Old Dog, New Tricks

[John Morris]

Hi Patrick,

On Dec 31, 2014, at 2:48 PM, Patrick Doyle wrote:
> OK -- it sounds like you're suggesting I 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?

  Yes, that is how I would think of it.

> 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?

  Good question, but I'm not sure I can answer it. The way I work my books, credit card purchases only show up in the credit card account and the corresponding expense account. To reconcile my credit card bill each month, I look at the credit card account register. To reconcile my own buckets each month, I pull a report on the various expense accounts (food, car:gasoline, computers:hardware, etc.) and update my spreadsheet full of buckets.

  I should mention that I don't actually do what I suggested (keep a bucket for credit card payments), so I can't say for sure that it would not clutter things up, but I don't think it would too badly. It just sounded like you might like to look in that direction given what you had mentioned before. The advantage of such a system is that you would know that the money left in a particular bucket is really available up to the minute. The disadvantage is that it requires extra bookkeeping.

Best,
John