How to deal with the cash flow and the credit card.

Buddha Buck blaisepascal at gmail.com
Mon Sep 25 13:28:36 EDT 2017


What might be a nice feature for GnuCash to have is the ability to generate
an "available credit" column for credit cards in some sort of report.

As long as I pay more to credit cards than I spend each month, I pay no
interest on the balance. As such, I sort of treat debit and credit cards
interchangeably. It's convenient for me to keep the credit card balances
low, and put all my recurring charges (mortgage, utilities, cell phone,
subscriptions/memberships) on the cards, so I don't have to worry that they
won't get paid if my bank balance is low.

Under those circumstances, a figure of interest to me is available funds,
the sum of liquid cash assets and available credit. I don't think I can get
that easily out of GnuCash.

This is sort of what I though Explorare was looking for.

As a bit of financial advice to Explorare, since I've had times when I've
had difficulty with managing cash flows: Don't pay your CC (or other bills)
according to their schedule; pay them according to yours. If you have a
$200 CC bill due on the 30th, and you get paid on the 10th and 24th, pay
$100 on each payday instead of waiting for the due date of the 30th. Do
that for all your bills that you can (especially for ones which are a
known, fixed, amount). Pay a portion every payday rather than on the
due-date. For recurring payments you can't pay-in-advance, put them on your
credit card, then pay it on your payday instead. When I had a steady job
but poor cash management, I solved it by paying half of each of my bills
via automatic bill pay timed for the same day I got my paycheck via direct
deposit. I would go to work, and by the time I took my lunch break, the
money left in my bank account was post-bills.


On Mon, Sep 25, 2017 at 12:45 PM Christopher Lam <christopher.lck at gmail.com>
wrote:

> I think the easiest way is to schedule both repayments as you expect to pay
> the credit cards in the future (23 and 30 of the month).
> Then on the main Accounts window, enable the column labelled "Future
> Minimum" which will warn you how close to the red line you will be :)
> (Click on the down arrow on the rightmost edge of column headings)
>
> On 25 September 2017 at 23:35, Explorare H. David <explorare at outlook.com>
> wrote:
>
> > Thanks for your replies. And here is what I'm considering.
> >
> > The repayment date for one of my credit cards is 23rd, and 30th for
> > another. If I want to buy something in cash between these 2 dates, I
> > need to know exactly how much money I could spend on that day. I have to
> > repay one of the credit card on 23rd, but the liability value for that
> > account is actually includes some bills I don't need to repay in this
> > cycle.
> >
> > So here comes the question: how do I know how much money I need to pay
> > for the credit account and how much "money" I still have on my debit
> > account if I repay the credit on time.
> >
> > And how do you guys estimate your usable money for the coming months?
> > For example how much "cash" I still have and how much "money" I could
> > use include all credit accounts.
> >
> >
> > On 9/25/2017 04:05, Aaron Laws wrote:
> > > On Sun, Sep 24, 2017 at 11:12 AM, Explorare <explorare at outlook.com
> > > <mailto:explorare at outlook.com>> wrote:
> > >
> > >     Just a stupid question:
> > >
> > >     I have three credit cards which have different bill date. So how
> > >     to know the
> > >     amount of cash I have on a specific date? Is there a tool to
> > >     calculate this?
> > >     I didn't find a place to set the bill date and the repayment date.
> > >
> > >     Sorry for my poor English :P
> > >
> > >
> > > Are you wanting to know your current assets minus your current
> > > liabilities to know how much "money" you have on hand? For this,
> > > you'll take your chequing account balance and subtract all your credit
> > > card balances, right? I use the "Net Worth Line Chart" for this
> > > purpose, and only select the current assets and liabilities (chequing,
> > > cash, etc, and credit cards, etc.).
> >
> >
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