Moving Money From Saving, Investing, & Debt Payments

D4L3

If you have an expense category for 'Saving, Investing, & Debt Payments' that you contribute to monthly, when you need to tap into say emergency funds, is it best to categorize that as a negative expense or a transfer?

jacobs

I agree with what @RickO wrote, but I'd offer a few different thoughts about how to report on your transfers if you want to.

@RickO mentioned using Tags on your transfer transactions, and then doing a report on Tags. Another approach is that in any report, you can force selected Transfers to show up. Using the Advanced tab of Edit Report, you can specify to include transfers to/from accounts outside the report. So if you wanted to see your transfers to Loan and Savings accounts on a category (expense) report, whern you Edit the settings for that report, you'd exclude the savings and loan accounts, and select the option to include transfers with accounts outside of report. This will cause a Transfer section to appear at the bottom of the report, below expenses, showing the transfer to the savings and loan accounts, and the transfers to those accounts will be reflected in the bottom line of the report.

It works similarly in the Budget section of the program, where you can include selected transfers in your budget, as if they are expenses even thoguh they aren't.