Update to working with the Savings and Spending Budget (SSB) with
details for each Category.

I tried to convert back to the Advanced Budget but it wants to start
the budget on today's date and not January 1. I fooled around a
little but could not get this fixed. This, of course, messes with the
annual number so back to the SSB. I needed to make a few adjustments
as a few of my regular bills changed. This means I have to 1) change
the bill and 2) change the detail I setup in SSB.

Anytime I change one of the Category items in SSB, it changes the
Budget Group total. If I increase a Category, the amount is added to
the Budget Group total a-okay, but if I decrease something, the Budget
Group total doesn't budge. To fix this, I edit the Budget Group
amount (right-click on the group and select "change planned amount"),
zero all the values and press "okay."

A popup will occur for each month complaining the Budget Group amount
is less than the sum of the categories and provides a suggested
amount. The suggested amount is the new sum of the categories but if
I just press okay, the previous sum gets filled in and not the
suggested amount. To resolve, I manually enter the suggested amount.
Not a horrible task but it will keep you on your toes to make sure you
enter this correctly.

I really do like the monthly and annual views of the SSB without the
need to run a report. I also like the fact that it works very well
with the Lifetime Planner using my suggestions posted earlier.

<neveroutoftune[at]gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1171679988.969909.196570[at]h3g2000cwc.googlegroups.com...
- quote -

Cash Flow Forecasting is a powerful tool. With an accurate Advanced Budget
and reasonable detail in scheduled Bills, it seems accurate to me.
--
Chris Cowles
Gainesville, FL

On Feb 14, 7:56 am, "Chris Cowles" <spam_mag...[at]remove-me-
bellsouth.net> wrote:
- quote -

Funny thing, I now remember reading the mentioned post about using the
URL to get the the Advanced Buget but somewhere in money, it mentions
the Advanced Budget is only available if you are upgrading from a
previous version. And I believed this!

Thanks for highlighting the mistake "SSB does get fed by Bills like
Advanced Budget did." This was an very important point an should have
read "SSB does NOT get fed by Bills like Advanced Budget did."

Good catch.

I'll have to take a look at the forecasting. I rarely used this
feature. It seems to get one function to work correctly you have to
play games with another function. Bills, Budgeting, Forecasting, and
Lifetime Planner never seem to get along so you figure out which one
is important to you and sacrifice the others.

One terminology change to consider: the 'Savings and Debt' category of the
S&S budget would be more aptly named 'Savings and Debt REDUCTION', if
interpreted in light of the original author's article. Regular debt, in the
sense of scheduled loans, falls in the 'Committed Expenses' group.

What I find hard to accept is the way the S&S budget totally ruins the Cash
Flow Forecast. IIRC, the only way to use that other than purely for
scheduled payments, is to apply 'past trends'. You lose the ability to
forecast the effect your budget will have on your cash flow. Without that,
you lose a reality check.

What if my past trends were terrible, and I'm planning to be a better
manager? What if things have changed radically outside my control? What if
Money is annualizing weird one-time events that have no bearing on normal
cash flow?

I hope some means of applying a real budget forecast to the cash flow
forecast shows up again in the future.
--
Chris Cowles
Gainesville, FL


"Steve" <sjcohen730[at]aol.com> wrote in message
news:1171469335.381442.323100[at]v33g2000cwv.googlegroups.com...
- quote -

On Feb 14, 7:56?am, "Chris Cowles" <spam_mag...[at]remove-me-
bellsouth.net> wrote:
- quote -


I too have assumed the advanced budget will be history soon, so I too
started using the saving & spending budget in Money 2007. I too
utilized the various named groups to my needs. I did not realize that
both "fun" and "committed expenses" can be used for the lifetime
planner budget link. Fortunately, we experienced users can work with
the product to get most of what we want even tho Microsoft tries as
hard as it can to screw things up. Thanks for your input. I think it
helps all of us. Steve

Thanks for your detailed analysis. I, too, played with the S&S Budget, but
found it wanting. Maybe I can adopt your methods to see if I can make it
acceptably for me.

If you want to go back to the Advanced Budget, type those words in the help
file search window and follow the instructions.

Is the line quoted below an error? Should it be "...does NOT get fed..."?
--
Chris Cowles
Gainesville, FL

<neveroutoftune[at]gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1171429994.602929.157480[at]a75g2000cwd.googlegroups.com...
- quote -

I should have remembered to point you to
http://umpmfaq.info/faqdb.php?q=186.

"Dick Watson" <littlegreengecko[at]mind-enufalready-spring.com> wrote in
message news:eCcysj$THHA.5100[at]TK2MSFTNGP06.phx.gbl...
- quote -

Great post. Thanks for the effort to write it up.

New M07 users can create an Advanced Budget--the "online" help article
(advanced budget create?) describes how. I agree the future for real
budgeting tools in Money is not bright.

<neveroutoftune[at]gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1171429994.602929.157480[at]a75g2000cwd.googlegroups.com...
- quote -

I discovered my M06 Deluxe data file had the slow problem related to
budgets. Upon opening M06, I would wait 45 to 60 seconds while my CPU
was pegged at 100% before I would try to do anything. Also, some
transaction seemed to take a long time to enter. After reading
several notes, it seemed this was unusual and needed fixed.

The way I discovered my problem was I installed M07 Deluxe (got it
free from Staples with Taxcut after rebate) on another machine and
converted my M06 file and did the "Remove all Bills Data" or more
commonly referred to as "Nuke the Bills". I re-entered all 42 my
bills, paychecks, regular deposits, and loans and tested performance.
The slowness and high CPU problems were gone.

