Zero-based budgeting | Budget

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Zero-based budgeting

Jen

Support zero-based, or the envelope method of budgeting

February 1, 2021

Matthew

Can’t wait to see this implemented, this is my primary use case for any personal finance tool

Ian Carson

Progress bars on the actual budget screen are a great feature too for this kind of thing as you can see if your on track or off track on long term budget goals.

Jan

I'd so much love to use lunch money, but the lack of zero-based budgeting and the lack of possibility to prepare for larger expanses is a real deal breaker for me.

Past User 16488

Hello! The lack of this feature is the only thing holding me from switching from Ynab to LM. I use a lot of currencies in YNAB, which is an absolute pain in that software, but without envelopes or zero budgeting I am lost.

Jen

Merged in a post:

Transfer budget from a category to another

Past User 21866

It would be great to be able to transfer budget from a category to another, in just a click or two on an overspent or underspent amount (and have the budget of each category change accordingly), as it is done in YNAB. This is the last thing refraining me to jump aboard and quit YNAB.

March 29, 2023

May 7, 2023

Past User 21605

It wouldn't be that difficult, at first glance, to add a couple of columns to the home screen for "total budgeted" and "% of budget"
That would get us most of the way there. A way to implement savings goals would be helpful too to allow for easier projection of required budgeted amounts. 
Some tweaking to the Budget screen that takes this into account would make sense, for example adding the ability to:
-budget the _average_ spent over the last X period of time
-and to allow for rollover as an independent option instead of tied to only being a fixed amount. (ie, add a checkbox below the dropdown to add "with rollover" without blowing up the number of choices in the dropdown.)
-To add savings goals to the budgeted amount (for example, "spent plus savings goals" should probably be implemented as choosing "spent" in the dropdown and selecting "plus savings goals" as a checkbox.)
What is less clear is how to handle robbing from a savings goal by overspending. Maybe this is too complex and savings goals should be separate categories, but this would lead to massive category bloat, especially without the ability to Hide a category from the budget list (implication, add a "hidden categories" section at the bottom of the list)

Past User 21053

Envelope budgeting functionally would take LM to the next level!

Past User 19445

Hi Jen, is the zero-based budgeting feature will be added soon?

That is the only thing holding me to switch from YNAB - Would appreciate your feedback on a timeline.

Past User 15882

I never heard of this term tbh, but I think that is exactly what I need too :-) I am checking out LM again and after my setup the Home Overview screen confused me, until I realized it only shows projected expenses and budgets are not counted in.

What is the sense in sitting down and setting a budget for a month, if I can't see anywhere, how much is budgeted in total that month and how much.

Past User 14889

I've been using LunchMoney for 2 weeks and I like it very much. However, not being able to enforce Envelope budgeting is the one big thing I miss from YNAB, which is holding me on the verge of switching back.
The lack of constraints/indications when I'm "messing up" my Zero Dollar method confuses me, and I end up spending much more time than I'd like in the app double/tripple checking things manually, to ensure everything matches to Zero. IMO two things are making it complicated for me.
1st, if the available cash on an account is directly modified intentionally (or worse, by accident), no "adjustment" transaction is created. For many days I thought a bug was keeping my available cash on an account out of sync with the result from summing all transactions, until I realized the extra amount I had added during a "reconcile" session was kept "internally" without any explicit notice.
2nd, I miss the YNAB big red warning when Ive Budgeted more than I have, and even the gentle green warning of "there's money available to budget".
I think an MVP of ZeroBased budgeting would be accomplished by something that yells at you when for a given month "Available Cash + Expected Income - Budgeted" differs from 0, and that when you manually adjust the available cash on an account, a "Manual Adjustment" transaction is added for the difference amount, so that you can categorize it and keep track of every penny.

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