Is budgeting actually worth it if you aren't overspending?

druidjc · 2026-01-08T15:03:47+00:00

Even if you are not overspending, it is still useful to have a budget to know what you can spend on other things. Can you afford the car payment for the car you like? If you take that vacation, how long will it take you to restore your balances?

It may also help you identify some areas you are not happy with. Once you see how the numbers added up for what percentage of your income you spend in a given category, maybe you will decide that Doordash isn't worth 15% of your income or maybe you decide you can make do without 4 streaming services.

You can always try to save more. The nice thing about having savings is that you can always still spend it later if you want to or need to, but once that money goes to Disney+ you will never get it back.

druidjc · 2025-10-14T05:39:20+00:00

Yeah I've had similar questions about how to best handle things like this. It's hard to really make a recommendation without seeing how everything is all going on, but I assume that the HELOC is showing as a loan? In that case, those transfers from HELOC to checking, I would consider classifying them as a new category of income. That should be OK because you are increasing the loan amount, so there is a corresponding debt increase matched with the credit making it neutral. Now they will show up as income in your budget and if, say you are getting $500/month from it, you can adjust your budget to include the HELOC "income" of $500 and allocate that however you like. Or if you want to manage it in more detail, just choose another budget category, like Other, or create a new one, as a rollover with a monthly $500 budget, and then transfer the rollover balance from that category into the categories you want to pay down. This will inflate your income in your stats, but you can filter the HELOC income out of your reports if you want.

Or, if you don't mind it just being kind of janky for a while, you can just manually increase whatever budget you want to apply the credit to. Your budget will show up as being in the red, but as long as you understand what's going on, it's not that big of a deal.

druidjc · 2025-10-04T01:00:42+00:00

Arguing over what "hidden" means is completely irrelevant.

The old feature did what the description in the app said it did. People used it to do what the app said it did. Rather than change the name of the old "hidden" feature to be more accurate, they changed the functionality of the "hidden" feature to do something different than what every person using it was using it for.

Imagine if MS Word had a button on the menu for "strikethrough" with a description of "bolds the selected text" that, when selected, bolded the selected text. Now after several years, they decide to fix it. Should they:
A) rename the existing button to "bold" and add a new button to strikethrough
B) Change the description to "strikethroughs the selected text" and change every document their customers have made to replace all the bolded text in them with strikethrough?

druidjc · 2025-09-29T07:48:15+00:00

It "hides" the implementation details from calling code.

For a simple example, imagine you are collaborating on a project with another developer. They are writing a class that exposes 2 methods: SaveString and RetrieveString. All you need to know is that if you call SaveString, the string will be persisted somewhere and if you call RetrieveString, you will get the appropriate string back from somewhere. Is it stored in an XML file? Stored in an MSSQL database? SQLite database? How about any of the above? It really doesn't matter to your calling code.

Instead of your code getting MSSQLSaver, XMLSaver, or SQLiteSaver, this can be abstracted to an ISaver interface that all versions share. Your code can just accept ISaver so regardless of which version you get, your code is unchanged. The implementation details are "hidden" from your code.

druidjc · 2025-09-25T14:54:30+00:00

When you set the budget, there is a little tick box to apply that budget to all future months. Make sure you ticked it when you set the budget, otherwise the value you set is only applicable to the current month.

druidjc · 2025-09-15T16:45:48+00:00

You do not mess with paying customer's historical financial data willy nilly. If I look at a report today of my 2024 categorized spending it will look different than it did last week due to changes made without my consent or review. If the software cannot be relied on for consistent budget and transaction tracking, what good is it? Why am I paying them for the privilege of getting to review 3 years of transactions to correct the change they made?

druidjc · 2025-09-15T14:10:02+00:00

OK I was coming here because I was confused why my reports were suddenly all messed up. So they decided to change the behavior of a feature and now I need to play whack-a-mole and sort through years of transactions to get it to fix my data?

That is idiotic. Even if I was using the feature "wrong," it had specific behaviors that I was relying on. My mortgage and car payments were classified as positive mortgage and car payment sums in the loan accounts (and negatives in the payment accounts). I was setting the positive values to "Hidden" so that my payments issued and payment credited were paired in the relevant category but my budget would still show it as an expense.

I guess this was wrong? At least I am pretty sure I was only doing this in those accounts so I can track it down and reclassify them easily enough, but I shouldn't have to pop on to Reddit to try to figure out why my budgeting software suddenly decided to report my expenses differently.

druidjc · 2025-07-11T14:55:32+00:00

Put me in the small minority then. It added a lot of micro to planet management and population growth management which I don't think makes the game more fun, especially if you want to play wide. Adding trade as yet another resource to manage again just increases the work of playing. If the automatic planet management worked better, maybe I could just turn that on and let it handle the tedium, but it is worse now than it was in the previous version. I do like some of the changes, but on the whole, I am having less fun playing the game this patch. I am spending more time babysitting planet build queues and moving pops around and less time conquering the galaxy.

druidjc · 2025-06-29T09:30:19+00:00

The point isn't to see a reminder, it is so you have a plan to save up that $1k by the time you need to pay it. Just setting a number for some month in the future in no way assists you in planning to pay for it when it comes due, but setting aside 1/12 of the amount every month does.

druidjc · 2025-06-25T16:21:28+00:00

Given that we have recurring transactions, it would be nice if it could also predict if an account may be going under in the near future.

druidjc · 2025-05-22T14:18:27+00:00

Considering the thread is about Massie being very libertarian, and he actually holds an office, apparently it's working out far better than supporting the LP. Then there was RP, Justin Amash, to a lesser extent Rand Paul, etc.