But, I had the side affect of "Nuke the Bills" in that my loans
appeared both as a living expenses and under loans in Lifetime Planner
(LP). I also discovered that M07 treated the budget differently in
other areas in LP as well.

M07 really pushes you away from using the Advance Budget (you can not
create one from a new file, only if you upgrade). I really like the
granularity of the Advance Budget, having tuned mine over several
years. But, I decided to dive in and try the Savings and Spending
Budget (SSB). Thus, starts my quest to make the Savings and Spending
Budget act like the Advance Budget.

SSB is an interesting concept and could be useful for those who don't
know how they spend their money but this veteran budgeter, this
concept did not work. It took a while to understand how the six
Budget Groups (Income, Committed Expenses, Fun, Irregular Expenses,
Savings & Debt, and Retirement) were to be used and, more importantly,
how they affected LP.

By trial and error (remember, I am using a copy of my real money file
so playing around was not a problem), I found the Living Expenses, as
shown in LP was the sum of the Committed Expenses and Fun groups.
Income was income. I did not find an correlation between Irregular
Expenses, Savings and Debt, and Retirement between SSB and LP.

I concentrated in the Committed Expenses and Fun groups to see what I
could do. The original concept is to spend 60% of your income in the
Committed Expenses, and 10% in Fun and the rest amongst the other
groups. I ignored this concept and added budgets to the individual
items within each group, a la Advance Budget.

The first thing I had to do was to get the correct categories in the
Committed Expense and Fun groups. Keep in mind that for LP, the
Committed Expense and Fun groups are summed to create the Living
Expenses. You can readily see this by viewing the Expenses screen
within LP and comparing to the sum of Committed Expenses and Fun.

Early versions of Money segregated Taxes, Loans, Insurance and Savings
Contributions, and Special Expenses from Living Expenses. Even in
M07, it states this same message within LP when looking at "Estimate
Annual Living Expenses". But the new SSB puts taxes and other
categories in Committed Expense thus ends up in your Living Expenses.
Now, one could argue that taxes are Living Expenses and I agree. But
my goal was to make SSB and LP work together and LP separates taxes
from Living Expenses.

I found a way to do this within SSB by moving the payroll tax
categories from Committed Expenses group to Irregular Savings group.
This allows me to track actuals to budgets at a glance and it keeps
them out of the Living Expenses in LP. Problem solved.
I then started treating Committed Expenses and the Fun groups
differently. I could not find a way to rename them to something more
sensible. I use Committed Expenses for the uninteresting items of my
budget that I don't need to look at monthly. The Fun is more of my
favorites. These are a small number of categories that I watch very
closely each month. By putting them in the Fun group, I can find them
very quickly as I only have 7 categories in Fun while my Committed
Expenses has about 100 categories.

Now I had the tedious work of entering all the detail budget
information. You can assign budgets to individual categories but they
don't always affect the Group budget. The "depends" thing happens
here. But I found something out very interesting; first, I assigned
budgets for each category (the 100 in Committed Expenses and the 7 in
Fun). I then right-clicked on Committed Expenses, selected that I
wanted a different amount for each month, then set each month to $0.
When I pressed OK, I got a popup stating that the amount I entered was
too small for January, and to please enter $x,xxx amount. When I
pressed OK, the suggested amount was automatically filled in for
January. This amount was the sum of all the categories. It then
popped up again and complained about February and gave me a suggested
amount. I did this for all 12 months and now had a Committed and
Expense budget amount that was the sum of the categories just like the
Advance Budget. I did the same for Fun and Income and got the same
results.

I was not breaking out the champagne yet. SSB does get fed by Bills
like Advanced Budget did, so I had to enter all detail, including
paycheck detail, into the SSB. For items that I had an annual budget,
like vacation, I just entered the annual amount and divided by 12 to
get a monthly amount. My paycheck was more cumbersome as I get paid
every other week. So I grabbed a calendar and mapped which months I
got two checks and which months I got three and entered the
appropriate amounts for each month for each category. Once I had all
the entries, I did the trick in the previous paragraph to re-sum all
the major Groups. If I made a mistake on an entry and changed a
figure, I would have to re-sum the group. This is a bit of a pain but
for the first time, I can see exactly how LP calculates the Living
Expenses. I was psyched.

Now I have my budget done and I rentered my bills. Dealing with my
two loans became a challenge as the "Nuke the Bills" removed them from
Bills. To get them back in, I went to my last payment in the pay from
account and selected to make this a recurring transaction. But this
caused the individual categories, Principal and Interest, to have
actual dollar amounts instead of "Calculated." I found that if I
changed the category to something else (did not matter) and while
still editing the bill, switch to another field then switch back to
the category field and selecting the "Load Payment : xxxx" field that
it changed the individual Principal and Interest categories changed to
"Calculated".

I am feeling good now. I have my 42 bills back in, I have my budget
built with budgets for each category, I can see where LP gets Living
Expenses, and LP Yearly Snapshot has all the right numbers. And its
running fast. I purged all the old budgets and my files size went
from 25M to 22M. I keep a couple of years of data and I have a pretty
active portfolio with about 40 items mingle in 10 accounts.

I compared my M06 on one machine to M07 on the other found my data
looked good. A few things were different in the budget as M06 knew
how to deal with things, such as my paycheck every other week (a side
note, M06 budget chose the wrong months sometimes for months that I
had three paychecks) whereas M07 I was dividing annual numbers by 12
and rounding.

I am going to run parallel for a few weeks to see if I can find any
glitches in M07. I already like to speed improvements.

Side note: Who knows what is going to happen with Advance Budget in
future releases but the fact that it is broke in M07 and that you can
not create from a new data file suggest that Advance Budget is on its
way out. This is a shame as I really like the granularity and the tie
between Budget and Bills.