Buckets Full Guide

Congratulations on choosing to learn more about managing your money well! Start here to learn a simple, powerful method for budgeting your money. Then check out the Using Buckets section to begin using Buckets effectively.

Here are some guiding principles to help you budget well. If you want to jump into how to set up your budget, jump to Buckets Method.

1. Live on last month’s income

Spend this month what you earned last month. If you’re not able to do it yet, make it a goal. You really can do it—Buckets can help you!

When you start living on a month’s supply of income, start saving to have a “spare month’s supply” of income. Then, can you make it two months? Then three? Think about how far you want to take this.

2. Use the right tools to help YOU

Budgeting tools can be good for math, automating tedious things, presenting potentially hidden information, reminding, tracking trends over time, helping you see what is going where so you can adjust spending habits, and give you solid data. Budgeting tools are not good at earning money, saving money, or putting that candy bar back at the grocery store checkout. Tools are just tools. Effective budgeting is all about you.

3. Think of your budget as something that evolves

The more you practice budgeting and spend time reviewing and adjusting your habits, the better off your budget will be. Commit to keeping a learner mind-set and think of your budget as something that evolves.

4. Define what your values are

What do you value most and want to prioritize? Sitting down to make a budget is a great time to align the dollars with your heart. (If you don’t, who will?) Perhaps you want to prioritize retiring early, starting a business, or getting out of debt. Or maybe the top priority is being in agreement about money with your significant other, finishing a degree, or traveling together. Still yet, it could be contributing to a personally significant cause, simplifying to create a better work/life balance, or prioritizing health/healing. Your priority may or may not be on this list–it could have something else to do with freedom, accomplishment, security, peace, adventure, wellness or whatever.

Take your time here. Really think about what you value most. A good budget is realistic and yet incredibly hopeful as well. Make it so that it holds your greatest hopes for future life.

5. Make a habit of thinking generously

Your life will be better when you give some amount of money away. It doesn’t have to be much, but build charitable giving into your budget.

The Buckets method is a variation of what’s called “Envelope Budgeting”—the idea of cashing your paycheck and dividing the money into envelopes. You could do this with physical envelopes or the Buckets app.

Imagine you have a rain barrel catching all your income that you then divvy out to fill up smaller buckets. Each bucket is different and the fill line varies. You want to make a bucket for all of the expenses you have.

Steps

In essence, you do this every month:

1. Get a bucket
2. Make it rain!
3. Use it up
4. Adjust

Here’s each step in more detail.

1. Get a bucket

Write down all the kinds of things you buy. Be detailed or general—it’s up to you. Here’s an example list to get you started:

1. Charity
2. Groceries
3. Eating out
4. Rent/Mortgage
5. Health insurance
6. Health expenses
7. Clothing
8. Gas
9. Car insurance
10. Car repairs
11. Car registration
12. Car payment
13. Utilities
14. Fun
15. Trombone lessons
16. Tuition

Then write down things you want to save for:

1. Vacation
2. Retirement
3. A new car
4. A Costco sized jar of cashews

Now make a bucket for each thing on your lists.

A good rule of thumb is: if you know ahead of time how much an expense will be, make a separate bucket for it. For instance, I know that my rent is $1000 per month, so I have a Rent bucket. And I know that $5000 in tuition will be due in September so I make a Tuition bucket.

2. Make it rain!

At the beginning of each month fill up your buckets with what you expect to spend that month from the money you already have.

Regardless of how often you’re paid, many expenses happen on monthly or multiple of monthly cycles, so we budget monthly to prepare for those expenses.

3. Use it up

Throughout the month, as you spend money, take it out of the corresponding bucket.

4. Adjust

At the end of the month, move money between buckets so that none of the buckets have a negative balance.

Start the process over again by making any new buckets you need, kicking buckets you don’t, and filling them back up.

This is how we use Buckets to budget well. You might use Buckets differently; that’s okay. Keep reading anyway to discover some less obvious features in the app.

The very first thing we did when setting up our budget was to enter all our bank account names and balances in the Accounts tab.

Each account has a detailed view that you can get to by clicking more.

Naming accounts

To name/rename an account, click on it’s name in the table (or in the detailed view) and type in the new name.

Balance

In the account’s detailed view, change the balance by updating the value in the balance text box.

Closing accounts

If you close a bank account (in real life) you can record the account as closed in Buckets by clicking the Close button at the bottom of the account’s detailed view.

Closed accounts are hidden in certain places, but all existing transactions will be preserved.

Deleting accounts

Deleting accounts can really mess up your budget because all transactions associated with the account are also deleted. Be careful with deleting accounts.