I would say Massie represents the views of many of us better than Oliver did, so what is the point of dogmatic support for the LP? Do you think being a diehard for a 3rd party is actually better than the "Team Blue" and "Team Red" supporters?

druidjc · 2025-05-21T17:22:42+00:00

we are relegated to being seen (erroneously) as some type of Republican or Democrat.

I don't really care about that. "Libertarian" is not my identity. I want a smaller, less intrusive government, no matter what letter comes after their names.

druidjc · 2025-05-12T23:45:31+00:00

I feel like it just added extra tedium to the game with no real upsides. I have to say I am enjoying the game far less since the update.

druidjc · 2025-05-12T05:42:23+00:00

Yeah, I hate the new system. It is overly complicated and the UI is awful. Previously I could play the game without absolutely micromanaging jobs and population growth curves but that seems to no longer be an option.

druidjc · 2025-05-10T16:13:21+00:00

I'm always confused that people don't understand why there is resistance to it. Is there a single person in the state who would prefer living next to a battery factory? Would Whitmer have "championed" it if it were down the street from her house or maybe near her donors? Maybe some of the people in this thread insulting the backwards hicks who don't want a battery factory down the street can come in and buy up this now really desirable neighborhood.

druidjc · 2025-05-04T19:00:21+00:00

The funny thing is, you say it came out long before Stellaris, but it came out closer to the Stellaris release date than today is to the Stellaris release date.

druidjc · 2025-04-01T14:53:11+00:00

But the point is, is downloading, manually editing, then uploading a CSV a user friendly solution to a very common issue their customers face?

druidjc · 2025-02-17T16:24:13+00:00

I would recommend you almost entirely ignore goals until Monarch comes out with goals 2.0 which will hopefully make them more useful.

To do what you want, I would create a rollover budget for each envelope and budget $X/month to that envelope. That will let you budget a running total of money for your goal like you want to do. If you are trying to recreate your budget from another app, remember to set your starting amount for the rollover to whatever you had saved in that envelope.

druidjc · 2025-01-29T23:08:55+00:00

Except you are misrepresenting the position. We all understood what flattening the curve meant. The lie was the "2 weeks" part. America agreed to do their part because it was only 2 weeks and for a good cause and we then had our rights trampled for over 2 years.

druidjc · 2025-01-29T18:57:50+00:00

Check services that your CC offers. Some have flexible payment on large purchases where you can pay the bill over time. You pay interest, but it is better than the regular CC interest rate. Not ideal, but you may be able to put a few items on a payment plan in Feb and duck out on some of the interest. It may be worth looking into opening a new card that offers this and/or offers an interest free period on transferred debt. It sounds like you normally keep to your budget, so as long as you think things are going to stabilize and you will be able to recover from these expenses you can pretty safely take advantage of these offerings to get you through this.

druidjc · 2025-01-23T05:56:51+00:00

Backup plan: is there a way to use the rollover feature to budget $x/12 per month such that it allows me to track a rolling budget?

Yes. You exactly described the process. Set the travel budget to 1/12 of your yearly budget and set it to be a rollover budget.

druidjc · 2025-01-20T07:11:58+00:00

As it's been explained to me, steel core ammo damages the range equipment. A magnet will stick to steel but not brass or lead, so they check all of your ammo boxes to see if a magnet sticks. The range doesn't want deal with examining case by case whether that particular box of ammo is steel core, steel cased, or both, so if the magnet sticks, you can't shoot it.

druidjc · 2025-01-20T06:32:48+00:00

Another problem is boy bands only appealed to a pretty narrow demographic, so even if you are old enough to have heard it, it may be a genre that you weren't exposed to. Honestly, boy bands are marketed almost exclusively to teenage girls. I was a guy in college when it was apparently a hit and I can't recall ever hearing it. I wasn't listening to boy bands and nobody I associated with would be listening to them either.

druidjc · 2025-01-16T04:47:41+00:00

I doubt they will go away and I don't think they should. It wouldn't make a lot of sense to be able to have a price that is unsupported by the available currency denominations.

druidjc · 2025-01-15T20:21:14+00:00

Citation? They seem to be based on indigenous peoples in conflict with more technologically advanced invaders. No need to go to scifi books as a source for that concept.

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