[Feature] Combine income forecasting with rollover budgets

[brasswood]

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• Would you like to implement this feature?

Pitch: what problem are you trying to solve?

I like the idea of the envelope budgeting system. However, given my (expected) income, I want an easy way to see if my spending plan is sustainable, and if so, for how long. This is so that as my planned expenses change, I can figure out ahead of time how I will need to adjust spending habits in my other categories.

Example: I have $10,000 in savings and expect to make an income of $1,000/mo. My rent and utilities are $700/mo, groceries $150/mo, I want to save $150/mo for retirement, and I want to save $200/mo as my expected average healthcare expenses. I also want to spend $100/mo on eating out, $100/mo on gas, and $100/mo on video games. Is this sustainable? It is easy to see that it isn't forever as my expenses exceed my income. But I do have some savings, so how long is it sustainable? In this scenario, I will "bleed" $500/mo, meaning I will run out of money in 20 months. Plenty of time to improve my means to support my lavish lifestyle.

Currently, all envelope budgeting programs I know of do not allow you to forecast income. All you can see is that you have $10,000 available to spend right now. If you just use a rollover budgeting system like this, you won't be able to see that you are bleeding money until you are bleeding it. And you won't even see it unless you check up on your spending reports.

Sure, I could use a spreadsheet in addition to the budgeting software to plan my income and spending. But budgets are not static. What if I take on a new expense, or the price of groceries goes up? Now I have to go update the information in both my spreadsheet and my budgeting app? I don't like that. I think the point of having a budgeting/personal finance app is to have all of the information I want readily available in one place. If the price of groceries goes up and I overspend, I want one place to see 1) how I am going to cover this right now and 2) how this might affect my future plans.

Describe your ideal solution to this problem

Essentially, I would like to combine the best of both worlds from rollover budgets and report budgets. To me, this means combining the ability to forecast income from report budgets with the ability to create "savings categories" from rollover budgets. My ideal implementation is the report budgets, except that categories roll over from previous months.

The current behavior of report budgets is for the balance for each category to reset to 0 each month, no rollover. This makes sense for most of my categories; if I have leftover money at the end of the month, it's just because I over-estimated my spending, and I want to start a new estimate for the next month. However, for the healthcare category, if I have leftover money at the end of the month, it's because I'm actually stashing that money, and I want to continue stashing on top of that rather than resetting the balance back to 0.

I don't know what the best approach to this would be. We could either add income forecasting to rollover budgets, add rollovers to report budgets, or make an entirely new mode with the features I'm asking for.

Teaching and learning

No response

[github-actions]

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This repository uses lodash style issue management for enhancements. That means enhancement issues are automatically closed. This doesn’t mean we don’t accept feature requests, though! We will consider implementing ones that receive many upvotes, and we welcome contributions for any feature requests marked as needing votes (just post a comment first so we can help you make a successful contribution).

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