Hello!
I wanted to mention a problem I noticed with the new Targets feature.
Here’s the problem: I have a yearly travel budget which I spend sporadically throughout the year. This makes a monthly budget for this category useless as some months I spend £0 and others I’ll spend £500+. This will be an issue for any category where spend is sporadic.
Possible solution: allow for a yearly budget option toggle on a per-category basis.
What do you think?
You can edit your target for this category each time you enter a new month (& disable it when not on holiday) & my assumption is, although it’s not been confirmed that the old targets won’t be affected.
Would that work for you?
Weekly, monthly and custom date ranges for targets are already in development, but that’s for the whole targets feature as one date range.
Having a yearly target for travel would make sense although separate virtual accounts are being planned for the future, which might even have their own targets. Have you considered using a virtual account for travel when the feature becomes available?
The other option is that you divide your yearly target by 12 and we can push the idea forward that you can enable an option for the remaining balance of that category to roll over to the following month and if you do go over, it’s reduced for the following month. Although that idea is less ideal than the former.
I hadn’t heard about the virtual account. It’s interesting but sounds a bit like a workaround. I would prefer getting the ability to select a different timeframe for each category’s target.
Your answer brings up an interesting question: what do you consider a “holiday expense”?
We seem to see it differently.
For me, a holiday expense is anything that concerns the holiday that is out of the ordinary. So trains/flights/hotels will all be holiday expenses. But food or shopping during the trip will not be holiday expenses. Hence, for me, those holiday expenses occur usually before the holiday takes place.
The monthly budget I’ve setup now for holiday expenses is my yearly budget divided by 12. But this isn’t satisfactory. Re-adjusting the monthly budget for holidays at the beginning of each month doesn’t really help as I’d just be re-dividing the remainder of my yearly budget by 12…unless you were thinking I should add my entire remaining yearly budget as my monthly budget and update it monthly? Again, all this requires calculation on my part which defeats the help provided by the feature and turns the holiday target into nothing other than a manual reminder.
Disabling the target while on holiday won’t help because of my understanding of the holiday category as explained above. I usually don’t have holiday expenses during the trip itself.
Thanks for the detailed explanation, it’s interesting to dig into the use case in more detail. I can’t see a way around the manual recalculation & adjustment of the monthly targets, that would be necessary for the approach that I suggested, either. Your feature sounds good to me!
Here’s Ole (head of product management for iOS I think’s) thoughts on this issue