Budgeting

[Eric Schwartz]

> You want to make a distinction between the parent account, and the 
> parent+child accounts.  To me such a distinction is meaningless, as I follow 
> a simple rule that parent accounts never carry balances.  At most they are 
> 'clearinghouse' accounts, in which credits _always_ have corresponding 
> debits. 

In general, that's true for me for Expenses, but not for Assets.  For my
current form of envelope budgeting, I have a general "oh crap" reserve
fund in Savings, and then sub-accounts for things like Transportation,
Vacation, Home Repair, and the like.  It seems most obvious to me that
any money specifically targeted goes into the subaccounts, and the
parent holds everything else.

For my 401(k), I transfer the money from my paycheque into the parent
account, and then transfer it out again as purchases are made.

That said, I don't see much use myself for selecting parent or
parent+child in different ways.  The main effect of something like that
is to make the whole UI confusing for a relatively small number of users
(as a rule).  What you end up with is 90% of people exposed to an option
they have no use for, and should never see.  An alternative might be to
automatically select all child accounts, and then provide an easy way to
deselect them as a group.

> Thus to me the 'balance' in a parent account always represents the sum of 
> the balances in the child accounts. 

I could do that, I suppose, by forming an "oh crap" account under
Savings and adding a "contributions" account to my 401(k) account, but
it doesn't match my mental model of what's going on very well.  For
instance, the way I came at the above solution was that I started just
saving money in general, and didn't worry too much about where it went. 
When it came time to start budgeting, I created subaccounts for specific
categories, and moved on.  It's easy to get started like that-- at least
for me it was-- and I'd like to accomodate it with whatever solution we
end up with.

-=Eric
-- 
Eric Schwartz <emschwar at debian.org>
Debian GNU/Linux Software Project