Accounting for saving money to pay credit card monthly

[Matthew Vanecek]

<quote who="Bill Wisse">
> On Thursday 13 January 2005 06:49, Robert Uhl wrote:
>> TC <tc at emailetc.co.uk> writes:
>> > Eventually, after much messing about, I realised that I was doing it
>> all wrong.  This is a budgeting problem, *not* a book-keeping one.
>> You CANNOT do what you're trying to do within the the overall
>> ledgers of Gnucash (or any other proper book keeping tool) and still
>> have your books be accurate.
>>
>> Not true; I've been using GnuCash to handle budgets for several years
>> now.  What I do is make my budgets sub-accounts of my chequing and
>> savings accounts (chequing, since that's where the majority of my
>> money comes from, and savings because for long-term budgets it makes
>> sense to earn better interest).  When I pay for an item, it's either
>> via cheque or credit card.
>
> I do that as well and it works great.
> I have a number of subaccounts in my cheque account.
> When I make a deposit say for $1000.00 I split this up in
> one subaccount "Reserved for Import duty" ( end of the month I have to
> pay  Import duty) ... $200.00. Cheque account $800.00.
> the total will still show up as $1000.00 but I see that I can only spend
>   $800.00
>
> --
>

That's just too much work for me.  I have a spreadsheet template for my
budget--just plugin the numbers for next month or the next month when I'm
getting close.  It helps to have steady stable income, but I can tell you
pretty far in advance whether or not I'll be able to, for example, buy
tickets for a golf tournament, simply based on my budget.  But then, I
reckon the definition of "work" is different to different people...

Although, I do have my savings divided into sub-accounts like you guys
talk about.  It's nice to know how much I have saved to date for my car
license fees, or for my next vacation.

Anyhow, there's many ways of doing it.  Hopefully the originator of the
thread has a couple different viewpoints to look at.

ciao,
-- 
Matthew Vanecek
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5,(41*2),sqrt(7056),(unpack(c,H)-2),oct(115),10);'
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