How To Budget Investment Accounts?

[Wm]

Wed, 20 Aug 2014 17:34:04 
<CAD=st1PxcLBPhHYvj1zxJ-4USoSANGdwhMEyK9FvHkPgrzXfkA at mail.gmail.com> 
Jonathan Chan <jonmchan at gmail.com>

>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.

I'm one of those that argue personal budgets can't roll over, any 
surplus goes to savings and shortfalls come from current period :)

gnc *cannot* (and I argue shouldn't) accommodate all the variations of 
everyone's ideas about something that isn't accounting, *explicitly* as 
there isn't a GAAP for personal budgeting (and if you think about it for 
30 seconds there shouldn't and can't be)

there is one big exception here and that is if someone sponsors some 
code and someone else picks it up but I don't see that happening soon

> That said, there was a ton of stuff
>that I didn't like about Mint which is why I switched to GNUCash.

Hi

>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.

I'm not here to defend gnc's existing budgeting stuff except to say 
whenever it comes up for discussion there are a lot of inputs (i.e. how 
people would like it done) and

a) many of those requests, wishes, etc. can't be reconciled

b) external budgeting is possible

c) if you've been following the KMyMoney thread it could be questioned 
wether gnc should do budgeting at all as that ain't accounting :)  <-- 
note smile

>So back to the topic, I'm the type of person that likes keeping track of
>everything

gnc does that for free, surely?

all you're doing is ticking off

cat food budget v cat food actual

I hope you haven't got to the state we see (sometimes comedy sometimes 
satire sometimes horror) in films sometimes

Budget
   Dating Mary, first feel of breasts 100
Costs
   Text saying I liked her 50c
   Look her up on FB  ...
etc.

That sort of detail isn't needed in most people's lives.

>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.

If you have *nix type tools handy I can lend you or anyone else my 
gnc_xml to sqlite (should work with any modern SQL capable db) scripts.

That way you can use ODBC to have your gnc data in Libre Office as I do.

-- 
Wm...