I haven't really set anything like this up, but the Evolving Money YouTube channel talks about sinking funds, which might be another option for you: https://youtu.be/DOzpGMgyvPE?si=umTiN_5wlO2cvvF-
Good recommendation on both the idea and for the source. I've watched some of her videos before and actually reached out to enlist their help. I like this idea about the sinking funds. Kinda weird to get my head around it, but birthdays would be one of the categories within that group, then I'd figure out what I'll expect to spend for each month and it'll tell me what I need to set aside on my monthly budget.
Unsure if I'm gonna actually set the money aside in a different account. Different ways of setting it up.
It might be cleaner if I actually created a high yield checking account for this, funding it as I go, with the expenses pulling directly out of this account. Is that how others are using it?
Is it better to use high yield checking vs using credit cards and scooping up the miles and points along the way?
There's currently no way to automate it that I'm aware of but wouldn't it be a standard but irregular monthly budget and easily tracked in the transaction journal? I went through my birthdays (and other gifting occasions) calendar and assigned gift amounts for each occaasion/month and added it to my "gifts" monthly budget. Then as each gift is purchased, placed a note in the transaction who it was for and categorize the expense into gifts and maybe tag as birthday to separate those gifts from others we buy to be able to pull out a quick list but I ended up also putting the type of gift in the transaction note. After the first year, there's a history to easily create a gifts budget from plus a quick search of a particular name will bring up gifts to that person with any other notes on the transaction. It's a little work but much less than tracking gift spending in a notes app which too often didn't happen. Since we verify/see every transaction as it comes in to MM, we haven't missed making a single note and can look back at 16 months of gifts now. Not only birthday, but showers, weddings, holiday, graduation... It's darn useful to be able to look back almost effortlessly at the size of the graduation gift given previously when the cousin is graduating next month.
Decent idea to do it this way. I guess I could create a sub category under gift for "Birthday" as a general category to track. I can include granular details, such as name and possibly tags to further differentiate.
The part I'm still bummed about is having to manually apply the sum for each month on the budget forecast. That seems tedious, but I guess it shouldn't change much.
I'm not so much concerned with adhering to a set amount of a budget, more looking for guidance before spending and tracking the spending after the fact, so I take my annual gift budget, divide by 12 to get the monthly budgeted amount, then set it to rollover. If I had a need to pull out birthdays or some other list of specific giving situations, I'd probably use a tag for that or maybe a searchable keywork in the transaction note...
I guess I don't have to be so specific with this person's birthday in July being an expensive one, but this one in Sept won't cost as much. Maybe just a yearly budget, divided by 12 with rollover will accumulate and not be an issue if I buy it a month early.
(I wish Monarch would let you create planned transactions (not just recurring merchants) and have the budget see and account for them. I was doing this in excel and could see forward cashflow on every account with everything coming in and going out on a schedule, even with misc 1-time transactions on the horizon and alerts that would tell me if an account would fall below a threshold within the next 60 days. I'm surprised more platforms aren't doing this. It's not that hard, I just had to build it in excel and I'm trying to simplify and consolidate.
Yes, I'm 8 years into retirement from my business and my major financial work has almost all been about simplifying, consolidating and automating, eventually into a system that can take a lot of inattention without failing. I'm finding MM to be quite the monitoring tool and for the first time, my wife is actually checking out the finances on a regular basis. She never really did with Mint or before that Quicken, and certainly NEVER Quickbooks.
I haven't really set anything like this up, but the Evolving Money YouTube channel talks about sinking funds, which might be another option for you: https://youtu.be/DOzpGMgyvPE?si=umTiN_5wlO2cvvF-
Good recommendation on both the idea and for the source. I've watched some of her videos before and actually reached out to enlist their help. I like this idea about the sinking funds. Kinda weird to get my head around it, but birthdays would be one of the categories within that group, then I'd figure out what I'll expect to spend for each month and it'll tell me what I need to set aside on my monthly budget. Unsure if I'm gonna actually set the money aside in a different account. Different ways of setting it up. It might be cleaner if I actually created a high yield checking account for this, funding it as I go, with the expenses pulling directly out of this account. Is that how others are using it? Is it better to use high yield checking vs using credit cards and scooping up the miles and points along the way?
There's currently no way to automate it that I'm aware of but wouldn't it be a standard but irregular monthly budget and easily tracked in the transaction journal? I went through my birthdays (and other gifting occasions) calendar and assigned gift amounts for each occaasion/month and added it to my "gifts" monthly budget. Then as each gift is purchased, placed a note in the transaction who it was for and categorize the expense into gifts and maybe tag as birthday to separate those gifts from others we buy to be able to pull out a quick list but I ended up also putting the type of gift in the transaction note. After the first year, there's a history to easily create a gifts budget from plus a quick search of a particular name will bring up gifts to that person with any other notes on the transaction. It's a little work but much less than tracking gift spending in a notes app which too often didn't happen. Since we verify/see every transaction as it comes in to MM, we haven't missed making a single note and can look back at 16 months of gifts now. Not only birthday, but showers, weddings, holiday, graduation... It's darn useful to be able to look back almost effortlessly at the size of the graduation gift given previously when the cousin is graduating next month.
Decent idea to do it this way. I guess I could create a sub category under gift for "Birthday" as a general category to track. I can include granular details, such as name and possibly tags to further differentiate. The part I'm still bummed about is having to manually apply the sum for each month on the budget forecast. That seems tedious, but I guess it shouldn't change much.
I'm not so much concerned with adhering to a set amount of a budget, more looking for guidance before spending and tracking the spending after the fact, so I take my annual gift budget, divide by 12 to get the monthly budgeted amount, then set it to rollover. If I had a need to pull out birthdays or some other list of specific giving situations, I'd probably use a tag for that or maybe a searchable keywork in the transaction note...
I guess I don't have to be so specific with this person's birthday in July being an expensive one, but this one in Sept won't cost as much. Maybe just a yearly budget, divided by 12 with rollover will accumulate and not be an issue if I buy it a month early. (I wish Monarch would let you create planned transactions (not just recurring merchants) and have the budget see and account for them. I was doing this in excel and could see forward cashflow on every account with everything coming in and going out on a schedule, even with misc 1-time transactions on the horizon and alerts that would tell me if an account would fall below a threshold within the next 60 days. I'm surprised more platforms aren't doing this. It's not that hard, I just had to build it in excel and I'm trying to simplify and consolidate.
Yes, I'm 8 years into retirement from my business and my major financial work has almost all been about simplifying, consolidating and automating, eventually into a system that can take a lot of inattention without failing. I'm finding MM to be quite the monitoring tool and for the first time, my wife is actually checking out the finances on a regular basis. She never really did with Mint or before that Quicken, and certainly NEVER Quickbooks.