Automatic Credit Card bill estimation

Fair enough… And I’ll add in support of deferring this idea that there are a billion and one things your programmer(s) have to do.  :D

ALSO: it’s a quickly thought out idea that would add a _very_ special case just for fully-paid-off credit cards. Probably something even better could be done, if I bothered to think it through.

Frankly, though, I don’t think timing is a real problem. The BIG purpose of this idea isn’t to produce a perfect day-by-day prediction, but rather to allow me to make sure the right amount of money is in the right place — if the actuall bill needs to be paid a few days later than planned nothing is going to explode. The big deal is (for example) that I know that $2000 balance sitting in the account two months from now is NOT available for discretionary spending, because it’s going to be spent to pay the unusually high credit card bill caused by several quarterly bills coming in at the same time on the previous month.

But… like I said… there’s probably a better way.

-Wm

I can see a problem with that… I don’t need to keep that amount of money in my account forever; I only need to make sure it’s there in time for the bill — just like every other planned expense. It seems like a natural use for a planned expense.

However, while reading some of the old forum messages, I found one old idea that might be better than mine — the commentor called it a “snowball” program, but let’s just call it a “debt planner”. It’d be a menu selection that would ask you some questions, then generate calendar entries for the forseeable future. In addition to asking you for any overdue balances on the accounts CalendarBudget knows about, it would also ask for other debts, their amounts, their due dates, whether there’s special zero-interest treatement for bills paid on time… It would also ask you for your priorities (pay down debt ASAP, maintain position, clear only the high-interest debts, and so on) and strategy (optimal, Ramsey Snowball, etc).  Then it would generate transfers that are calculated based on priorities.

If the script is run a second time, it would read in the existing transfers and pre-fill the plan with the data implied by them (yes, the entries would have to include some kind of marker so that script would know how to look for them).

That’s kind of blue sky, but it seems useful.

As I see this (I should read this topic for another 3-4 times to fully understand the need of wtanksleyjr) – you should make some RESERVATION of your funds. I would open another “virtual” account (named RESERVATION, for example) and transfer funds onto it! Also, I would make another transfer (back) on the exact date of credit pay-off. You could look at it as some savings account.

I tried this — it doesn’t work, because it throws off all of the CalendarBudget bank reconciliation.

For a future bill with a known date there’s another option — simply manually update the future bill. As long as you remember to scroll a couple months ahead to look for negative cash balances you’ll be OK. It’s a pity that’s a lot of manual work if you use a credit card a lot, but it’s better than nothing.

And odds are that your credit bill will be pretty much the same every month, so perhaps you can get away with only entering a guess, and then updating the guess when the bill arrives.

In the bad old days, this would be handled by double-entry accounting. Double-entry is a horrible user interface for 99% of personal finance — but there’s something to learn from it.

I’ve been working on that for a long time, designing a personal finance website, but now that I’ve found CalendarBudget I don’t have the energy — it solves 90% of my “wants”.