How to bucket out savings for different things?

wiseonesomeofthetime

I use the best interest rate paying easy access savings account and a spreadsheet. Like many on here by the look of it.

Depends really whether you are more concerned with separation of pots, over interest to be earned.

Let's be honest though, interest rates for easy access savings are not going to be mind blowing.

For the boiler at £3000, however, if you think it will take say 12 months to save for it, consider a regular saver. There are a few out there offering higher rates, marginally, than easy access savers at the moment.

Eco_Miser

gsmh said:

IvanOpinion said:

I must be old fashioned ... what is wrong with a spreadsheet.  That is all I use to manage money.

A spreadsheet is great for a specific task and for modelling, but why not use software which has been written specifically to manage your finances? A spreadsheet makes the job more difficult surely. I say this as an IT teacher who has taught such things for many years. What about direct debits? Say you have four monthly Council Tax debits left - how is this reflected in your spreadsheet? What about reconciling transactions as they appear in your bank account? How can you see a reconciled and actual balance? So many questions . . .

I can set up a spreadsheet to do what I want it to do.  Other people's software does what they want it to do, the way they want to do it.  I have a page that lists all expected direct debits and standing orders, another that lists all expected income, and several that list all bank transactions, one for each current and upcoming month, taking the values from those pages.  I have another sheet that records actual bank transactions from online statements. If the account totals on that sheet don't match the predicted account totals, I go looking for the discrepancy. 
I don't understand the question about 'four monthly Council Tax debits left'. I have ten such debits a year for the rest of my life left - so about 300.

IvanOpinion

gsmh said:

IvanOpinion said:

I must be old fashioned ... what is wrong with a spreadsheet.  That is all I use to manage money.

A spreadsheet is great for a specific task and for modelling, but why not use software which has been written specifically to manage your finances? A spreadsheet makes the job more difficult surely. I say this as an IT teacher who has taught such things for many years. What about direct debits? Say you have four monthly Council Tax debits left - how is this reflected in your spreadsheet? What about reconciling transactions as they appear in your bank account? How can you see a reconciled and actual balance? So many questions . . .

While I can see where you are coming from I would disagree (and I say that as someone who used to develop personal and commercial accounting software).  You just have to work out a system that suits yourself - and a spreadsheet gives you the flexibility to do that.  I have been maintaining my current spreadsheet now since 2000.  Over time it has evolved and new tabs added and new ways of doing things tried out.  

Over the Christmas period I lay out anticipated expenses for each month for the next year (rough back of fag packet calculations) and then throughout the year I maintain it.  It currently manages my day-to-day income, expenditure, direct debits, foreign currency rates, investments, nett worth, holiday expenditure, insurance details and so much more

gsmh

Eco_Miser said:

I don't understand the question about 'four monthly Council Tax debits left'. I have ten such debits a year for the rest of my life left - so about 300.

When I see my monthly income go into my bank account, I add the credit to the app I use  and I see all my recurring payments leave the account in the app automatically. So if I have four payments left of anything after payment five it automatically stops and I don't see it in month 5. It's great a spreadsheet works for you and I use a spreadsheet for long-term planning, but for recording day-to day or recurring debits and reconciling things as they appear in my bank account I have no desire to re-invent the wheel. It is very much a case of finding the software which suits you and I have found nothing better than MMEX.

Eco_Miser

gsmh said:

Eco_Miser said:

I don't understand the question about 'four monthly Council Tax debits left'. I have ten such debits a year for the rest of my life left - so about 300.

So if I have four payments left of anything after payment five it automatically stops and I don't see it in month 5.

Neither do I, but in the case of Council Tax it re-appears two months later, with higher amounts once I've had the new tax bill, and made the change on the master payments page, but with the old amount or a guesstimate until then.
I started the spreadsheet late last millennium, when I upgraded from a book, though it's grown in scope and complexity since then.

gsmh

IvanOpinion said:

While I can see where you are coming from I would disagree

So would you suggest we shouldn't use finance software and should instead use a spreadsheet? Do you use a text editor with markup for documents too? Something like LaTeX? There are those who do, and I have used LaTeX myself in the past, but sometimes life is too short not to use an off-the-shelf product that fits the bill. There are things I do on a computer that I have created myself and involve a long workflow, but I honestly wouldn't recommend others do the same. They give me enormous pleasure and there's nothing like using something you've developed yourself.

