How to track multiple currencies?

Hi,

I want to share a problem I face and would like to know if any of you have experienced something like this or got any ideas that could help me.

I got my budget on GB since a few years ago. That budget works fine for me, but I’ld like to travel to another country in january and live there for some months to study.

However, I cannot abandon my old budget since I’ll still be responsible for payments and expenses in my home country, but also I’ld need another budget to track what I spend in the new country

How could I configure GoodBudget in order to track both things?

Thanks

Hi there,

Thanks for posting, and that’s a good question. Goodbudget works best when tracking only one currency. Because of that, I’d recommend using a separate GB Household to track that secondary currency. You could add an income to that Household equal to the amount you plan to spend there (but converted to the correct currency), and then add transactions as normal. That would require you to add transactions in two places because you’d need to keep your main Household up to date too.

If you want a really easy option, then you can try doing what my husband and I did the last time we traveled. We went to the ATM, expensed a large sum of cash (which was then recorded in GB), and then we just spent the cash and didn’t bother tracking each individual transaction since the total sum was already expensed.

Hope these options are helpful!

1 Like

We ran into this for our daughter, who lives in the US for part of the year but in the UK for uni.
Another option might be to set up new envelopes and a new account for the foreign currency. A single ATM style transfer probably wouldn’t be as useful for the long term, but you could leave your current envelopes intact and add some for your new host country. You can group envelopes too, so all the envelopes from each currency are together.
To fund your foreign account, I would do a miscellaneous deduction from your home account then add the equivalent as new income to your host account (instead of a transfer which wouldn’t account for the exchange rate), and budget in envelopes that are specific to each country.
The big drawback here is that your Unallocated funds will combine both currencies and the values won’t be equivalent, but if you don’t budget with your Unallocated much that’s not an issue. However, if you DO need that level of specificity, you could create annual or goal envelopes for each currency and transfer between envelopes (instead of doing Fills) to keep your Unallocated at zero.
That’s wordy, but I hope it helps!

1 Like

Hi,

Thank you both for your suggestions. The ATM option is more practical, I used in another trips, but for long term I could get lost. I’ll explore both the second GB Household and the envelope to see which one could work for me.

Thanks