Not tell it about the other stuff.

Seriously, Money doesn't support what you want to do. It budgets everything.
You need to change your purposes to be more comprehensive and include taxes
and 401k contributions in your financial plan. There's no reason this is a
bad thing to do. You just have to adjust your mental frame of reference.

The only other way is to have a "gross pay" cash account that is set to not
be included in budget and put the paycheck there and pay the taxes from
there and do the 401k contribution from there and then transfer the net to
an account "in budget". Then this net would show up as a transfer into
budgeted accounts.

"smbreau" <smbreau[at]discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
newsE4ECDE6-774D-4EAB-A016-657807EC96C6[at]microsoft.com...
- quote -

I'm struggling with the same question. I have my pay transactions entered as
paychecks, but I want my budget to include only my net pay. In my budget, I
only want to work with amounts I can control. For my purposes, 401(k)
contributions and taxes are not true budget items. Is there any way to get
M06 to show net pay in the budget?

Money Budget Planner is stuck halfway between purity (just the income and
expense category stuff) and what lots of users expect it to do instead
(basically accounting for all of the cash flow). It includes the transfers
in/out in order to get to the answer: can the user "afford" the budget or
does income less expenses come out positive.

I'm not sure what you mean by it reducing your paycheck. Tax Estimator does
goofy things with paycheck info in a good cause. I'm not aware of it doing
anything in BP (unless it does the same as TE--reducing the first category
line from the Wages tab by the total of the Before Tax tab).

I'm also not sure what you mean by your net worth goes up. Are you referring
to a Net Worth report or something?

"E9" <E9[at]discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:B4CB5890-2B0C-4B72-9A4D-70A058406FDB[at]microsoft.com...
- quote -

"E9" <E9[at]discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:B4CB5890-2B0C-4B72-9A4D-70A058406FDB[at]microsoft.com...
- quote -

In the budget, transfers in and out of budget are considered income or
expense events.
--
Chris Cowles
Gainesville, FL

Dick,

You're right, it shows up as a transfer. The budget screen, however, adds
the amount to the 'total expenses' row.

I think Money does it this way because it reduces my paycheck by the amount
I'm contributing.

Bottom line is my net worth goes up but my budget always looks unbalanced.

E9

"Dick Watson" wrote:

- quote -

Why does it show up as "an expense" (what Category???) instead of something
like Transfer Out of Budget Accounts? The 401k cash account should be setup
as not in budget. The money should be getting there as a Transfer. Hence the
Transfer Out of Budget Accounts.

There's probably something I'm guessing incorrectly about how you are really
doing this. Advanced Register all around? Advanced Budget?

"E9" <E9[at]discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:EEA44182-52DC-4BA5-A583-5BE89AC4B21A[at]microsoft.com...
- quote -

I noticed that Money treats money that I contribute to a 401k account or
transfer to a savings account as an expense. Basically, the more I
contribute, the worse my budget looks. Is there a way to prevent this from
happening?

Right now, I exclude transfers to my savings account from the budget and it
solves the problem, however, I shouldn't have to manually do this each time.
For 401k contributions, I cannot find a way to do this.