Old Dog, New Tricks

[Patrick Doyle]

Hmmm...
On Wed, Dec 31, 2014 at 2:06 PM, John Morris <johnjeff at editide.us> wrote:
> 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.
I know the feeling... I notice that you didn't ask why I'm still using
Quicken 2006 :-)

>   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.
Yep, I do that.  And, under my proposed system, when I pay my credit
card bill, I will create a transaction with the following split:
Credit: Assets:Checking (decreases the balance)
Debit: Liabilities:Visa (decreases the balance)

> 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.

OK -- it sounds like you're suggesting a create a bucket (along side
the rest of the buckets/checking subaccounts) to hold the money to pay
my Visa bill each month.  Ahh... I hadn't thought of that.
Is that what you are suggesting?
If I do that, how do I reconcile my Visa bill each month?
Doesn't that clutter up the reconciliation process for my checking account?

If instead, I keep the buckets as subacounts of Equity, then I think I
get to record transactions in my checking account and transactions in
my Visa account separately, but look at the Equity accounts to see how
much money is in the buckets.

Thanks for the tips & discussion.  It helps me to understand this
better, the more that I talk (write) about it.

--wpd