How To Budget Investment Accounts?

[Jonathan Chan]

Yeah, I can see that budgeting is very individualistic. I suppose I'm sorta
disappointed with the budgeting functionality of GNUCash. I see and
understand that it gives you basic budgeting functionality, but I actually
liked how mint.com functioned where you can budget month to month and have
rollover and all those nifty things. That said, there was a ton of stuff
that I didn't like about Mint which is why I switched to GNUCash.

I also think it is interesting that you use a spreadsheet to do it because
I think you sorta need that kinda power and flexibility to build a budget.
It sorta shows that GNUCash budgeting features are very basic and could be
flushed out more.

So back to the topic, I'm the type of person that likes keeping track of
everything so the way I implemented was with David C's suggestion and then
I added another Orphan account to keep track of all the money that is being
generated to put it into the Expense portion of the budget. It makes things
round about, but it balances when I look at the Budget and the general
account ledger.

Jonathan


On Wed, Aug 20, 2014 at 12:40 PM, Wm <wm+gnc at tarrcity.demon.co.uk> wrote:

> Wed, 13 Aug 2014 02:09:06
> <CAD=st1ODD=au8vn5ao9fyLFtWz1B5t9as5gTA4JvLH0yqxzwpQ at mail.gmail.com>
> Jonathan Chan <jonmchan at gmail.com>
>
> >Thanks for the reply. I'm not sure if that works well either as then
> Income
> >now is double-reported for all the tax-deferred income... I would have
> >Income:Salary reporting 100 dollars into the checking account, and then
> >another 100 dollars from tax-deferred income. Are you sure your logic is
> >correct? I tried putting it into my account and I couldn't get that part
> to
> >balance.
>
> As DavidC suggested there are a whole lot of ways to do this and no
> right or wrong.
>
> Another way would be to set up a scheduled transaction that runs on the
> same date as income arrives to transfer any fixed amounts out of the
> budgeting scenario.
>
> Conceptually:
>
> income          100 fixed amount
> rent            -11 ditto
> invest          -12 ditto
> other regular   -13 ditto
>          ----------
> sum              64
>
> and then you budget on the remainder of 64 thus
>
> Budget           64
> entertainment    -6
> dining           -7
> groceries        -8
>          ----------
> unallocated      43
>
> i.e. only budget on the variables.  Otherwise you spend time being
> unsurprised that you budgeted 11 for rent and that is exactly what
> happened.
>
> I don't use gnc's budgets at all at the moment, preferring to pull data
> into a spreadsheet where I can play at will.
>
> If people didn't reply earlier it is not because your message wasn't
> read so much as personal budgeting is very individualistic and rightly
> so.  If you've been here a while you pick up ideas on issues like this
> rather than expecting a static formula.
>
> --
> Wm...
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