If you want to delete an account and all its transactions, first close it, then click the Delete button.

After entering our accounts, we clicked on the Buckets tab to divide up our money into useful categories—buckets. It’s useful to think of buckets as literal buckets, filled with money, sitting around your house (or pretend they’re envelopes, if you prefer).

We make a bucket for every independent expense or goal. We currently have 63 buckets, but we didn’t start with that many. Don’t feel pressured to make a bunch. Here’s a sampling of our buckets:

• Food
• Mortgage
• Diapers
• Year’s supply
• Haircuts
• Charity
• Car repairs
• Car insurance
• Car registration
• Gas
• Vacation
• Parties
• Matt spending
• Clothing
• Clothing for kids
• Redo wood floors
• Costco membership

Bucket types

There are 5 different kinds of buckets. Change a bucket’s type by clicking the gear icon.

Plain old bucket

These buckets hold money until you take it out. We use this bucket type when we occasionally put extra money toward something.

Recurring expense

For this type of bucket, you specify how much to put in it every month. In general, buckets of this type fall into 3 categories:

1. Expenses for exact, predictable amounts (e.g. Mortgage, Car insurance, Car registration, Costco membership, etc…)
2. Expenses for varying, but similar amounts (e.g. Food, Diapers, Haircuts, etc…)
3. Expenses for which you’ve decided how much you’ll spend on a regular basis (e.g. Charity, Vacation, Parties, Matt spending, Clothing, etc…)

Save X by Y date

Use this bucket if you know how much money you’ll need for something at a certain point in the future. You enter the target amount and date and Buckets computes how much you should add per month. Example uses: Tuition, House projects, a specific vacation, etc…

Save X by depositing Z/mo

With this type, choose a target amount you want saved and how much you can afford per month and Buckets will compute when you’ll reach your goal.

Save Z/mo until Y date

Choose a target date and how much you can afford per month and Buckets will compute how much you’ll end up with by the date.

Rain

Rain is the amount of money you have available to put into different buckets and is shown in the upper left corner of your budget.

The rain amount will make the most sense only after all transactions have been categorized. If you suspect the rain number is wrong, first categorize everything.

Hover over the raindrop to see a popup showing how rain is calculated.

Expenses vs Income

Most people have more expense transactions than income transactions, so the input for new transaction amounts defaults to a negative amount. To add income, either click the big - button to the left of the input or else prefix the amount with +.

Every real life transaction for your accounts should cause a corresponding transaction in one or more Buckets. So if you charged $1 to your credit card to buy a doughnut, you should take $1 out of your Doughnut bucket.

Also, if you don’t have one already, perhaps you should make a Doughnut bucket :)

Categorizing happens in the Transactions tab.

Simple categorizing

1. Click Categorize on a transaction
2. Choose a bucket from the dropdown menu.
3. Click Save

This creates a transaction on the bucket for the same amount as the real life transaction.

Multiple buckets

1. Click Categorize
2. Choose a bucket from the dropdown menu.
3. Click on the amount next to the chosen bucket, and change it.
4. Choose another bucket from the dropdown menu that appears.
5. Click Save

This splits the amount from the real life transaction between the chosen buckets.

Income

If a transaction is income (e.g. your paycheck), instead of categorizing it for a particular bucket, click the Income button. Doing this adds that amount to your Rain for the month.

Transfer

If you transfer money between 2 accounts, you should categorize both transactions as Transfers.

For instance, if you transfer $100 from Savings and put it into Checking, you’ll have two transactions:

• -$100 from Savings
• +$100 into Checking

Categorize both of those as Transfers and then your income won’t be artificially inflated.

If you are trying to pay off debt, there are a few things Buckets can offer you.

Mortgage/Loan

Many users treat fixed-payment credit (e.g. mortgages and car loans) as expenses to the budget rather than accounts within the budget. It makes sense to mark these kinds of debt accounts as Off Budget rather than Debt.

Credit Cards and Other Debt

If you always pay off your credit card in full every statement, then you are safe to leave your credit card account as a Normal account.

If, however, you are trying to pay off a credit card balance, it may be helpful to mark the account as Debt. Click the account details and change the account type from Normal to Debt.

Debt Accounts

Changing an account to a Debt account causes two things to happen:

1. The account’s negative balance is removed from your total rain.
2. A debt payment bucket is automatically created.

Rain without debt explanation

Suppose you have the following account balances:

If your Credit Card account is a normal account, in order to get your Rain to 0, your bucket balances will have to total to -1,000 also. For example:

Budgeting with a bunch of negative amounts doesn’t match reality, though. In real life, you would never allocate a negative amount for food. So, when you mark an account as Debt it removes that debt from your rain amount so that you can budget like this:

Debt Payment Bucket

The debt payment bucket will mirror every transaction into your account. For instance:

• 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.

