Actual Budget Tips
Actual Budget is a open source privacy-focused budgeting app designed for tracking your finances. I’ve been using it for a while and have picked up a few handy tricks along the way that aren’t covered in the docs.
I also run it with all the experimental settings turned on.
Read the Docs
Don’t read this without reading the official docs first.
Build your categories for cleaning up
Think about how you want to cleanup extra money from variable budgets at the end of the month. Don’t mix budget periods. This allows you to have cleanup rules on monthly budgets and it makes it clearer what kind of progress your making for things that stretch over multiple months.
As an example, let’s say you have a house with some expenses. Put all your monthly stuff in one category, and have another category for each large expense that’s due yearly like Taxes and Insurance.
That might look something like this.
- Usual Expenses -> Home
- #schedule Power Bill
- #schedule Water Bill
- #schedule HOA
- #schedule Mortgage
- #source home
- Periodic Home Expenses -> Property Tax
- #schedule Property Tax
- #target home
- Periodic Home Expenses -> Home Insurance
- #schedule Home Insurance
A setup like this allows Actual Budget to cleanup anything left over from variable accounts like your power and water bill, and earmark that extra money for something like your end of year taxes.
Skip online accounts for now
- doesn’t work very well at the moment if you do things like split transactions. If I could match transactions, that would change things. However, the way I use it right now, every time you try to sync, it creates duplicate transactions.
Do an end of the month cleanup
To track your net worth, you’ll want to periodically reconcile all your accounts and doing it at the end of the month matches the period of the net worth report.
Clear your budgets at the beginning of a month
So, don’t just do a end of month cleanup, do a beginning of the month cleanup as well. This allows you to take into account any extra money that you have put in towards your goals and reduce your monthly contributions in categories that are healthy. I prefer to do this, and move any extra money to the next month.
When you get income, roll it forward to the next month
As soon as you get income you should be rolling it forward to the next month. Ideally, before you entered the income, you’ve already cleared up any overbudgeting for this month. If you haven’t, you’re going to get into a situation where your templated budgets aren’t accurate.
Display 3 months at time
I like to have 3 months displayed at a time so I can see my spending from the previous month as well as what I am budgeting for the next month. I usually keep it like this until I start contributing to the month after next, and then only temporally change it to do things like fund categories.
Split your loan payments
Split loan payments into 2 different transactions. One of them is a transfer to your “Off budget” loan account, and the other is a regular transaction that has a payee to the loan holder.
Figure out your budget before you fund it
This is a tip meant for people who have an established budget already.
Don’t live paycheck to paycheck. Budget for the next month before it’s fully funded so you can see what kind of progress you need to make in the current month. When your current month is fully funded, make sure you roll everything over to the next month. As you enter deposits, move that over to the next month so it’s easier to identify overspending and try to cover it from what you currently have available. If you are unable to do this and your current “To Budget” buffer becomes negative, reset future months buffers, 0 out the current month, and then re-hold for future months.