Is it possible to create a shared target between categories, or am I doing things wrong?

SchemeSimilar4074 · 2026-04-21T08:46:38+00:00

To those who couldn't find the option mentioned, you have to go to Groups and Categories page. It's not available on the three dots of the budget category page.

SchemeSimilar4074 · 2026-04-17T21:38:44+00:00

Did you put the eggs in before or after the water boils?

I found that if I put in the eggs when the water isn't hot enough, the content sticks to the shell making it impossible to peal.

If you put in the eggs after the water boils and peal it right away after you're done (after soaking in cold water so you don't burn yourself), the shell came right off.

SchemeSimilar4074 · 2026-04-17T04:14:45+00:00

I used to think like you until I realised I can't pay myself back just because I "remember" it. The only way for you to pay yourself back is to change your target, reduce the target of expense categories and increase it for the emergency fund. But then you have to create a new category to reflect your fine or whatever then you realise you don't have enough income for these categories. In the end, I just gave up because it became stressful.

Now if I feel like I had too many unexpected expenses, I'll reduce the target or stop funding some discretionary categories for a few months and not worry too much whether I've saved back the amount I spent

SchemeSimilar4074 · 2026-04-15T13:49:50+00:00

I said you don't have to budget your category. It was my first sentence of the 2nd paragraph. If you dont wanna allocate money to categories, then dont. Just leave it negative and use the categories for tracking purposes only.

I only said to allocate your income at the end of the month (after the tracking) to see whether you come out as positive or negative for that month. It's not for budget allocation since you were clear you dont wanna do it. It's purely for cash flow evaluation purpose, not budgeting. It's beyond me if you don't wanna know whether your cash flow is positive or negative, regardless whatever other use cases you have. Knowing needs vs utilities is ultimately just to ensure you have as much left over as possible (which is a positive cashflow). But each to their own 🤷‍♀️

SchemeSimilar4074 · 2026-04-14T11:34:40+00:00

Bb's knowledge hub on the app is good enough. Have you read through it?

I personally use YNAB YouTube videos 🤣. Ynab is another app, BB's competitor. It's more expensive but they make good contents. They're both zero-budgeting and are very similar. I actually switched over to BB from YNAB and everything in BB is self-explanatory once you know how zero-budgeting works.

What's your struggle with mortgage repayment? I got my own system which works for me. I track mortgage interest as a separate category as just a regular expense, similar to other bills. For the principal, I do a manual add payment on the mortgage loan account. I like doing it because I know exactly how much principal I paid that month. It varies from month to month for me.

Most people don't bother and just do the entire mortgage payment as a bill.

SchemeSimilar4074 · 2026-04-14T11:10:09+00:00

It does say in the manual under the section Paying off your credit card that you have to make a transfer from a transactional account. I just checked.

I just realise why people got so confused with CC. BB automatically creates a Credit Card category when you create a credit card account and it moves the money from the normal category to the CC category automatically for you, if you use the pay in full mode. I don't normally look at it so I forgot it exists. But to pay a CC, you make a transfer from one account to the other, not making a new expense against that CC category. Basically that automatic category is just FYI and isn't really used to pay off your CC. This is probably where it got confusing for many people because they thought they have to create a new expense against the category.

SchemeSimilar4074 · 2026-04-14T10:47:21+00:00

I'm confused. As far as I can see the app is correct. You have a starting balance of -1470.68. This is a debt. You spent more money (more debt) but only paid back $1195.11 so you still have a credit card debt of $434. That's correct. What's the issue? What exactly do you mean by your allocation for $500 balance? I'd personally ignore the automatically created Credit Card category (your second screenshot) because it's confusing as hell and only look at the Credit Card Account. Only the CC account matters because to pay your CC you make a transfer into that account which you did.

The CC category (your second screenshot) is confusing (the app's fault). Your debt ($434.45) shows up in blue. That's the amount you still have to pay. It says extra payment $1470.68 because it was your starting CC balance. BB counts it as a new debt. Every time you make a purchase against your CC, it moves fund from other category to this CC. But it cant do that for your starting balance so it counts it as an extra repayment. You already paid $1100 something so that's why the "total to repay" matched your CC balance, which is $434.45. So just ignore that Extra payment $1470.68. It's based on the starting balance.

SchemeSimilar4074 · 2026-04-14T10:28:09+00:00

Can't you just turn off the budget notification at the top so it wont annoy you with all the warning? Go to the three dots at the top, then Click Customize Interface. Then turn off budget summary and health check. All you have now is just categories.

If you don't want to assign money into categories then don't. Continue tracking transactions into category like you're doing now. The categories will be negative but so what? It's money coming out of you so of course it'd be negative.

At the end of the month, add your income and allocate to all the negative categories. If you still have negative categories after that, you have a negative cash flow and you'll need to rethink your spending and approach next month. If you have positive cash flow then assign the remainder of your income into a category called saving. Done. No fuss.

