- quote -

I'm still trying to use it, but I've run into some problems at
times that I can somewhat work around. I'm the first to admit that I
frequently think differently from how others think. For example I like
to "pay myself first", a pretty common philosophy. I have a few
good-sized savings objectives that I transfer money out to a savings
account when I receive a paycheck. I understand that it's just
shifting money from one pocket to another but it's easier for me to
see total saved, how much I'm saving regularly, etc. I've seen
people say that you should just be saving whatever is leftover from the
budget (your budget should be designed to accommodate that goal).
Sorry, but I've tried for a couple of years to think that way and I
need the extra visual support in keeping to my goal. I'd love an
indicator showing how much progress I've made on my savings goal.
INGdirect helps with this because you can easily create a bunch of
accounts to break up the savings into manageable pieces. I've also
tried using the Payee field on a transfer to indicate which savings
goals the money is for and creating a report. I prefer to pay my car
insurance in two payments per year (saves on the "monthly billing
convenience fee"), but each paycheck I save a portion of the bill so
it's not a shock when I actually have to make the payment. Money may
yell that my expenses took a massive jump for one month. While that's
true, I've been saving along the way to have the cash available to
make the payment.

I try to spend only $X per week on food that I take to work. I have yet
to get this to work properly on a monthly basis. I have found that if I
set a custom amount per month instead of using the $X per month generic
setting the numbers work a little better. It gets messy when I buy
food for June at the very very end of May and the transaction clears in
May.

I set myself a weekly/monthly allowance for everything else. I track a
bunch of categories individually and set the max budget amount on the
parent category. Magazine subscriptions fall into this. I want to still
spend only that $X for the month but Money says I have $X plus the
subscription amount to spend. I think I can get away with it if I
change the custom amount to be $X less the subscription price. What I
track on spreadsheet versus what works out in Money just never seems to
be the same. Same thing with my "work" food budget.

I definitely have some quirks in my thinking that may not work for
everyone so I keep my trusty spreadsheet handy to supplement my MS
Money budget.


- Cara

I stopped using it... I started getting strange results and it became too
time consuming to try and figure out. As it is, I spend too much of my time
as it is trying to unmatch wrongly matched transactions and match them to
the appropriate transactions...

To me, a budget ought to be fairly straighforward to setup and easy to
maintain.

-- John

"Vadim Rapp" <vr[at]myrealbox.nospam.com> wrote in message
news:%23UeknSZgGHA.3900[at]TK2MSFTNGP05.phx.gbl...
- quote -

Not much. It's too broken and limited by insistence that scheduled items
must be in budget. Most of its problems stem from trying to make that work
well.

I'd use it more for comparing actuals to budget and doing variance analysis.

If all Advanced budget allowed me to do was set category budgets by
arbitrary time period as average values or discrete values and then support
all the variance reporting, I'd be happy as a clam. I don't need Budget
Groups--though ability to roll up budget reporting by existing categories is
fine. I don't need "Debt" as I can understand the difference between cash
flow and incomve vs. expense even if the Money team cannot. I don't need
them to force the scheduled items into the budget--thought it is a nice
place to start filling in the budget. Indeed, they should not make the
coupling that scheduled items are, by definition, ib budget. That's stupid.

Oh, and what we want isn't going to change what they are going to do.
Microsoft Money: 60% of a decent personal finance management tool.

"Vadim Rapp" <vr[at]myrealbox.nospam.com> wrote in message
news:%23UeknSZgGHA.3900[at]TK2MSFTNGP05.phx.gbl...
- quote -

Hello guys,

are you using Budget un Money?

what for?

what would you like changed/improved in it?

thanks,

Vadim Rapp