If you have debt, Buckets v0.50.0 offers better help managing it. Either enable Beta Updates, download it here or wait for the stable release in a week or two.

Negative rain, be gone!

Suppose you have $1,000 in Savings and a credit card debt of $3,000. That might look like this in Buckets:

That negative rain amount makes budgeting difficult. How do you allocate -$2,000 into buckets?

“Let’s see, I’ll spend -$400 on food this month, -$500 on rent…”

Instead, you can now change the Credit Card account to a Debt account and budget the money you do have, debt notwithstanding:

With this setup, you can split the $1000 you have into buckets of your choosing.

Debt payment bucket

A second effect of changing an account to a Debt account is the automatic creation of a debt payment bucket. This bucket is meant to collect funds until it’s time to make a payment.

The debt payment bucket will mirror every transaction into your Debt account. It follows these 2 simple rules:

  • if you deposit $50 into your debt account, the payment bucket balance will decrease by $50 indicating that your pending payment has gone down.
  • if you withdraw $50 from your debt account, the payment bucket balance will increase by $50 indicating that your pending payment has gone up.

In addition, you can add money to the debt payment bucket just like any ordinary bucket.

Because many debt accounts bill a month behind (e.g. on July 25th you pay for transactions that happened May 25th - June 25th) it can be tricky to get the debt payment bucket balance to accurately tell you what you should pay on your card. See the guide article for tips on how to manage this.

For even more details (or if this blog post is outdated) the most up-to-date documentation is in the guide.

Happy budgeting!

— Matt