Allocating Income

Allocation and Money Flow

MoneyWell is very much about visuals. The bucket visual is designed to teach you to spend only what is in a bucket. When you plan to spend a specific amount, it's like drawing a "fill to here" line on the bucket. Allocation is the process of filling the bucket to that line.

Click Allocate Income on the toolbar and let's take a look at the Allocate Income Panel.

In the "Income to Allocate" section at the top, you have a drop-down list of all your income buckets. If you have more than one income bucket, you can allocate income from each one of these by selecting them here. Next to your selected income bucket is the amount of money left in this bucket for allocating.

This section also shows you the "Total New Flow Amount," which is the total of all the money in the "New Flow" column below, and the "Balance Remaining for New Flows," which is the money you have left over.

When you first bring up this panel, MoneyWell tries to use all your income and fill your buckets up to your plan level. If it runs out of money, it will stop filling buckets. You can see in the example here that there was only enough to fill up through the "Education" bucket and even that was short $5 of the planned $40.

You should never allocate more money than you have, but you can shift around the money in a different way as long as your balance never goes below zero.

This panel is creating money flows for you. A money flow is a way to move money between buckets. In this case you are taking money from your selected income bucket and you are putting it in your expense buckets. After you click Save Allocate the new money flows will show up as money left to spend on your expense buckets. But don't save this allocation just yet, you probably need to change the priority of your allocations.