Financier Forums

I used to have a regular payee MarcParc. Today I made a purchase and the payee is MARC. Every time I try to type MARC, it autofills to MarcParc. Even if I put a bunch of spaces after the last letter. Is there a way to fix this?

I just go approved for the Chase Sapphire Reserve. For at least the first year, and probably in subsequent years, I will get a lot of value out of the benefits even taking into consideration the very high annual fee. They gave me a pretty high credit limit. And it's got me thinking maybe I should a card. These are my limits right now.

Chase Sapphire Reserve - $32K
Chase Freedom - $14K
Capital One Mastercard (oldest line of credit) - $17K
Citi Double Cash - $15K
Target Redcard - $2.5K
Best Buy (store card, not Visa) - $4K
Amex Blue Cash Preferred - $17
Amex Green - No preset spending limit

Not taking into account the new card, I average about 5% utilization across all cards, though it is generally concentrated on the Double Cash and the Amex Blue. With the new card, my credit lines total about 90% of my gross salary. I'm a paid in full user so I don't need the credit to get by.

I'm thinking I might close the Best Buy card. I only got it because it gave me 10% off a new TV that I bought when I moved back to the US in 2015. It was in store rewards, but I was able to use the points to pay for some other things I needed to replace after being gone for 3 years. I don't really shop there on a regular basis.

I'm torn. Having missed the deadline to apply for the Chase Sapphire Reserve when they were still offering the 100K points sign up bonus, I still think it could be worth it (I know that you can still get the big bonus if you go into a Chase bank, but the nearest one to me is 90 miles away, plus the offer ends Mar 12 and I won't be in the US until March 10).

I'm currently in the middle of an international business trip that will total about 7 weeks, so I could have been racking up a ton of points. I will go home for a few weeks and then come back for a month. Then go home for a few weeks and come back for a month. So if I had the card by my next trip, I could be earning triple points on my $250/night hotel plus I'd make the minimum spend for the 50K points sign up bonus in a heartbeat. 3x the points on dining and travel beat all of my other cards for those categories except for potential quarterly bonus categories on my Chase Freedom and random special offers on my Amex.

The downsides - it has an annual fee of $450. What if I don't travel as much next year? I mean, I'm sure I'd travel enough to get the $300 travel credit which would help offset the annual fee. But if I'm not traveling a lot, then the no fees on foreign transactions aren't worth the fee (I have an old Capital One card that doesn't charge international transaction fees and has no annual fee). I won't need to renew my Global Entry until 2022, though I guess you could count the benefit as setting aside $25/year for this eventual cost. Not traveling a lot also means no need for the Priority Pass membership that is included for lounge access during stupid 7 hour layovers. Also, I want to refinance. I just have been traveling so much for work since November that I haven't been able to focus. A new card will ding my FICO. According to one credit card's website, my current score is 831. According to another credit card's site, it's 814. Though if I did apply for the card right now, by the time I get around to refinancing, my score may have recovered.

I don't have access to an HSA in my current job. I max out one of my IRAs each year (my ability to contribute to a Roth IRA can vary from year to year and my traditional IRA is pretty big so the backdoor conversion doesn't make sense right now). 2012-2015 I maxed out my 401(k). I was unemployed from September 2015 - mid-March 2016 so I didn't max it out last year, but based on the percentage I have taken out, if I had been working for 12 months in 2016, it would have been maxed out. I also have $200/mo taken from my checking account and deposited into my investment accounts.

If I did have an HSA, I wouldn't be using it as a retirement vehicle until I had a pretty large chunk of money saved up for actual medical expenses. Right now, my Out of Pocket Max is $2000/year so I have the full amount for this year (Oct 1 2016 - Sep 30 2017), minus the $12 I've spent so far on prescriptions and I have $1000 saved for next year (Oct 1 2017 - Sep 30). As I receive FSA reimbursements (I pay on a card with 2% cashback and submit claims), I usually budget them to the next year's OOPM category. So between the $800 in FSA that I have for the current plan year and unused medical category expenditures for this year, by the time the new plan year starts, I'll have all of the 2017/2018 OOPM saved plus a chunk of 2018/2019. My company locked in the insurance rates through 2019 or 2020 I believe. Of course if I leave this job I may end up somewhere else that has a higher OOPM and I'll have to shift around. I'm not looking to leave my company, but we implement government contracts so I go where the contracts go which could mean changing employers.

It happened again. I opened my budget at lunch to add in a purchase and saw $4.08 that needed to be budgeted in the January header. I was 100% sure I had already budgeted that because it was a cash back reward I got for paying my cable bill with my Amex and I reconciled the Amex over the weekend. I closed the tab (but not the browser - Firefox) and opened a new tab and opened Financier again and the header for January had my to be budgeted back down at $0.

This hasn't happened on my home computer at all, just my work one. Don't know if that makes a difference.

Quote from: Joel on January 06, 2017, 09:02:10 AM
For me, the question is simple. Are all paychecks this month marked as available next month?

