Don't know if you would be interested but you might consider opening a money
market acct with a place like Vanguard and transferring your "accrued" funds
to that separate account instead of tracking two different running balances
in your checking acct which probably does not pay much interest.

I save money using that technique and simply make periodic electronic
transfers from checking to the money mkt acct which, of course,
automatically keeps a running balance so you always know exactly how much is
available and you earn higher interest as well. When I need some of the
"accrued" money for property taxes or whatever I simply use an electronic
transfer from the money mkt acct to the checking acct.

To me trying to account for the "accrued" funds with classifications or
otherwise would be too much trouble and may not work very well in any event.

Regards

Bill Wood


"Kelsey G" <KelseyG[at]discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:EA736928-883D-4B97-9BB4-FA382B05654A[at]microsoft.com...
- quote -

People who really want to see the problem in this "cookie jar" model never
like this answer, but Money just really doesn't support this model well at
all. You WILL See this money in your account balance. If seeing it there
encourages you to spend it, then you will likely spend it.

Money's model is this: plan/project your income and expenses sufficiently to
KNOW that you will have enough money to make these payments. Check as you go
along to make sure that your income and expenses are within the plan that you
already KNOW will have sufficient funds for these occasional expenses. When
the time comes to pay the occasional expense, voila!, the money is there. No
cookie jars. No subaccounts. The math just works.

If you can't cope with that model for one reason or another, you will have a
really hard time coercing it to support the "cookie jar" model. People have
come up with ways to fake this out, more or less, but mostly less.

There has been a lot written about this which you can find in the archives
of this newsgroup at http://groups.google.com; do an advanced search of
newsgroup microsoft.public.money with search terms like subaccount and cookie
jar and budget and cash flow.

"Kelsey G" wrote:

- quote -

I think a similar situation was covered in another post, but I must be
missing something. I'm new to Money, so I apologize if this was covered
elsewhere.

I "accrue" funds in my checking account for things such as property tax and
other items that I only pay once or twice a year. The accrued portion also
includes a reserve for emergencies. I keep a separate running balance for
the accrued items, so my checking account register only shows the amount I
have available for other spending. In other words, my actual balance is the
"accrued" portion plus the "other spending" portion.

I don't want to set up a separate account for the accrued portion because
the money is still physically in my checking account, and downloaded
information wouldn't match my checking account register. I was thinking about
using a Classification for the accrued items, but I wasn't sure how to set
this up. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Thank you.
--
Kelsey