"kurios" <kurios[at]discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message news:FB5DBFE4-332C-48B3-AEDD-6ABB088C4B1F[at]microsoft.com...

- quote -

Your situation and practices are much like mine, except that I'm using the DRP as it was intended: to pay off revolving debt on inactive cards. The DRP is not designed to and will not serve as a workaround to smooth cash flow in the manner you described.

You want to eat your cake and have it, too. You can't, as things are.

A few options are:

1. Edit individual payments of the scheduled credit card payment. The problem with that is, once you've edited one, you have to edit them all. I recommend against that approach.

2. Use a different credit card for the irregular bills and schedule corresponding payments for those.

3. In addition to the baseline payment to model your regular cash flow, schedule other payments that model the irregular cash flow. I know you stated that you don't want to do that, but nothing says you actually have to use them. When the time comes for that month's irregularly large payment, skip the irregular bill and use the regular bill to schedule the entire amount. Your goal is to model cash flow. This will do that without much clutter in the list of bills.

4. Consider mycheckfree.com, if the irregular vendors permit. You can get email notices of the ebills, and automated payment of the minimum, total, or a fixed amount, just as you can for many credit card providers. That gets charged to your checking account, not from a credit card account. I recently started using this for some store cards managed by GEMB. Primarily, that's my Sam's Club Discover. Until they linked to MyCheckFree, I couldn't put that card on autopilot because the web site wouldn't permit scheduling more than a single payment.

5. Consider having the irregular bills drafted directly from checking. You lose the float but that's only 1 month out of 12. Not exactly a huge loss at ~3.5% APY, at best. If the bill hits close to the end of the credit card statement period, it's even less float than that.

Hoping to help...
--
Chris Cowles
Gainesville, FL

Greetings,

I am trying to understand MS Money 2007 in the way I can accoplish things.
My ultimate goal is accuracy of the Cash Flow Forecast. First, here is how
things are setup:
* I have a checking, savings, and a credit card.
* I use my credit card for nearly all expenses - minus some bills we can't
pay with Credit Card.
* I pay off the balance of this credit card every month.
* I am currently using the advanced budget which seems to work pretty good.

I have recurring bills that are yearly or every 6 months that are rather
sizeable and are setup in the Bills. These bills I pay with the credit card
and I also setup a monthly credit card payment of an estimated spendings per
month.

Here is my problem: When I run the cash flow forecast, I see all my deposits
and expenses just fine however - my credit card account keeps going more
negative and never balances out because of those bills that occur once a year
or every 6 months.

I don't want to raise my montly spending to average out the bills that are
on non-monthly patterns NOR do I want to schedule multiple credit card
payments that take care of the excess balances in those months that
non-montly expenses occur.

What does make sense to me - but doesn't work - is to include the Debt
Reduction Plan for my credit card which has the option to pay off the balance
every month. Also, it shows up in my advanced budget under special. The
downfall is that it doesn't include that amount into the cash flow forecast -
but all the other budgeted items do.

Another way this would of worked is by having a scheduled bill payment be
generated by the Debt Reduction Planner for the amount that is debited by the
Budget planned. This doesn't seem to be the case either.

I'm sure there are other ways to "fool" money into showing the correct
amounts in the cash flow forecast but in the end - I maybe the fool!

Any tips or advice is much appreciated as I have spent oodles of hours
trying to get this to work.


Thank you for your time,
kurios