You are also welcome to put additional funds into the debt payment bucket as you have them.

Because of complicated deadlines associated with credit card billing, don’t assume that the amount in the payment bucket is the exact amount you should pay. See the next section for help with this.

How to categorize debt transactions

• Expenses: Categorize credit card expenses as the bucket the expense was for (e.g. food expenses should be categorized as Food)
• Payments: Categorize credit card payments as transfers (one transfer from an account and a matching transactions to the credit card account). Transactions should match your bank statements.
• Interest: Categorize credit card interest as Debt.

Syncing the payment balance with the billing cycle

Credit cards can have very complicated billing cycles. And even the simplest cycles can create confusion. In the simplest case, you’ll have one billing cycle’s payment due just as the next billing cycle ends, as shown here:

If you’re using a Debt account, this means that your debt payment bucket can often include money meant for 2 or more cycles at once. Here are some tips to help ease the confusion:

1. Pay off each billing cycle as close to the end date as you can. This limits the amount of overlap with other cycles.

2. The first month you use a Debt account, just before you make your first payment, add your payment amount to the debt payment bucket.

   For instance, if your debt payment bucket has accumulated $400 and you’re about to pay $600 for the previous billing cycle, first add $600 to your debt payment bucket to bring the balance to $1000. Make your payment and the balance should now reflect the amount due on your next cycle.

3. Consult the debt payment bucket’s transaction list and use the balance at the end of the previous billing cycle as your payment amount.

   For instance, if your billing cycle ends on the 4th of the month, though your bucket might have $690 in it now, at the end of the previous billing cycle it only had $450. Pay $450 rather than $690.

Always double check that the amount you plan to pay matches what you’ve been billed.

Another Great Idea

You’ll have more success paying off your debt if you budget for it. Consider these two ideas:

1. Create an additional recurring expense bucket and choose an amount to pay toward your debt every month. After making it rain each month, transfer the balance to the debt payment bucket.
2. After making it rain each month, put any extra money into the debt payment bucket.

Buckets provides a way to share your budget between devices, which can be summarized as:

1. Create avenues for the devices to reach each other
2. Pair the devices
3. Expose a budget file from one device
4. Save the exposed budget file on the other device

To manage sharing on Buckets Desktop:

1. Open Buckets
2. Open Preferences (macOS: ⌘ , — Window/Linux: Ctrl ,)
3. Click Sharing

To manage sharing on Buckets Mobile:

1. Open Buckets
2. On the main screen, click Sharing

Make sure Allow new connections is enabled.

Avenues

First, create an avenue for your devices to reach each other. Buckets currently supports the following avenues, which are described more below:

1. Relay client
2. Shared folder
3. Local network (server and client)

Relay client

A Buckets Relay is a server that you can use to bounce your data from one device to another. The relay does not store any budget information and so requires that both devices be online and connected to the relay at the same time to communicate.

We host a public relay at relay.budgetwithbuckets.com. Use of this relay may be revoked at any time for any reason, but we intend for it to be available. Since the code is open source, you are welcome to host your own.

Authentication

You may authenticate to the public relay with your Buckets License, if you have purchased one. Or, if you are using a trial version, you can authenticate with an email and password by clicking the Create or manage account link.

Shared folder

A shared folder is a folder that multiple devices have access to. Services such as Syncthing, Google Drive, Dropbox, iCloud, OneDrive and others provide shared folders. To use a shared folder, Buckets must have an on-device path to the folder.

Budgets are encrypted within the shared folder to maintain your privacy even while using a third-party service. However, this means that if the encryption keys (which are stored in the Buckets application data) are lost from all devices, you lose access to the budgets stored in a shared folder.

Any number of devices can use the same shared folder. Each budget must be explicitly shared with each device. For example, if Alice, Bob and Cathy are all using the same shared folder, Alice can choose to share her budget with Cathy but not with Bob.

Currently, Buckets syncs with shared folders once per minute (if anything has changed), so it can sometimes take 2-3 minutes for all devices to see and respond to updates.

Local network (server and client)

You may connect devices directly to each other on your local network, assuming they can see each other. One device will act as a server (add the server avenue) and other devices will act as clients to that server.

You will need to know the local IP address of the server and provide it when creating the Local network client avenue.

Pairing devices

The first time your devices see each other, you must pair them by comparing some images and codes. All images, colors and codes must match to guarantee that your devices are communicating securely.

Exposing budgets

After pairing devices, you may choose which budget files to expose from one device to another. Toggle the controls to expose or hide each budget file.

