I’ve Paid For This Twice Already…

I have a thinking hangover

Have you ever not been able to figure out something, and you think about it and think about it and do more and more scenarios and calculations (for me it is usually math that makes my head hurt lol), and finally, the light dawns and it all makes sense, but your brain kind of aches from thinking so hard for a while after?

That is what I call a thinking hangover. And I have a particularly bad one right now.

Our budget wasn’t adding up. The “budget” end was adding up, but when I compared our August actual figures to my bank account, the bank account had more money than I thought it should. Because the bank had more and not less, I wasn’t working quite as hard or quite as nervous as I might have been if it was the other way around, but I still needed to understand what was going on.

After many different calculations and looking at numbers and digging through July and August I discovered what was going on. I carried forward some money from July into August for irregular expenses, but I never put that into my budget sheet anywhere (for, it isn’t exactly income all over again, it’d already been recorded as income when we earned it) and that amount corresponded to how much my bank account is off by.

So my very inelegant solution for right now is to change how I deal with that end of month surplus from a bookkeeping standpoint. I am entering the total “surplus” on day 1 of the next month as income, and then I will enter the amount I snowflake at the first paycheck into my expenses under snowflaking as well. The difference between that snowflake amount and the total surplus amount is what I am carrying over for irregular expenses from one month to the next.

Now, this I think makes it so that I can’t use my budgeting program as a “year” tool, just a “month” tool. It will make each month completely reconcile with my bank account though, which is what I really need. I can’t be keeping random this or that amounts in my head, that defeats the purpose of the budget. I’ll think more about if there is a better actual solution to this once the thinking hangover subsides a bit.

I went back and treated August this way, entering July’s surplus in as an income item, entering in the amount I put in emergency fund savings and also the amount I snowflaked as expenses, and now August reconciles with my bank account. And it turns out that my surplus in August was actually about $50 more than I had originally calculated just looking at my budget figures. But, I’m still not convinced I’ve got all the bugs worked out and everything is completely adding up, and I would hate to snowflake too much and get caught with some huge shortfall because I messed up. So, I am going to keep with my original plan of snowflaking a $152.08 surplus from last month this Friday, and see how this month goes. If I am now on the right track and I’ve got everything accounted for going forward, at the end of September anything I didn’t snowflake from August will end up as part of September’s surplus (come on, surplus!) and I will snowflake it then.

I feel like there has to be a better solution than this but it isn’t coming to me right now, and this solution does make all the numbers actually agree and reconcile with each other, at least on a month by month basis. We’ll see what it looks like at the end of September and if my weird hack works. Have I mentioned I hate accounting for irregular expenses? And we have a whole ton of them due this month and next, it ought to be delightful to figure out. Ugh.

~J

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