A tool to simulate the impact of a big spend

What about having a tool in the app to show how the rest of your month could look financially if you made a big spend. You put in the value of what you want to buy and it gives you feedback and advice.

E.G.

You currently have £180 until payday in 10 days, a nice £18/day, this is £3 above you average daily spend. If you buy these £80 jeans you will be left with £10/day. This is £5 below your daily average and you will really have to focus on careful budgeting and may miss out on something else or raid your savings.

What do you think?

Buy cheaper jeans.

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I treat my finance planning in a very similar way. I ‘forecast’ rather than ‘budget’ and would love to see advanced forward-planning/what-if tools available within the app to show me how I’d do in the future if I act as I am today. Let’s say the projected forecast shows I have £200 left over this month and a total of £400 left over the month after, I’d consider putting £300 into savings after being paid - leaving me with £100 ‘spare’ for birthdays/drinks/events after the next payday.

Pocketsmith does this very well on the web. Money Dashboard’s forecasting isn’t as intuitive. YNAB is solid but has only a running balance to show into the future (which is actually very, very useful in itself)

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Thanks for the feedback. Hope I don’t need to point out it was a random example…

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Thanks David. I’m going to look into those tools you mentioned. It would be so nice if it was designed into a future version of the App.

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They could integrate a magic 8 ball into the app!

“Will I have enough money to last me to the end of the month if I buy £80 jeans”

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Thanks for the suggestion of Pocketsmith, haven’t heard about that.

Something like this would be a great build into whatever new budgeting they do, something that prompts you to consider, “can I afford this”, or more realistically, “where else do I need to make sacrifices to get this”.

I like how you can do this in month with YNAB ( I know… talking about YNAB again why don’t I just marry it… )

For example I could put in a fake transaction in my Coffee Accessories budget and have to see it I can afford it already and if not, which other categories I’d need to take it out of to cover the difference.

What I like about that is it forces you to consider the damage in month , and gives you a big reg flag of “this will become debt” if you don’t deal with it (sort of…)