I’m trying to follow this approach. I deleted my credit card debt account and just kept the regular credit card account. In doing so, I went ahead and adjusted the balance on the credit card account to reflect my current balance. But now my Unallocated just went hugely negative, I guess because GB expects me to pay that off this month. Any suggestions on how to best handle this?
Hi there – Thanks for your post! I think you’re saying you had your CC listed as a Debt Account in Goodbudget, but just switched it to a standard Credit Card Account now. Now, you’re wondering how to handle Unallocated, right?
You’re right that Goodbudget expects you’re going to pay off your CC balance in full. As such, Goodbudget automatically deducts what you owe on your CC from the money you have available to budget with.
If you have flexibility in your budget, you can try to pay back some of the negative Unallocated by transferring funds to Unallocated from your regular Envelopes. Or, you can slowly pay Unallocated back by leaving a little bit of your income behind after you fill your other Envelopes at the start of each budgeting period.
I hope that makes sense!
Thanks, Karisa. I have around $3k balance still on the card. It was one of those promotional 0% offers I used to pay for an unexpected expense. Seeing my unallocated in the -$3000 range isn’t very helpful. What I’ve decided to try is set the CC balance to the amount I’m going to pay this month. The cost is losing sight of the actual card balance in GB.
There’s always different approaches how users handle GB. Personally, I would set my CC balance to what it actually is. If you’re going to pay it off over time at 0% interest, then you’ll just do an account transfer each month until it’s paid off. I’ve done this several times and it works perfectly, at least for me.
I agree with WRBird—I would go ahead and set it up as a “pay over time” with 0% interest. If you have charges on the same card at different rates, you might set them up as different accounts. Also a trade-off, but the total balance will be correctly represented.
I did that some time ago and the reconciliation was a big headache but I had visibility of the numbers. And the headache was more incentive to pay it off 
Lots of options for you to choose from!