Car registration, annual insurance, the December present pile, a car service every 10,000km. None of them fit a monthly budget: eleven quiet months, then a month that blows the whole plan apart.
The fix is to budget the monthly share and let it accumulate. Financio calls the mechanism rollover; the traditional name is a sinking fund.
Setting one up
- Work out the annual cost and divide it by the number of periods in a year: 12 for a monthly budget, 4 for quarterly.
- Set that as the category's budgeted amount.
- Switch rollover on for that category.
Rollover is step 3 of setup, and you can change it later from Manage Budget → Rollover.
Rollover is step 3 of setup, and you can change it later from ••• → Budget settings → Rollover.
What it looks like
$900 rego, budgeted $75 a month with rollover on:
| Month | Carried in | Budget | Spent | Remaining |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| January | $0 | $75 | $0 | $75 |
| February | $75 | $75 | $0 | $150 |
| … | ||||
| November | $750 | $75 | $0 | $825 |
| December | $825 | $75 | $900 | $0 |
Remaining is the size of the pot, so it answers the question that matters: will there be enough when the bill lands? A category marked ↻ is carrying money, and the progress bar measures spending against the budget plus what's carried, so paying the $900 out of a full pot reads as on track, not as an overspend.
If the bill arrives before the fund is full, Remaining goes negative and stays negative until the monthly amounts catch up. That's the honest answer, and it's the signal to raise the monthly figure.
Things to watch
- The fund starts when the budget does. A budget created in August can't retroactively fund a bill due in January. It builds from your first period onwards. For the first year, either set the monthly amount higher to catch up, or accept one short year.
- Changing the amount rewrites the fund. Budgeted amounts don't vary by period, so the carried figure is worked out as "periods elapsed × today's amount − what you've spent". Raise $75 to $100 and the pot jumps as though it had always been $100. That's handy for a small correction and surprising for a big one.
- Don't trust the seeded amount here. Setup fills each category from your last 6 months of spending. An annual bill outside that window seeds $0; one inside it seeds a monthly figure many times too high. These are the categories to set by hand.
- One category, one fund. If you want rego and home insurance tracked separately, give them separate categories. See Managing Categories.
When to use a goal instead
Rollover keeps the money in your budget, mixed in with everyday spending. For a large or distant target: a $6,000 holiday, a new car, a savings goal tracked against a real account is usually clearer, because the money is actually set aside rather than notionally reserved. See Savings Targets.
A reasonable rule: recurring bills you can't avoid belong in the budget with rollover; things you're choosing to save up for belong in goals.