IvanOpinion

gsmh said:

IvanOpinion said:

While I can see where you are coming from I would disagree

So would you suggest we shouldn't use finance software and should instead use a spreadsheet? Do you use a text editor with markup for documents too? Something like LaTeX? There are those who do, and I have used LaTeX myself in the past, but sometimes life is too short not to use an off-the-shelf product that fits the bill. There are things I do on a computer that I have created myself and involve a long workflow, but I honestly wouldn't recommend others do the same. They give me enormous pleasure and there's nothing like using something you've developed yourself.

Not at all, if you have lots of free time on your hands then go ahead and use whatever software you like.
However going back to the original question it was about bucketing out savings.  I know all these youngsters have nothing but free time on their hands to have lots of accounts or 'pots' and get addicted to moving tiny amounts between pots to make fancy charts and graphs in pretty colours that tell them ... very little.  To me that is all a total waste of time.

The simplest, cheapest and easiest solution to this is simply to use a spreadsheet.  Your bank account says £100, your spreadsheet says how it is proportioned. It is then up to your own discipline and management to handle that information.

PS: Never used LaTeX, we have always used Adobe products.  But your analogy is wrong.  The premise of the original question was something quick and easy, would you bother firing up LaTeX to write a note to your milkman?  Life is too short to waste time on complex software that is basically a sledgehammer to crack a tiny little nut, especially when you have actual nutcrackers freely available. But then again, watching the youngsters in work managing their 'pots' they have far too much free time on their hands.

gsmh

IvanOpinion said:Life is too short to waste time on complex software that is basically a sledgehammer to crack a tiny little nut, especially when you have actual nutcrackers freely available.

That is exactly my point! Downloading a free money manager like MMEX and setting up an account and a few dummy accounts (pots) would take literally minutes and would require no understanding of spreadsheets. That is exactly why I recommended it. I could confidently say nearly everyone I know would struggle to set up a spreadsheet but could manage a simple finance app.

IvanOpinion

gsmh said:

IvanOpinion said:Life is too short to waste time on complex software that is basically a sledgehammer to crack a tiny little nut, especially when you have actual nutcrackers freely available.

That is exactly my point! Downloading a free money manager like MMEX and setting up an account and a few dummy accounts (pots) would take literally minutes and would require no understanding of spreadsheets. That is exactly why I recommended it. I could confidently say nearly everyone I know would struggle to set up a spreadsheet but could manage a simple finance app.

Maybe the education system is letting them down - spreadsheets are one of the easiest tools out there.

Boa21

I use Microsoft Money, which I know is no longer sold or supported, but you can get copies on line from ebay and the likes.

It's great for managing multiple accounts for for being able to 'move money' between the accounts. But the biggest benefit is setting up all the standing orders and other regular payments. On payday, I enter the amount that goes into the account and then clear all the regular payments through to the next payday. This way you can see how much money is available.

For money set aside for a specific purpose you can assign a 'payment' in any given account for some point in the future. Say, Christmas spend. You can increase the amount each month so it grows and while the money still sits in your (hopefully) interest bearing account but it appears as spent, so psychologically it's not there to use that month.

I also do most of my grocery shopping with a cashback credit card, but each spend is matched by an assignment from my current account to the next months credit card bill, so again, still sitting in my current account but spent psychologically.

You have to be really dilligent at entering every transaction, I'm a pain for wanting receipts for contactless payments. It's also useful for balancing the account against the statement each month - so no rogue direct debits and so on.

I've long thought that Martin should buy the rights to this orphan software and sell it cheap. It's an absolute essential tool for managing my finances.