Budgeting - Let's decide what we want!

[Jack McKinney]

Big Brother tells me that tripp+gnucash-user at perspex.com wrote:
> On Sat, 30 Aug 2003, Jack McKinney wrote:
> 
> >     No.  I am using subaccounts of Cash In Checking to budget.  However,
> > this means that when I reconcile with my bank, I have to go into several
> > subaccounts to find all of the transactions.  My register trick just grabs
> > all of the uncleared items from all subaccounts and presents them for
> > clearing.
> 
> A problem with this method is that not all of your budget expenditures
> will necessarily come from cash/checking or any one account. You may, for
> various reasons, elect to put some of those expenditures on a credit card,
> store credit, etc.

    Not all of my _payments_ will come from my checking account.  However,
it is still true that I want to budget $100 out of each paycheck for
groceries.  Whether or not every grocery purchase comes from my checking
account is immaterial.  What is critical is that I do not spend more than
that $100 on groceries from my checking account.  If I do, I might not have
enough money for rent!
    What you are actually budgeting is not how much you are going to spend
on various things.  You are only budgeting how much you are going to spend
out of a particular budgeted account.

-- 
"The pellet with the poison's      Jack McKinney
 in the vessel with the pestle,    jackmc at lorentz.com
 the chalice from the palace       http://www.lorentz.com
 has the brew that is true."
1024D/12C23A80 4096g/CA714907
  6:51pm  up 472 days,  6:45,  4 users,  load average: 0.02, 0.07, 0.07
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 240 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : /pipermail/attachments/20030830/f4b07c92/attachment.bin