Budget questions. (wordy)

[Chris Shoemaker]

On Tue, Nov 08, 2005 at 11:19:20PM -0800, Andrew Sackville-West wrote:
> Not to jump in the middle but I think you guys are trying to compare 
> apple to cars. I don't think it really matters how a person developed a 
> liability (car loan, mortgage, CC, whatever), what does matter from a 
> Personal Budgeting standpoint is how you can afford to pay that sucker 
> down. If I bring in $1000 a month, pay $300 for groceries, $150 for 
> utilities, $50 for cable (gotta have TV man!), $$100 for beer and $400 
> to the loan for that shiny new car that I sleep in, I need to be able to 
> reflect ALL those items in my budget. This may not be *B*udget, but it 
> is budget. It should be intuitively easy to include money paid to a 
> liability in a budget. I think most people understand, if you explain it 
> to them, that they are either expensing the car over time or 
> depreciating it or whatever, but that is immaterial when it comes time 
> to figure out how to pay the bills. People want to just list that $400 
> along with all the other monthly "expenses" (that is, things that suck 
> up my money) regardless of whether it is actually an Expense or is 
> reducing a liability.

Ok.  I agree: no matter how you account the incurring of the
liability, you want to budget paying off the debt.  So do you think
that the way the budgeting form currently lets you mix liability and
expense accounts is intuitive then?

-chris