My question involves understanding my Available Funds when I do my monthly envelope fill at the beginning of each month.
I have 3 credit cards that I pay off in full on the DUE DATE (not at the end of the month). So at the end of each month, each credit card has a balance amount in GB that “rolls over” to the next month.
When I go to fill my envelopes at the beginning of the month, I am unsure of whether my Available Funds reflect these balances due or not. So I did a test to see if it did. I entered a “bogus” transaction of $100 on one of my credit cards, using a selected envelope and the credit card account. I checked, and my available funds didn’t change (I checked both before and after by going into Fill Envelopes and selecting Available).
Can you please help me decipher how to correctly interpret my Available funds to I correctly fill my envelopes?
Your Available funds will reflect the balance from cards set to pay off monthly, but the piece that’s easy to miss is the fact that your money is combined in Envelopes and Available (which is really just a special envelope). Your Available didn’t change because the money came out of a different envelope. For an extreme example, make your bogus transaction 10,000 instead of 100. Now your Available is unchanged but the other envelope is 10,000 in the red. To fix it, you’ll need to fill it from Available (reducing that amount by the difference) or from another envelope. As long as everything is in the black then your available will be correct for the new month.
(I hope that makes sense; I feel like it may still be confusing)