I want to transfer money out of the Goodbudget ecosystem to an account that is not in Goodbudget. For example:
Checking (Goodbudget): $5000
I want to transfer $2000 of this to my Credit Karma account, which is not in Goodbudget and which I don’t want to look at (transfer it and forget it).
I tried:
Would it work to make a temporary debt account of $2000 which I then pay off?
Are you spending the money you’re moving as part of your budget? If it’s included in your spending money, ie it’s filling envelopes, you’ll have to have it in Goodbudget. If you don’t intend to use it, you’ll need to reduce the money in your envelopes to make up for the transferred funds you can’t spend.
You could create it as a credit card with a limit of $2000, but then you’re still spending it and it will show as a negative balance somewhere no matter what. If you really want to move it and forget it, you’ll have to take it out of both your Accounts and your Envelopes.
Maybe the easy way to say this is that to do what you want, you’ll have to reduce the balance in the Account by $2000, then transfer money from your envelopes into Unallocated until that balance is $0.
Just do an expense transaction since you don’t have your Credit Karma account in GoodBudget. That will move money out of your account and your envelope.
That’s still going to require an associated envelope though, which will leave it in the red. It sounds like their current envelope balances include the 2K that’s going to Credit Karma, so it’s double-counted as both “forgotten” and “budgeted”.
I must be missing something here, they have $5000 in an account, which means they also have $5000 in all their envelopes. They want to pull $2000 out of the GB ecosystem, isn’t that a simple expense transaction? I do this type of transaction all the time. I have a checking account in GB with a balance of $5000. I have envelopes in GB that total $5000. I have a savings account that is not in GB. I transfer money from checking account to my savings account. To show this in GB I create an expense transaction with payee as “Move money to savings” Amount is $2000. Envelope is whatever envelope or multiple envelopes I choose. Account is checking. It’s done. Now my account in GB has a balance of $3000 and all my envelopes have a total balance of $3000. If the envelope that I used in this transaction is red after I make this transaction, then I do an envelope transfer from one or multiple envelopes to bump this red envelope to the black.
Please let me know if this isn’t what they’re asking. I’m sure once you explain it a lightbulb will go off in my head😊
The difference is, the income predates Goodbudget. There is no record of the income coming in. It’s purely going out.
I think I have solved the problem by creating a debt account for the amount, with a one-time payment of the entire amount. It puts me over budget for this month, but I think next month it will be rectified.
It doesn’t matter if the income predates GB because that amount is still in GB. However, you have it solved and that’s all that counts👍
I agree with you—they were just saying that when they tried to do an envelope transfer (which is the same as an expense really, as far as that envelope is concerned) their envelope went into the red. Which, yeah, it would, because you’ve spent it.
I’m concerned that the debt transaction, being off-budget, still leaves them overdrawn by $2000 since that money isn’t spendable. That’s not the same as a true debt where the money hasn’t left your hands, but rather is owed to someone else. Unless they’re implying they’ll use the Credit Karma money to pay for budgeted items, (and that’s not how I read it; I thought it was a set-it-and-forget-it savings account) then they’re going to be $2000 overdrawn at the end of the month.
Doing it using a debt transaction was the only way I could find where, at the end of the day, my bank balance is correct, my envelope is not overdrawn, and there is no change to my unallocated funds.
The hit came to my monthly budget, which shows that I am way over this month. I may be wrong but I’m thinking I can change my budget next month to include $0 toward that debt payment, because it’s paid off and done.
I realize it will make all of my reporting inaccurate, but I don’t use the reports anyway.
Anyone has a better idea that will allow all of those factors to remain in balance, that would be great, but all of the suggestions so far create large imbalances that will persist for months and months in my envelope budgeting plan.
Thanks for your help!
My concern with this plan is that a debt typically represents money spent on your behalf by someone else, so it would seem to double count that money if you both move it AND call it a debt rather than an expense.
Just to be clear–the total in your bank account (NOT counting the money in Credit Karma) is $3000, the total in your envelopes is $3000 (not the budgeted amount, but actually what’s remaining IN the envelopes), and your unallocated is $0, correct? If that’s the case then you should be fine, but I’m not at all sure how a debt transaction made that happen. But there’s one thing you’ll find about this app–we’ve all got ways to make it work for us and they’re usually creative and quite different from each other’s!
Yes the balances are as you stated. I think what makes this work is that the beginning of the debt account is just a manually entered number. It’s not “funded” or “transferred” from within the system.
I guess I won’t know until next month if it fully worked. Thanks!