budgeting

[Paul Lussier]

In a message dated: Mon, 01 Oct 2001 16:04:12 PDT
nigel_gnucash-devel@unos.net said:

>In my mind, the purpose of a budget is to tell me how much money I have
>left to spend in a given period on a given type of item.  That's what I
>want the budget to do.

That's basically how I think of budgeting.  I want to be able 
allocate at the beginning of each year some set ammount for things 
like car repair, charitable donations, etc. on a per month basis.

Things like mortgage are pretty easy, since the amount is usually 
fixed.  It's the "unexpected curves" life throws me I want to be 
prepared for.  I wasn't prepared to put a new catalytic converter in 
my car last week, I hadn't budgeted for it, but I couldn't not do it.

It would be nice to say up front, I'm setting aside $50/month for 
Expenses:Auto:repair.  I know I'm not going to use that much each 
month, but if I had done that last January, I would have had $450 set 
aside for last week's repairs which would have easily covered it!

>I'm not interested in a budget that calculates interest on float,
>calculates finance charge interest on purchases, tells me which account
>to put my savings in, or any of that.

While these features would be nice, I don't see them as a necessity 
at this point.  I'd rather just have the basics of budgeting now.

>I want to know if, given the constraints that *I* have set, I can afford
>to buy a DVD player this month without adversely affecting my ability to
>pay rent, buy groceries, etc.

Right!

>I'm not suggesting that all those other features are boring and useless
>- far from it!  Some of those calculations are *extremely* interesting
>to me (especially the interest on float one).  It's just that I don't
>think those features belong in the budgeting subsystem.

Where would they go, the "What-if scenario generator module" ? :)

This is the type of thing I think spreadsheets are very useful for.
Maybe there's some way of developing a module to gnucash that ties in 
with gnumeric to do this type of thing?

>What do the rest of you think?  Why does a casual user use a budget?
>Why does a business user use a budget?

I already pretty much explained what I want, and the "Can I afford a 
new DVD player and still pay the rent" analogy pretty much says it 
all for me :)

I would however, much prefer something for paying off long term loans/
liabities at this point though.  That's one feature from Quicken I 
miss; the ability to set up a new loan, number of payments, interest 
rate, etc. and then analyze these things over time as I make extra 
payments (quite frequently), skip others (never! :), etc.
-- 

Seeya,
Paul
----

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