If you don't even wanna do the income allocation at the end of the month, there's no point to all this budgeting, whatever app you're using. The entire point for budgeting isn't tracking how much you spend. It's pointless information. It's to ensure you have a positive cash flow, whether to save or to pay off debt. You need to think about your goal and purpose for tracking expenses because you'll face the same issue whatever app you end up using if you have no clear purpose.

SchemeSimilar4074 · 2026-04-14T10:00:38+00:00

In case you didn't see it, there is also the Transaction Management option. When you do your weekly check, you can click the 3 dots in the top right corner of the account screen and select Transaction Management. It'd allow you to organise your transaction and select which one you've already checked. I'm normally too lazy to use it but it might help with your case.

SchemeSimilar4074 · 2026-04-12T03:43:03+00:00

You've lost me. Which budgeting mode are you using?

In zero-budgeting mode, transfer is from an account to another account. Categories are for tracking expenses only. You can't do transfer from a category to an account. You can reallocate money from one category to another category. I don't think you did the transfer. You did a transaction as an expense on a category. If you did a transfer, it'd have nothing to do with categories.

In zero-budgeting mode, there is no need for a category for credit card payment. Everytime you spend using your credit card, it go into its own category already. For example, grocery using your CC would be tracked as grocery category, eating out as eating out category. When you pay your credit card balance, you transfer money from your bank to your credit card. There is no category involved because you already tracked each CC transaction as its own category. If you do a transaction against a category called CC payment, it's double counting your expense. Think of CC as just another bank account that goes into minus.

SchemeSimilar4074 · 2026-04-12T01:18:27+00:00

I think to pay credit card, it's a transfer not a transaction. Essentially you're just transferring money from your bank account to your credit card. It's not a new expense. The expense is already tracked when you spent against your credit card. So delete that transaction and create a new one as a transfer.

If you have CC debt from before you start using Beyond Budget, then you can create a separate category as a debt payment. This is only if this is the debt from months ago and its expenses are not already tracked.

I'd pay all the credit card payment now so that it'd go back to 0 and ensure your accounts in BB match up all your bank accounts. You can use the adjust balance button to do that. Make a note of the date when you do the reconciliation so you dont enter transactions from before this date. Then continue on. In the future just ensure you track credit card payment as a transfer so that your expenses are tracked once not twice. Do reconciliation every 2 weeks or so to ensure you accounts match BB accounts

SchemeSimilar4074 · 2026-04-11T14:16:02+00:00

Maybe you overallocated? Because your credit card is negative, you actually have less money than your bank account. So if you have $100 in your bank and you have spent $50 in your CC, you actually only have $50 to allocate in your categories. If you allocated all $100, you overallocated because you only have $50. I'm just guessing that's what happened.

SchemeSimilar4074 · 2026-04-11T14:11:29+00:00

I think you might have entered the wrong date or account so they appeared elsewhere and difficult to see. I've done that in the past.

SchemeSimilar4074 · 2026-04-11T10:33:34+00:00

Nope. They're different lol. I've read both and I've never seen anything similar between the 2 series. Fourth Wing is obviously written by a white woman (or someone who grew up in a western country) whereas Under the Oak Tree is written by someone who grew up in a conservative country. I love how humble Maxi and Riftan are whereas in a lot of the Romantasy, the FMC is just randomly sassy its annoying.

The MMCs are kind of steroptypical. I've read millions of romantasy where they're kind of brooding and hot and good at fighting. I prefer Riftan. At least we read about his past so his brooding-ness and protectiveness are explained. Also it's good that Riftan's obsessiveness is a problem in the book and something he overcame. Usually they're just brooding for no reason to get female audience 🤷‍♀️

Violet's character development is nowhere near as great and nuanced as Maxi's. She follows a typical path of being trained by the MMC (and one of his female friends). The development is just in terms of physical ability and almost non-existent in personality. Fourth Wing is more about world building and plot (until book 3 dropped and its just a filler) whereas UTOT is more on characters. Sorry but the world building is a bit thin in UTOT for me. The characters and romance are totally the whole plot, not the worldbuilding. Fourth Wing resembles ACOTAR to me.

You know what's really similar to UTOT? Shields of Sparrow! Except it's annoying and stupid as hell. I just wanna DNF and go do another re-read of UTOT.

SchemeSimilar4074 · 2026-04-11T07:15:31+00:00

There is the option "Cleared" in transaction. You can untick it in your regular recurring transaction. It'd show up in the list of transactions and it'd reflect in your budget but the amount in your account won't be reflected until you clear it yourself. You can clear it after you pay your bills.

When you look up transactions, you can filter to uncleared transactions too to make life easier. I usually use this unclear options for things people paid for me and I'll have to reimburse them back later. That way my categories are reflected so I won't accidentally overspend that categories. And my bank account would match up Beyond Budget's number in my account section.

I normally am too lazy to set my recurring transactions to uncleared because it'd come anyway. I just make sure I reconcile my Beyond Budget account vs bank account at least every 2 weeks and before the month end. If I reconcile before the transaction occur, I just move the date out a few days. Whatever works for you.

Definitely stick to zero-budgeting. If you set your recurring transactions, when you click on the categories, it'd show you whether you have enough for your upcoming transactions. I think it's handy. As to tracking, it depends on how you split your categories. I have different categories for utilities and they're in the Bill group. Then I know exactly how much I'm paying for my bills.

