Hi there,
My wife and I have a bankaccount for our budget. The account holds both hers, mine and our budgets - so three in one account.
How can we setup GB in order to be able to see how much each has to pay each month?
Thanks!
Hi Mikkel and welcome!
If I understand your question correctly, you have three accounts and have divided responsibilities between them, but all the money is lumped into one GoodBudget account. If that’s correct, there are two relatively easy ways to split up your budget. The easiest IMHO is to go Pro, but that requires a subscription fee of a few dollars a month.I used the free version for quite a while but when I became obvious that I would keep it up, I upgraded which gives me the ability to manage several different accounts simultaneously (100% worth it!!!) When you enter a transaction, you’ll choose which account the funds will come from and you can automate recurring bills the same way.
If you’d like to remain on the free version for a while, my suggestion is to create envelopes for each of your accounts. That way you’d have, for example, envelopes labeled “Your Account” with $1000, “Her Account” with $1100 and “Joint Account” with $4000. The total of the three would add up to the total funds in the single account listed on the Accounts tab.
The downside of this method is that you can’t automate your Fills and you’d have manually transfer money from your “account envelopes” to your budgeted envelopes each time.
If I misunderstood, and you actually mean that you have money that you’re each “allowed” to spend from the same bank account, it’s even easier. In that case, you’d just label your envelopes to reflect the money available to each of you. For example, you might have a “Rent/Mortgage” envelope that you know comes out of joint funds, an “Entertainment–Me” envelope for your money and an “Entertainment–Her” envelope for your wife’s. The budget might reflect $100 in the “Entertainment–Me” envelope and each transaction will deduct from that total. That way you’re keeping your spending separate. Even on the free version you can automate spending, so if for example a car payment always comes out of your money, you could have it repeat monthly and deduct from that envelope.
I hope that helps. I feel like I’ve made a simple process sound complicated but it’s very easy to get the hang of it. (In fact, even with the Pro version I use a variation of this with my savings accounts so they’re not included in our Unallocated funds.)
I’m happy to help if you have more questions or if I’ve misunderstood your initial situation.
All the best!
Tiffany
Hi Mikkel,
It sounds like you might be asking how you can have multiple distinct budgets that do not interact with one another in one Goodbudget household? If so, it’s not possible to create completely separate budgets within a single household. However, since it sounds like you have a single Account that you’re splitting into a number of “budgets” that each have their own subcategories / Envelopes, perhaps Envelope Groups (https://goodbudget.com/help/budgeting-with-goodbudget/envelope-groups/) would be a good solution for you?
You could do something like Yours: Bills, Hers: Bills, Our: Bills, etc, which would keep them visually distinct but all connected to that one Account.
If you would like, you could also set up 3 separate free GoodBudget households that can be separately accessed with a PC or laptop. Then, if it works as well as you want it to, each family member could have upgrade and access his own account and budget account, as needed, to handle their individual account on their own phone. or for any of them on a PC.
Good luck!