Budgeting

[Robert C. Ramsdell III]

In practice I do the same thing...  Every paycheck puts money in my 401(k) 
main account (for example), which money is then transferred into the child 
accounts (mutual funds) when I get the 401(k) statement and reconcile.  In 
the case of savings I would create an 'Oh Crap', or misc child account.  I 
guess the rule about parents having 0 balance only applies at the end of a 
reconcile cycle (i.e. anywhere from 1 - 3 months depending on how 
disciplined I'm being, although 3-month reconciliation is brutal). 

The main thing I've wished for is a way in reports to select 'all children' 
(as opposed to opening the parent and clicking the children one-by-one) when 
I want more detail about a specific category. 

Robert 

Eric Schwartz writes: 

>> 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 
> 
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