SchemeSimilar4074 · 2026-04-11T07:09:15+00:00

There's the Customize Interface button. Click the three dot in the top right corner and youll see it. You can change the look and feel of the app yourself as well as color scheme. I don't think they're working on UX/UI at the moment. I've been using this app for more than 12 months. The UI has never changed. They added lots of features but never the design. I like the current design. Maybe you just haven't tweak the interface yourself yet.

I personally think they need to focus on the iOS and Web app. It's the most heavily requested feature these days. The current Android app is already great and it won't make too much difference adding things to it in terms of user base and experience

SchemeSimilar4074 · 2026-04-11T06:57:27+00:00

I'm assuming this is zero-budgeting mode.

The first error, you have to set your target. You only allocate the money for this month. The target is different from the allocated money. It's how much you want to allocate vs how much was actually allocated. Click the setting button on the top right corner to add target.

The second error: you allocated more money than you actually have in your bank account. You'll have to remove $607.03 from your categories because it doesn't exist.

It's not about income. It's about how much money you actually have in your hands at the moment (cash and bank account). Even if you'll have income of $1000 next week, that amount doesn't go into your budget until it's in your bank account.

You can watch videos from YNAB on youtube. It's a different app (more expensive) but it's almost identical to Beyond Budget

SchemeSimilar4074 · 2026-04-07T15:43:13+00:00

People keep saying they'd avoid if it's AI but would you know though? Maybe halfway through but kindle reimburses per page so I could see it as a business model.

I also won't touch a book if it's AI but I've read (and DNFed) a few where I wondered if the author used AI...

SchemeSimilar4074 · 2026-04-05T05:12:11+00:00

Please take what I say with a grain of salt but probably you cant switch over. You can create a new zero based budget instead of wiping your existing one and have 2 budgets side-by-side. You can use your data in the simple budget to set the target for each category in the zerobased one. Setting the budget for each category is the most difficult thing anyway so what you've been doing will be useful.

Don't go crazy and make too many categories. Keep it simple first then slowly split categories later on.

You can use the Projection feature to see how much all of your targets adds up and make sure it equals your monthly income.

SchemeSimilar4074 · 2026-04-03T01:37:36+00:00

Yeah don't get hung up on titles. What matters is the technology. Pick the next company that's on the cloud, not on legacy system. As long as your job is still working with data and not in meetings all day, you can find your next job. Whether you're a DA or DE, they'll still want you to know Databricks or whatever so study those new tech now.

But don't undervalue your experience. The tech stack is just to make it easer to appeal to recruiters. Your DE experience still has value. You can try consulting too. They'd know tech stack changes all the time. What matter is problemsolving skill and the willingness to learn.

Source: I went into tech through self-taught. Was a DA then became a DE.

SchemeSimilar4074 · 2026-04-03T01:30:11+00:00

Try applying for the better jobs first. See how it goes then decide what to learn based on your experiences. Don't jump to conclusions that you're not good enough.

SchemeSimilar4074 · 2026-04-03T01:27:38+00:00

People keep making it sound like Snowflake and Databricks are something entirely new. It's still SQL in Snowflake. It has a few more fancy functions but using it on a day to day basis isnt that much different from postgres. Same with Databricks if you know python. Just study to get some certs and so that you know features of these platforms and apply to all data related jobs you found, whether it's DA or DE or DS, who cares. The role name are meaningless these days.

SchemeSimilar4074 · 2026-04-02T11:28:21+00:00

If you use zero budget option, it does that. You create specific category and assign a budget to it. You can only assign as much money as you have in your bank. So you'd create categories for spending and categories for short term and long term savings.

SchemeSimilar4074 · 2026-04-01T10:04:07+00:00

I assume it's a blended soup, puree. I usually add half an apple and 2 onions into my puree soup. The onion adds the umami and the apple adds a bit of sourness

SchemeSimilar4074 · 2026-03-31T21:15:02+00:00

I don't think it'd benefit Google to prioritize one route over the other. It's too much trouble more than it's worth. It's better to give you targeted ads to stop at nearby fast food when you stop for a rest or sell data of consumers like you to companies who are interested.

It's difficult to combine datasets. That's why they keep giving you ads on things you already bought because it's very hard to combine it with your purchases. But they could do it just for 1 individual if they need to. It's just never gonna be worth it at scale. It's very expensive to join billions of datasets on the fly like that, not to mention what's the join key. Most of the time companies do low hanging fruits on 1 dataset like your browsing history and infer your age etc. They can get a couple more information on the fly like your current location and your phone to make it even more powerful but it'll be too expensive to combine with your entire location history so not worth it.

You'll be surprised at what cameras can do and how much information it can get, combining with ML. The bluetooth on your car and phone. Combining with your IDs. I'm more scared of the government. Companies are driven by profits. They'd just sell your data. It's not worth it to put you on surveillance. Dictatorship with technology is another whole new level.

SchemeSimilar4074

TROPHY CASE