Multiple budgets?

Hi. I’m trying out Goodbudget. So far it seems quite good, though a bit different to what I’m used to. Is there a way to have more than one budget? I like to have my personal spending budget separate from my family budget.

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Hi @Dexter - Thanks for giving Goodbudget a try!

Though Goodbudget works best as a way to keep track of a single consolidated budget, you can also use Envelope Groups to organize your Envelopes so that they mimic having multiple budgets. So, using your example, you’d organized your Envelopes like this:

  • Family Budget: Groceries
  • Family Budget: Eating Out
  • Personal: Eating Out
  • Personal: Fun Money

This will let you keep track of the balance for each individual Envelope, as well as for each group as a whole. You can read more about using Envelope Groups here: How do I Group my Envelopes? | Goodbudget

Hope that helps!

Thanks. I’d hoped to avoid that as it becomes complicated accounting for when the family budget or my personal budget owes the other budget money. That’s not a deal breaker though.

What are some methods Goodbudget users use to track reimbursements? A common situation in our household is that we will buy coffee and hot chocolates for the family. Hot chocolates get categorised to the children’s casual eating category and the coffees get paid back by my partner’s and my personal spending money, which is not in the family budget. Do negative values in a category carry over to the next budget period?

I think Splitting a transaction is the way to manage your hot chocolate and coffee. You’d enter the transaction, let’s say $30 at Coffee People, and the account from which the payment was made, but then Split the transaction so $10 comes from the kids’ envelope and $20 from you and your partner’s envelope. That way you can easily reconcile the account and the expenses are charged to the correct parts of your budgets.
The values in your envelopes can carry over or be reset per your preference. When you create an envelope Fill, you’ll be asked whether you want to “Set” or “Add” an amount to an envelope. Using “Add” means the new money will just go in, so any negative amount would be included. “Set” resets the envelope to exactly the amount you’ve budgeted.
Some examples:
I budget $100 for Movies. This month, I spend $75. If I choose to “add” $100, I’ll have $125 next month. If I choose “Set”, Goodbudget will put in just $75 so I’m back to $100 at the beginning of the next period.
Likewise, if I spend $125 this month and end up negative, “Add” $100 means I only have $75 for the next period.
Hope that helps!

Thanks @Tiffany. That makes sense. I guess my question was mainly whether any negative budget categories carry over, it sounds like they do?

They do! Until you refill your envelopes, nothing at all will change. If you have a Fill set for the first day of each budget period (and you’ll probably want to), you’ll choose which behavior you want the Fill to use and it will either replenish enough for one budget period’s supply OR just add a set amount, which could theoretically leave you STILL in the red if you were more than 100% “overdrawn” in that envelope.

I read through this and still did not get a yes you can have multiple budgets or no you can’t. I only see you can “mimic”. If this is not possible please just say no it’s not possible at this time. If it is possible to create a whole separate budget without “mimicking”, please share the how to details. Thanks.

If by separate budgets you mean entirely different pools of money with different incomes/outgoes that never interact, you’d need a separate household account. It’s not something you’d do within one Goodbudget account, but there are so many ways to track the same information within one household that I’m not sure why you’d want to. Still, everyone budgets differently so what works for us may not work for you!
I’m not quite sure I understand what you’re looking for though—you want to keep your personal spending budget separate from your household budget, which is done via envelopes. What result are you trying to accomplish that you’re not seeing here? The examples I saw in your thread all have envelope-based solutions, but if there’s something else maybe we or the Goodbudget admins can still help?

Thank you very much. You answered my question… it cannot be done and i’m going to give a bonus here because I’m one that does not like having to give reasons why I do what I do but you were nice enough to answer and explain it to me so kindness always deserves kindness back. This was only going to be temporary. I’m switching banks and accounts and everything and needed to keep them separate for about 2-3 weeks until the accounts were closed. I wanted to keep the budget I have and then create a new one based on the new accounts. That was it. I can manage without the other account… excel still works :grinning: Now wait til I post the question about why checking and savings are so hard to figure out. Thanks again.