Saving files and merging

Once a budget is exposed to a device, you can choose to download the budget to your computer, and automatically get updated versions thereafter. To make sure your budget is always updated on each device, choose to save the incoming device over the top of your local budget. You will then be prompted to merge in any incoming changes via the Tools > Merge Budgets tool.

At this time, the choice to merge in changes is a manual process but will become more automated as time goes on.

For example, Alice wants to collaborate on the budget with Bob. They decide to use a shared folder.

1. Alice adds a shared folder avenue on her computer
2. Bob adds the same shared folder avenue on his computer
3. After a few minutes, Alice and Bob are prompted to authenticate each other (by checking that the images on both computers match)
4. Alice has her budget stored on her macOS computer at /home/alice/OurBudget.buckets
5. Alice exposes that budget to Bob
6. Bob saves Alice’s budget to his Windows computer at C:\Users\Bob\OurBudget.buckets
7. Bob then exposes that same budget back to Alice
8. Alice saves the budget Bob just shared back onto /home/alice/OurBudget.buckets

Alice and Bob can now edit the same budget on their own computers!

Saving

Almost all changes you make in Buckets automatically save immediately. That’s why there’s no save button. Currently, the only exception to this is when recording macros (because updating macros must be explicitly saved).

Calculators Everywhere!

Somewhat like a spreadsheet, every field in Buckets where you type in numbers is a calculator. For instance, you can type 2+2 or 35/12:

Notes

Accounts, transactions, buckets and bucket groups can all have searchable notes attached to them. Hover over the thing you’d like to note, then click on the sticky note icon and type away!

Multiple Windows

If you find yourself wanting to see two different sections at the same time (e.g. your buckets and your transactions), open up a new window by clicking on:

• Budget menu
• Duplicate Window

Updates in one window will automatically show in the other.

Backups

By default, Buckets will create compressed backup copies of your budget files at regular intervals. Use the App Settings to pick where you want backups to be saved, or to disable automatic backups.

To restore from a backup open App Settings, click Backups and follow the prompts.

Congratulations on choosing to learn more about managing your money well! Start here to learn a simple, powerful method for budgeting your money. Then check out the Using Buckets section to begin using Buckets effectively.

This is how we use Buckets to budget well. You might use Buckets differently; that’s okay. Keep reading anyway to discover some less obvious features in the app.

What limitations does the trial version have?

The trial version of Buckets includes these limitations:

1. The app has a little yellow sticker in the bottom left side of the window
2. Every budget will include a Buckets License bucket to help you save up for a license
3. After a while, will periodically remind you to buy the full version.

Otherwise, the trial version is identical to the full version.

What’s included with the Buckets v1 License?

A Buckets v1 License is good for v0.x (the current version) and v1.x of Buckets (we’re working toward this version). If Buckets v2 ever comes out, there will likely be a small upgrade fee for those who have a v1 License. However, Buckets v2 is very, very far in the future. We’re still trying to get to v1 😁

Is there a mobile app?

Yes, it’s read-only right now but we’re working on letting you edit on the go! Check the homepage for a link for your OS.

NOTE: This article is intended for programmers who want to write programs that interface with budget files. You don't need this if you just want to use the Buckets app.

Buckets budget files are SQLite databases. The schema is mostly self-explanatory, but this document points out some things that aren’t.

WARNING: The schema is not final and may change without warning in future versions of Buckets.

If you still have questions after reading this, feel free to chat with me.

Concurrency

It’s not a good idea to do data-manipulating operations (INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, etc…) on the same budget file from more than one process at a time. So before you manipulate data outside of Buckets, close the budget file inside Buckets.

Amounts

Amounts are stored as integers, not floats. For USD (and most other currencies), this means that amounts are integer cents.

In this example, account 1 has a balance of $6,500:

sqlite> SELECT balance FROM account WHERE id=1;
650000
sqlite> SELECT printf("%.2f", balance/100.0) AS balance FROM account WHERE id=1;
6500.00

Inserting transactions

Insert bank/account transactions into the account_transaction table. Be aware of the following:

• The fi_id column represents an account-unique ID (typically assigned by the bank) for a transaction.
• general_cat should be one of the strings "", "income", or "transfer".

Account and bucket balances are automatically updated (by SQLite triggers) when transactions are inserted/updated/deleted.

Custom tables, views and triggers

You are welcome to add custom tables, views and triggers to your budget file at your own risk. Please follow these conventions:

1. Prefix the name of all custom things with c_ (e.g. CREATE TABLE c_mytable ...)
2. When merging budgets, custom tables are combined additively. So you may need to manually delete records in both budgets.