Goals: what the budget is for

Emergency keeps a balance on hand. Purchase is an amount by a date, for things like a trip, a roof, or a car. Debt is linked to one card or one loan and is reached when that balance is zero. Retirement is an amount saved by a certain year, added to every month and growing at a rate of return you assume. A budget has one retirement goal, because one household retires from it. Custom is whatever you want it to be. Buffer is a cushion of bills you always keep in your account, counted from $0 on the cashflow chart (step 5). The Reyes household has seven goals, from the emergency fund to keeping a month of bills in hand.

The list is an order of priority, not a wish list. Money without a job (money Mintro finds sitting unused, a windfall, or an envelope that ended the month with more than its target) goes to the first goal that hasn't been reached yet. Use the arrows beside each goal to change the order, or tell your agent. The Reyes household puts the emergency fund first, paying off the Visa second, and Japan third, which is how “we'll go once the card is paid off” looks as a setting.

Open a goal. Saved so far is what the envelope has available, or the value of the holdings the goal counts, or how much of the debt has been paid down. Target amount is the amount the goal is aiming for. Mintro works out where the goal stands from those two and the target date: ahead if the monthly amount gets there early, on track, at risk if it won't get there in time, or reached. Below that, Needed a month to reach it by the target date is the exact monthly payment that gets there in time, at the rate of return you assumed. Put that amount in Each month, or set your own, and see how the goal's standing changes.

A goal with a monthly amount gets an envelope in the Goals category on the budget, with that amount as its target. You assign money to it like any other envelope, and the goal's saved so far is what the envelope has available. Nothing is counted twice: the emergency fund's $13,244.24 is money sitting in savings, given the job “emergency fund” by the envelope, and tracked by the goal.

A buffer is a goal for your account balance rather than for an envelope: keep this much in your account so your balance never comes close to $0. You set it as a number of weeks or months of your scheduled bills, or as an amount, for All cash or for one account. Mintro works out the size from a year of the repeating bills paid from that balance, so one month for the Reyes household is $4,165.99: nine bills, with yearly ones counted as a twelfth each month.

Whether it is on track comes from the cashflow projection. Reached means the lowest balance in the next ninety days is at least the whole buffer, counted from $0. It is on track while the balance stays above $0, and at risk when it doesn't. It also shows how many days of bills the cash would pay for. A buffer has no envelope and no monthly amount, and spare money Mintro finds is never sent to it. By default, safe to spend on Cashflow leaves the buffer out; untick that under Edit goal if you would rather see it only as a figure beside the chart.