Hi @Tiffany,
This thread of questions is very similar to what I am looking for here. My partner and I each contribute to the monthly bills but also have a portion of our incomes that we spend and save in our own individual accounts. I would be interested to know if it had been considered to have unique logins to the same budget account where there were both shared envelopes & accounts, and personal/private envelopes & accounts as well.

I love this app but right now I’m only using it exclusively for our shared expenses (groceries, rent, and bills) which I find is limiting my view of my personal (fun) spending habits. It would be great to see this considered for the roadmap as I feel fewer couples these days are doing fully joint accounts.
Thank you in advance :slight_smile:

Hi Kate—that’s an interesting take! And although I’m chatty (to a fault sometimes!) I’m just a regular old user like you, with several years of Goodbudget experience :grin:
There’s a method for sending suggestions, but I’m sure @Alex or @karisa would be happy to add it to the suggestions list from here. You can also check the roadmap to see what’s already in the pipeline!

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Thanks @Tiffany! I’m so sorry, I’ve seen your name throughout the forum and thought you were one of the developers lol. Thank you for sharing all of your knowledge and wisdom with us newbies :wink:

Haha no apologies needed for that accidental compliment!!

For the record I am also just a GB power user.

I have been running your scenario as a thought experiment all morning. At first I attempted to argue it would be impossible, but I ended up convincing myself that it would indeed be possible to do what you describe, at least from the accounting side.

Setting aside for now the wisdom of married couples maintaining separate accounts, or unmarried coupled maintaining joint accounts, or “hiding” money/expenses from your partner, here are some of my thoughts about how how this could work…

First, remember that underlying all accounting software (including GB) is the fundamental accounting equation: Assets = Liabilities + Owner Equity.

Assets in GB are Accounts. Liabilities are expense Envelopes. Owner Equity is savings/goal Envelopes and the Unallocated balance. In other words Sum(Accounts) = Sum(Envelopes) + Unallocated.

Every transaction must have balancing Debits and Credits. If you Debit an Asset account you increase its balance and if you Debit a Liability or Equity account you decrease its balance. Credits work the opposite way.

Take Income for example. Income is a Debit to an Asset (e.g. your Checking Account). There must therefore be Credit(s) to one or more Liabilities or Equities so the equation remains balanced. If you do not Credit any Envelopes, or the total Credits do not equal the Debit, GB automatically Credits the Unallocated balance. If you Credit too much, GB automatically Debits Unallocated to offset.

Now let’s say you introduce Private Accounts and Private Envelopes. Say you put (Debit) $1000 into your Private Account and allocate (Credit) $100 to your own private expenses. Where does the other $900 “go” (Credit)? You can’t Credit it to the Shared Envelopes/Unallocated, because that money is not in a Shared Account. Your Shared balances will not… er, balance. In GB terms your partner would see Envelope/Unallocated funds which they don’t really have access to spend. Therefore GB would have to provide a Private Unallocated balance to each user. Sum(Shared Accounts) = Sum(Shared Envelopes) + Shared Unallocated and also Sum(Private Accounts) = Sum(Private Envelopes) + Private Unallocated.

Also, this would mean that if you want to have any hope of reconciling your GB accounts against transaction records from the bank, then you must open a joint account at the bank for the shared expenses and actually transfer money from your private account to the joint account and pay the expenses from there.

Which brings up the accounting of moving funds from your Private Account to the Shared Account for the purposes of paying Shared Expenses. This would have to be a combination of a Private Expense and a Shared Income. You would Credit your Private Account (reduce the balance), Debit one or more Private Envelopes or Private Unallocated (reduce the balance(s)) and then Debit the Shared Account (increase the balance) and Credit one or more Shared Envelopes or Shared Unallocated (increase the balance(s)).

With that sorted out, how would you answer a question like “how much have I personally contributed to Rent this year?”. Basically, you would need a Private Envelope that corresponds to each Shared Envelope. You receive income and allocate $X to Private Rent. Then you do an expense/income transfer like above from Private Account/Private Rent to Shared Account/Shared Rent. Then you can accurately run an expense report on your Private Envelopes to see what you have personally spent.

So it all works out on the accounting side, but the technical challenge of presenting this to a user in a clear manner is beyond my pay grade :wink:

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