Tips and tricks

Hi all,

I just wanted to share some tips with you about how I organize my finances most efficiently and how Balance Forecasting comes into play. It sounds far fetched, but by using the Auto-Updating Balance feature, I am now in my third week when I did not have to manually update my balance. It’s true! Here’s how I do it.

First, I make sure I don’t use my bank account for anything else but paying bills and I also make sure to track everything in Balance Forecasting. Second, I made it so that all of my monthly expenses that are irregular (by date or amount), such as my wireless bill end up on my credit card. That minimizes the number of irregular items you have to put into Balance Forecasting (plus, you rake up on rewards if your card has them). This means that you’ll have to create less exceptions. The only irregular expenses right now are my electricity bill and my credit card bill. Everything else occurs monthly on the same day and it’s always the same amount – all 12 of them that I currently have. As soon as I get an email that my electricity bill is due, I fire up Balance Forecasting and create an exception in the Forecasting view. I also pay the bill on the same day every month (through my bank’s bill pay), so that way I don’t have to create a date exception. Same with my credit card. Additionally, since the new credit card laws dictate that the due dates have to be on the same day every month, that works out well, because I won’t have to create a date exception for this either.

Another way I successfully use Balance Forecasting is to help pay off my high balance credit card. I can easily go into the Money view, change the amount I want to pay in the future, go to the Forecasting view and immediately see if changing the amount to pay was a good idea. If the balance goes into the negative in the future, it’s probably not such a hot idea.

Finally, with the new Reminders, I always make sure I don’t forget about a given payment in the future.

How do you use Balance Forecasting?