Not all of the money you spend in a given month goes towards your debts - there are other recurring expenses that you have to pay just to survive. Rent (but not a mortgage! That's a debt!), electricity, water, and so on. You have to spend the money or else you're not going to make it to the next month.

Please note that an expense is considered something that's fixed, or at least reasonably fixed. Your rent doesn't vary from month to month, your cable bill doesn't change, your cell phone bill is probably constant. Some of the money you spend goes to unfixed things, like food or gas or movie rentals. Setting up a fixed expense for those items isn't quite accurate, since it's not like you write a check for $20 to the video store each month for your rentals. Instead, you should segment your account with virtual budgets to set aside money to fund these activities. See Setting up budgets for more info.

There's also a set of pie charts to quickly show you how this debt factors into your overall financial picture.

• The top pie chart shows you what percentage of your income you spend n this expense.
• The middle pie chart shows you how much of your total cash expenditures (including payments towards debts) go towards this expense.
• The bottom pie chart shows you how much of your expenses (not including debts) go towards this expense.
• Name - The name of the expense in question. "Rent", "Cable bill", etc. Next to the name is a color well so you can color code this expense.
• Amount - The amount of the expense.
• Pay from - The bank account or credit card to pay this expense. Please note that you can only pay expenses from liquid bank accounts, or from debts that are set as revolving accounts.
• Due date - The next date this bill is due
• Repeat rule - how often this expense occurs. See Editing Dates for more info
• Ends - If you don't want this expense to continue on forever, you can stop it here
• On - and specify the date that it ends
• Pay on most recent payday - Once you get paid, the money is just sitting in your bank account and not doing anything. There's no reason to let it sit there for 3 days just until the bill is due, so some people like to pay their bills as soon as they have the cash on hand to do it. This checkbox enables you to pay your bill on the most recent payday instead. So if your rent is due on the first of the month, but you get paid on the 25th, checking this box will cause rent to be paid on the 25th instead.



To work with expenses:

1. Click on the expenses pane in the toolbar.
2. Click the '+' in the lower left to add a new expense, or the '-' to delete the selected expense.
3. Fill in the expense's information.

See also

• Setting up bank accounts to store your money
• Segmenting your accounts with virtual budgets
• Setting up automatic transfers between accounts
• Recording transactions
• Setting up recurring income to fund accounts
• Listing all of your debts
Copyright and © 1999-2012, Jim Thomason