Total Budget is coming back

We think some of you will find this feature extremely helpful.

At this point, your “okay to spend” is computed by doing salary - committed spending - spending.

However we have plans to give you an additional tracking tool by setting a total budget. This means you will be able to start your okay to spend from a total budget and not salary.

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What are the use cases for a total budget?

The main one I can see is to save some of your salary each month. If this is the primary use case, I’d still argue for what I’ve suggested before - a savings category.

Any scheduled transactions to savings accounts could go in this category, and be deducted from the total available to spend. The benefit of this would be being able to view savings by month, being able to account for months where you’re paid more (extra expenses or bonuses), not having to manually alter the total budget if you decide to save more one month.

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What happens to the money that goes from savings to current?

We want people to have a target to look for in order to save.

At this point, this is not clear and there are still lots who think we are doing the budgeting around their balance. :stuck_out_tongue:

i like this idea and is something i have been looking for. The use case for me is that i may spend a few hundred more or less each month. Whilst I have a fix amount I save each month i still want to be able to have my account balance grow a small amount each month so my account always has a buffer.

Looking forward to it being released.

Yes, this also applies for people who get bonuses.

They shouldn’t really count in your budgeting and with a Total Budget, we can overcome this.

I am not even mentioning freelancers! They will start seeing the big circles both in Feed an Analytics thanks to this. :stuck_out_tongue:

This is another sneak peek.

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Ok, I think you’re winning me over to the idea of a total budget. Looking forward to being able to try it out :grinning:

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There are also people with 6 paydays. In this scenario, the app is likely to break/lose track of them over time; so they can just add their main payday + set a total budget.

Can you add savings as a budget category the current closest I would say is investment but I wouldn’t call it an investment.

The reason why we don’t have this category is because transfers to linked accounts are labelled as Excluded. Hence why we need a Total Budget to track savings. :slight_smile:

Love this new feature, really helps visualise saving & budget where I can’t set strict budgets on specific categories like shopping.

I know this would make it tempting to over-spend but… I would like to be able to tap on the total budget and have it switch to the full payday amount view, just so I can double check how much I actually have. Then tap to go back :wink:

On the home screen card, this could appear in fainter text underneath the ‘left of your xxx total budget’.

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Yes, we wanted to add an Expected Savings row in the Pay day card.

This is basically Income - Total Budget. :wink:

Hi, is there a way of using ‘budgets’ on just one account when you have 2 current accounts? I have 2 current accounts, One my own, the other a joint. I want to only use ‘budgets’ against my own account. Thanks.

Hey @carnaige, at this point, the best way is to hide/unhide the joint account. :slight_smile:

OK thank you for letting me know, will give it a look… :blush:

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If you hide the Joint, you will just see stats for the other account; so it’s a quick solution. :wink:

We are, of course, thinking about a better way to solve this problem. There are also people who want to track their own spending on the Joint; but that is a completely different use case and super difficult, cause we don’t have any element to understand who is who.

Would it be possible to have the total budget be based on your ‘expected income’ minus a specified amount?

That way you could specify how much you want to save each month, and Emma would work out your budget for the month based on your incomes.

This would help me, and others, who have variable incomes but still want to save a set amount each month.

Maybe as an option in addition to the standard total budget setting.

Do you mean as a starting point? Cause you can add the total budget manually.