and update my progress? Thanks!

[cometgrrl]

I have two accounts with the name “savings” and only one shows in the account drop down for savings goals. Unfortunately, it’s not the account I want to use.

Is there a way to rename my accounts?

[heather]

Welcome, @cbra,

Thanks for the feedback here, folks! I’d recommend adding feature requests for improvements you’d love to see to this Savings Goal Tracker.

While you definitely can use this for tracking retirement and other longer term goals, it’s best used for shorter term/small goals because of the limitation with only being able to track with one account per goal. There are other retirement specific tracking solutions here in the Community for tracking these bigger goals that need to factor in multiple accounts and other variables. Our goal was to keep this really simple. The template becomes really complex (and more confusing to use/setup) when you start trying to assign multiple accounts to a single goal or allocating percentages of an account to partially fund multiple goals.

@jdinning thanks for your questions. It’s meant to be used with an actual account that’s just for saving, not every day use. There isn’t a way to allocate some portion of an account to a specific goal and another portion to a different goal or every day use.

I highly recommend opening an actual savings account and move your savings to that account rather than leaving it in your checking account. There are some great high interest rate savings options out there from SoFi, Capital One, Amex and others. Your money could be making money for you and there for goals when you’re ready to spending it!

One tip for working within the waterfall approach is to rank your least expensive goals lower than more expensive goals so you can see that those are fully funded and then the % of funding you have for the bigger goals. The ranking is within each account and can be fractional. E.g. three goals for the “AMEX SAVINGS” might be ranked 1.1, 1.2, and 1.3.

Welcome, @cometgrrl

If you go into the hidden columns out right in the Savings Goal sheet and change cell Q3 from J to F you’ll be able to differentiate between the accounts by last four digits and last four of a unique account ID assigned by Tiller’s systems. You can unhide those columns by clicking the small black triangle at the right of column Q’s edge.

[yossiea]

It would be nice to have the institution after the account name. I have several accounts called “Checking” so I’d need a way to distinguish amongst them.

[heather]

I don’t have a quick solve for that one @yossiea - I’d recommend nicknaming them on the Console so they’re a bit more unique. When you rename on the Console the existing data in your spreadsheet won’t updates, but the new entries will use the new name. You’d need to clean up any references to past account names (e.g. Accounts sheet, Savings Goal, Debt Payoff) by reselecting the account from the dropdown with it’s new name.

[yossiea]

Figured that would require manual work.
One other thing I noticed while doing this is that if I have two goals with the same name from two accounts, the dashboard will use the first goal for the total amount.

[zedd34]

I installed the template, should it be showing blank like this?

[Kyle_C]

This is very cool. Always appreciate these free templates and appreciate the work that goes into them!

I think this is related to some of the feedback, but in lieu of a feature request, is there an easy way to tweak something to get it to group by Goal instead of Account? If I’m saving for a downpayment, I might be using multiple savings accounts and brokerage/mutual funds for one “goal”, so this hopefully simple tweak would make the view much more intuitive in my opinion to see all accounts adding to a single goal.

[nicholasewhaley]

Get $25k out of your checking and open a savings… whack to have that much in savings. Open high yield savings for sure.

[heather]

@yossiea I think it expects to have a Rank set and it looks like you haven’t set any. I don’t know how it will behave if there is no Rank number set. But thanks for the note that duplicate goal names can cause unexpected results as well.

@zedd34 - yes it is intentionally bank because you have to fill out the section of light green under where it says “Set Up Your Savings Goals”

[yossiea]

I tried it with a rank set as well to see if it changes anything but I get the same results in the table as yesterday.

[tristan.freeman82]

When I open the dropdown to select a funding account, I only see 3 but have many more that should be available. How do I expand the list to show all accounts?

[heather]

If your accounts have the same name it will only show one instance, be sure to nickname your accounts on the Console then fill your sheet with the new names using Tiller Money Feeds. Or you can refer to this post for more info on a small change to you can make to show all accounts that have the same name. Introducing the Tiller Savings Goal Tracker - #10 by heather

If that doesn’t help, I’d recommend reaching out to our support team via the chat window in the lower right corner of the Console at https://my.tillerhq.com/