Apologies if this has been asked before. I searched but couldn’t find an answer.
I ended up with a some unplanned additional income this month and wanted to use a portion of it to offset budget overages in 2 categories. In the top right, I have “Adjust +/- modifies” set to Savings. I subtracted" $100 from that income category and “+'d” $75 to one budget category and $25 to another budget category, then launched Tiller Community Solutions > Tools > Savings Budget and clicked Update Savings Budget. So far, so good. The additional funds were added to the appropriate category budgets and my Budget Journal logged the changes.
Here’s my question: the original amount of additional income didn’t change. It still shows the same amount it did before I subtracted the $100. Did I miss a step or was it a mistake to move funds from Income to budget categories instead of making the adjustments between budget categories as the YouTube video demonstrates? It seems like there ought to be a way to allocate unplanned income towards spending categories.
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If I’m understanding you correctly, then I think the issue may be because you didn’t have anything in Savings for the Income categories. If you +/- Savings, then it’ll only take it out of Savings. The Savings Budget sheet doesn’t have to be reconciled, so you can add to Savings without it coming out of Savings anywhere else. What I would do is change it to +/- Budget and just add the $75 and $25 to the budgets for the spending categories. That ought to even out the spending and income categories. Next month, the excess unspent budget will rollover to savings in the spending categories. Hope that makes sense.
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Thanks, @dmetiller. I undid what I’d done before and changed it to +/- Budget as you suggested. That worked. However, no balances changed in Available Income. I can’t figure out why the Income section of the sheet allows Adjust +/- but doesn’t track them. January’s Available Income did not transfer to February. Do I have to manually add that to Savings for February so those funds roll over and are available for me to use? That’s easy to do, but it seems odd that it doesn’t do it for me. Am I missing something (again?)
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Income doesn’t rollover. Only unspent budget rolls over. So, you need to budget any additional income, and then when you don’t spend it, it will rollover to the next month. When I reconcile my Savings Budget sheet for each month, I am looking to make sure that actual income equals budgeted expenses. If any of those budgeted expenses don’t become actual expenses, then I’ll have money rollover into savings for the pertinent categories.
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Got it. I’ll create a “Rainy Day” budget category and use it to stash any periodic additional income (birthday money, etc.) that is in excess of my total budget for the month. In months that I have spending that exceeds a budget category I’ll reallocate a portion of the Rainy Day budget to the one that has the shortage.
Thanks again! I really appreciate your help.
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Exactly. I have a few different savings categories that I use precisely as you describe. If I ever wanted to spend the savings, I’d use +/- Savings to move the savings from the savings category to the spend category where I was going to spend the money.
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@dmetiller I suspect I’ll end up with more than one “slush fund,” too!
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