Savings Goal Tracker

When managing a budget, a useful technique is to treat money set aside for savings as an expense because putting money into savings means that the money is leaving your spending account. So, if you have a general budget category called To Savings or maybe a main category called To Savings with a few different sub-categories like Emergency Fund, Vacation, Christmas, it means that the money is leaving your spending account to be placed into these specific separate "Savings Accounts" or "Goals".

For example, let's say that in your budget spreadsheet or software, you have a "To Savings" category where you have chosen to funnel about $250 per month. In the Savings Goal Tracker, you can assign a specific percentage (%) to each goal so that the $250 deposit gets divided based on whatever priority you have set for your goals. You can do this with deposits, interest earned, and even withdrawals. The instructions worksheet within the spreadsheet explains how to do this.

Why isn't it more automated? Short answer: I avoid using VBA macros in spreadsheets (for many reasons). Unlike a spending account, you probably make fairly infrequent withdrawals and deposits to your savings account. So, adding 2 or three transactions per month manually is pretty simple. For recurring identical deposits, you can copy a row and then insert the copied row, then change the date.

My guess is that you might have a Savings Account, possibly a Money Market Account (for a slightly better rate), and probably a 401(k), IRA, CD, etc.

You might lump all your short- and medium-term savings into one or two savings accounts. You probably keep your retirement in a 401(k) and IRA(s) and maybe you have a separate account for college savings.

The point is that you probably do not use a separate account for your Vacation, Christmas, Travel, Furniture, New Car, Down Payment on a Home, and other savings goals. And that's okay. The savings goal tracker allows you to use a single savings account while tracking multiple goals.

Are you familiar with what a "Split" transaction is? In Quicken, this is how you can allocate a single transaction to multiple budget categories.

Well, think of a Deposit in the Savings Goal Tracker as a Split transaction. Instead of just entering the total deposit amount in the register, you actually Split the amount into your various savings goals.

Interest earned can also be "split" or "allocated" to different goals. However, interest is often such a small amount, you might just choose to have it go toward one specific goal.

Even Withdrawals can be recorded as coming from multiple goals. This might be necessary if you were using the savings tracker to save for a few different irregular expenses (like a semi-annual insurance bill, quarterly estimated taxes, Christmas, etc.) and wanted to make a single transfer into your spending account to make payments on more than one expense.