I’d like to track my savings in my monthly budget, but I’m not sure how to set up the categories. I have one savings account where part of my paycheck is automatically deposited, so the money that goes there is technically categorized as income. Do I make a category for “savings income” to track the income and then create another category to hold that income as “savings expense” so it doesn’t get lumped into my income calculations and get inadvertently spent?
Also, how do I track transfers from my checking account to my savings account?
You are correct in marking the part of your paycheck that goes into your savings account as income, otherwise the income amount in your budget won’t reflect your total income.
The transfers between your checking and savings account are simply categorized as account transfers, so they don’t generally go through an expense category.
Great questions. If the money is automatically being deposited into your savings account when you get paid AND you have that savings account also connected to Tiller - so you see the + transaction for the savings account for the auto-deposit to savings - then you’d likely want to use an income category marked as “hide” on the Categories sheet. That way it doesn’t show up as part of your monthly cash flow budget and available for spend. Since you’re not seeing the negative debit transaction of money leaving your checking account I think you’re fine with not having a separate expense category to “hold” the savings.
Let me know if that doesn’t make sense or fit your workflow.
Here’s more on the transfer category @Kathryn mentioned:
Hey @heather, speaking of tracking savings in the foundation template… is it really at all possible to do this well/accurately?
I’ve double and triple checked that I’ve applied all my categories appropriately, and I’m pretty sure I have. In the foundation template, you can see that in January I’ve budgeted a certain amount of savings, but have over-saved. (This is only really because I’m paid bi-weekly and had 3 paychecks in January.) Yet, my over-savings appears as over-spending.
Am I doing something wrong, you think? Or is this spreadsheet just not set up the way I’m hoping it is to track savings this way?
PS: I love how savings works in the budget monthly template, including the money bag emojis, though I don’t have a fine appreciation for the rollover features of that template and the complexities involved. For a long time, I have applied a loose envelope / zero-sum budgeting philosophy where most but not every single cent is applied to my budget. This is why I’ve opted for using the Foundation with the monthly and yearly budget sheets.
You’re right the over-savings would show as overspending in the Foundation template because there isn’t a “savings” category type, just income/expense/transfer - so it doesn’t understand that the over savings is a good thing.
It wasn’t built to gracefully handle the over-savings the way the Tiller Budget with Rollovers was, but I agree moving from that template to a simpler solution was the right choice.
The best recommendation I can make so it doesn’t show as an overspending is to just increase the budget amount each month for those categories to reflect the actuals so the remaining is $0.
