Old Dog, New Tricks

[John Morris]

Hi Patrick,
  As I said, I have not tried this. Getting my old tracking system set up in GnuCash was enough work for me this year, so this type of change will wait for another time. Because I have many other projects, I'm not likely to tackle this one in the near future.

  That said, I don't see how implementing the buckets in a separate equity account would make the credit card portion of your system easier to handle. I assume that you pay your credit card once a month, in full. I would think that you could have a separate bucket amongst all the other buckets designed to hold money to make those credit card payments. I'm imagining that you would move money from a budget bucket (such as Food) when you make a purchase with the credit card. That money would be moved to the credit card bucket. Then, when the payment is due on the credit card, there will be at least that much money in the credit card bucket. At the time of the payment, you would move the money from the credit card bucket to the actual credit card account to implement the payment that actually happens from your checking account to the credit card company.

  I do agree that this would treat the debit purchases differently from the credit purchases because they are different in the real world: Debit purchases remove the money from your control immediately; credit purchases leave you with a debt for some period of time that gets repaid as a lump sum.

Best,
John

On Dec 31, 2014, at 1:51 PM, Patrick Doyle wrote:

> Hi John,
> Thanks for the idea.  I started off thinking I would make the buckets
> out of subaccounts of my Checking account, but got concerned about how
> that would interact with credit card purchases.  Right now, if I buy
> food with my credit card, or with my debit card, I treat it the same.
> I think that still works with my proposed idea (keep in mind, I have
> yet to actually try my proposed idea, I wanted to get some feedback on
> it and think about it first, and then perform surgery on a QIF export
> of my Quicken data to accommodate my proposed idea, then import my
> historical data, and only, finally! then actually try my proposed
> idea).
> 
> Where was I?  Oh yeah, with my proposed idea of using Equity
> subaccounts to track the contents of my buckets, I think I treat
> credit & debit card purchases the same.
> 
> Lance: Thanks for the links... I'll read through them tonight and see
> how well they match my preconceived notions or if I can warp my
> notions to match his ideas.
> 
> --wpd