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Irregular expenses: Budget, Savings Goal, or other?

Thomas Hajicek

I'm trying to figure out the best way to manage and track irregular expenses such as gifts, clothing purchases, vacations, property taxes etc. I want to set a monthly budget for them and "build up" a balance of money to spend later because I don't know when and how much I will spend.

Savings goal seems like a good option to add to my monthly budget and build funds, but when it comes to actually spending money, I can't apply an expense to the savings goal balance.

Rolling over the unused budget each month also seems good because I can then apply the expense to the expense category, but when I get to the end of the year, I can't roll over the budget surplus into the next year. This is especially bad for things like my property taxes that are due in January. I don't want the budget I've saved all year to disappear on January 1st and then my tax payment blows up my budget in the first month.

It seems like this should be a common issue that many people have and Quicken should have built into their software. Maybe I'm just not using the existing tools correctly. If anyone has any suggestions on how to handle these kinds of expenses I would appreciate your help.

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Comments

mshiggins

When you are ready to spend funds accumulated in a savings goal, transfer the money from the savings goal to the account you will be using to pay for the expense. Then the amount of the expense from the spending account should show in your budget.

bmciance

Just my opinion, but I believe in the KISS (keep it simple, stupid!) method. For these type of expenses I just figure out what I expect to spend for the year and divide it by 12 and enter that as a monthly budget. Then when I review my budget I mainly look at my annual amounts vs what I have spent. You can come up with numerous other more complicated ways to do it but to me it's not worth the effort. I just try to stay within my annual budget amounts.

Thomas Hajicek

> @mshiggins said:
> When you are ready to spend funds accumulated in a savings goal, transfer the money from the savings goal to the account you will be using to pay for the expense. Then the amount of the expense from the spending account should show in your budget.

Ok, so you're saying I will have a monthly expense when I contribute $100 to a vacation savings goal, for example. then when I take a vacation in a year that costs $1,200 I will withdraw that from the savings goal and charge it to the vacation expense account, and the two will offset to $0 for the month of the vacation. Is that right?

Thomas Hajicek

> @bmciance said:
> Just my opinion, but I believe in the KISS (keep it simple, stupid!) method. For these type of expenses I just figure out what I expect to spend for the year and divide it by 12 and enter that as a monthly budget. Then when I review my budget I mainly look at my annual amounts vs what I have spent. You can come up with numerous other more complicated ways to do it but to me it's not worth the effort. I just try to stay within my annual budget amounts.

I would like to keep it that simple, but I want to track how much I have available to spend so I don't spend now what I need later. If my insurance or property tax is due mid-year, I want to use the software to track how much of my money saved is saved for those things. If my rollover budget is wiped out at the end of the year, I lose my tracking for mid-year expenses.

UKR

Thomas Hajicek said:

I would like to keep it that simple, but I want to track how much I have available to spend so I don't spend now what I need later. If my insurance or property tax is due mid-year, I want to use the software to track how much of my money saved is saved for those things. If my rollover budget is wiped out at the end of the year, I lose my tracking for mid-year expenses.

When you extend your current budget into next year*, rollover amounts are carried forward. But please verify that it does. Worst case, look up the rollover amount for December and edit the January starting rollover amount for those categories (like Vacation) where you do want amounts to rollover.

* your budget is extended into the new year when you click the Annual View's year number forward button "[>]". Or, when you open Quicken for the first time in the new year without having extended your budget already, you will get an automatic prompt about setting up the new year's budget.