For me too because I'm using the old fashioned YNAB definition of buffer which isn't about a financial cushion, it's about an administrative cushion. I have a financial cushion - but that's a separate loss of income category.

Yeah, I guess I don't care too much what the report says in that regard - I care how much I spend on Clothing and Accessories (too much! darn you handbag obsession!), not how I came up with the money to allocate to that category.

Quote from: Alex on January 04, 2017, 07:50:42 AM
Like a UUID? That's weird and annoying. Definitely shouldn't be happening. Means your payees weren't syncing properly.

I'm going to add this to my list of things to keep an eye out for. Please post again if it crops up again. Same goes for everyone else!

Ah, yes UUID.

As a follow-up, this evening when I got home, I opened up Financier on my home computer and the 3 transactions that I entered today at work had gobbledygook for the Payees but everything else was fine.

I encountered some syncing issues while make some updates during my lunch hour today. I was updating cleared transactions and reconciling on one of my cards and inputting some clothes that I had just ordered. Wasn't really looking at anything else. I'm also running YNAB 4 in parallel and happened to notice that the amount remaining in my Clothing category was much lower in Financier than on my YNAB phone app. Then I noticed that my mortgage and condo fees from Jan 1 weren't showing in my checking account register in Financier. I was 99.9% sure that I had entered them yesterday. There was also a transaction from yesterday afternoon that I had been pretty sure I had entered but wasn't there. I finally figured out that the reason the clothing category was off was because the December budget didn't show all the end of month allocations that I had done. So I assumed that it was because on Dec 31 I did the file conversion to import my YNAB 4 data into Financier and I must have imported a slightly older version of my YNAB 4 budget rather than the one where I did my end of month sweeps and reallocations. Since the YNAB phone app doesn't give you much information, I wasn't going to be able to figure it out until I got home tonight and could open up the desktop version. So I closed the tab. Then I started thinking - I know I entered transactions yesterday! So I opened up Financier again. And all the end of December reallocations and transactions I entered yesterday were there. But not the 2 I entered today. And all the transactions I cleared in my credit card account and then reconciled weren't showing up. Exited again and reopened to see if today's stuff would reappear. They did not. I'm using Firefox.

I just got the direct deposit notification for my expense report reimbursement. $6,100. However, my total reimbursable expenses incurred were $5,400. The excess is because the meals portion of my per diem ($90/day) was reimbursed on a flat rate and I generally averaged around $30/day in spending. (this is why the right arrow is so important for my tracking!). During the trip, in addition to expensable items (lunch, dinner, lodging, transpo to/from airport, visa, vaccinations, etc), I also categorized various expenses to Reimbursables that I knew would be covered by my excess per diem - Uber rides to restaurants, the sweet sweet $272 upgrade to Business Class for the trans-Atlantic portion of the return flight, VPN subscription for the month, etc.

Anyway, a thought occurred to me: should I be categorizing the whole $6100 deposit to the Reimbursables category and then WAM the excess to the desired category (HVAC replacement - super fun!) or should I split the transaction with enough going to Reimbursables to zero it out and the rest going to Income for January to then be assigned to HVAC replacement? I've always done it the the first way since starting YNAB in 2014, but that doesn't make it right (or best) . . .

Quote from: Alex on October 24, 2016, 07:01:10 PM
I like T-Mobile. Cheap if you use a good amount of data, free tethering, and free international data/text.

The free data and SMS in >100 countries is what sold me on Tmobile. I just came back from a three week international business trip and the free data was key. I was in a country where they barely have 3G so my free data was 2G, but I'm used to traveling to places where this is the case. Uber had just started in the country 6 months ago and it was great to be able to get around and to text my colleagues as needed on ETAs and such.

Quote from: heyboots on December 20, 2016, 02:24:45 PM
Every quarter I print out a little card to keep in my wallet to remind me what cards get extra cashback for certain kinds of purchases.

There is an app called Wallaby and you can tell it which cards you have and it uses GPS to tell you which is the best card to use in each store you are in.

I have a medical out of pocket maximum category that if fully funded (if not fully funded at the beginning of the plan year, I usually get it there in the first quarter) should cover almost all medical expenditures (there are often medical expenditures that do not count towards the OOPM, but then I would dip into my Loss of Income fund).

I have a Home maintenance category that I keep topped up at $2K to fill the insurance gap.

I have a Vehicle maintenance category that I keep topped up at $2K to fill the insurance gap.

Quote from: asromzek on December 09, 2016, 09:54:49 AM

Quote from: Paul on December 09, 2016, 02:01:55 AM

Quote from: asromzek on December 08, 2016, 08:17:15 PM
That's like when the bell rings in school at the end of the day on the Friday, and that one kid reminds the teacher that he forgot to assign the weekend homework. Thanks a lot.

A bit less painful to find the $12 in the budget to support Alex than have to do homework on the weekend though!

That sounds like the definition of a bribe...

Since it happened after the fact, I see it as more of a gratuity