BucketBudget

Budgeting Extention for Moneydance

BucketBudget is similar to envelope budgeting but also takes ordering into account. It treats your liquid assets as liquid, flowing them to fill the most important then the less important buckets (budgeting categories).

Setup Your Budget

BucketBudget will take income it finds in categories you tell it to look for and apply it to expense categories. Tell BucketBudget what income categories you would like to use on the planning tab.

  1. The green + sign adds a category
  2. The red X will remove a category

The same applies for expense categories you would like BucketBudget to track. Here order matters.

  1. Use the handle to drag expenses in the priority of their bucket being filled.
    1. The top expense is filled first. Once it is filled for the time frame specified, the next expense in the list is filled.
    2. Percentage (%) allocations will allocate a certain amount of incoming assets. This is useful for tithing and taxes. It will only do this up to the amount of money left in the transaction. Therefore it is recommended to put percentages as the highest priority. You can still lower the priority of the percentages if, for example, you would like to only contribute a percentage of your income to your IRA, but only after you've allocated fixed expenses. BucketBudget will do this for you, but it may be confusing because you won't necessarily receive the full percentage allocated.
  2. The timeframe of the bucket (week, month, year) affects the size of the bucket.
    1. If you have a year-sized bucket, the next bucket won't be filled until the entire amount for the year is filled for this bucket.
    2. If you have a week-sized bucket, the bucket will only be filled for the week, then flow to the next bucket. Any left over will be filled for subsequent weeks when they occur.

Track your budget

BucketBudget creates a Moneydance budget so you can use other budgeting views to track it. BucketBudget tries its best to convert your plan into a standard budget, but some concepts don't fully map, so your milage may vary. You can always check your bucket levels on the Actuals tab of BucketBudget.

A bucket appears on the right to indicate your ratio of spent to allocated. If you have extra money that you want to do a one-time transfer to another bucket, double-clicking on that bucket will allow you to do so.

BucketBudget does not analyze your entire history. Instead, it will freeze Distributed and Allocated amounts for timeframes way in the past. You can modify that time frame using the preference gear.