I would love to have a place where I can create finance goals. This would be super helpful.

To add to this, it would also be nice if the goal could be set to a specific currency, not only your main currency.

This will aid in knowing how much you need if you are going overseas. for example.

I decide to go to Japan next year, and after researching i determine that i need 1,000,000 JPY. however, given the currency fluctuations when the date arrives i might need more or less of my own currency to fulfill the goal (and it might be a big difference).

So seeing my goal in JPY (even if i designate money in my currency) will be more acurate.

Some others mentioned other systems that have this feature, and I wanted to share my experience with Mint.

A budget line can be set to occur "Every Few Months (2-12)", and the anticipated future transaction month can be input as well.

Every month (leading up to the future transaction month) the budget line would look "full" without any actual transaction occurring, but indicating that that money was saved ($26 in my fictional screenshot).

Once the transaction month budget was made, the budget line would open up for the full amount ($308 in my fictional screenshot) and wait for the incoming transaction to "fill" it.

This type of flexible feature (Free text budget name, amount, selectable future month, custom frequency range) already lends itself to LunchMoney's core flexibility.

Food for thought.

Yea this is how I used YNAB and it makes total sense.

In fact I'm a bit surprised and worried that lunchmoney doesn't do it. I wonder if I'm missing a core usage philosophy.

YNAB does this very well right now, and would love to see that here. Basically, you can assign your dollars a "job". Some are budgeted towards spending and paying for stuff, and some are given the job to be saved. Is it possible to have a similar concept here? I'm not sure how that would work, because a budget in Lunch Money is basically a spreadsheet with numbers, and doesn't really take into consideration how much money you actually have in your accounts at any given time.

When is this going to be released ?

You may have seen this before, but I think Betterment has a pretty elegant solution for saving planning. They incorporate interest/market growth more, but the general idea of combining one-off large deposits with monthly contributions and a time horizon helps you easily see if your plan will let you save effectively. They have a few investment calculations that wouldn't be needed in Lunch Money's case as well.

Part of what they do is allow you to set individual "goals" within one savings account. This allows you to track progress against each goal, but also have an overflow "general savings" account for unassigned funds.

I think you should keep this particular feature simple and just say "I want my savings acct(s) to hit X by this time. am I on track or not." the buckets and goals are almost a separate part for the issues Sam mentioned. To keep the theme with the budget bars. Orange/Yellow if im not on track and need to catch up to my goal. Green if im on schedule

Big vote for me. I actually follow this system and save money. I have buckets like property tax, federal tax etc.. I even used this system to save money to get my windows replaced.

This is a very difficult feature to get right. If I'm saving for a $3,000 car, and I have $4,500 in my bank, have I saved for the car? Well, it depends on how much buffer I need in my account after spending. I feel like any budgeting tool that "holds" buckets of money for specific purchases, also needs to include a concept of a baseline buffer, and a way to determine the order in which the buckets are filled.

Personally, I don't find this system useful. I simply keep a comfortable cash buffer for "everything", and then make purchases on credit cards which I pay off in total. So, rather than saving for specific items, I just aggressively save for everything, and then spend judiciously.

I wonder if there is a way to rethink this entire problem to meet the needs of both strict per-item budgeters, as well as looser, less specifically goal-oriented users like me. Most tools tend to go too far in one direction.