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By Dustin, May 24, 2012 9:41 am

I received the following question I thought might be helpful to address on the blog:

I have a lot of savings accounts that I essentially treat as folders. I have an automated savings plan for most of these. There are then many transfers in from checking each month and 1-4 out of these each month. How do I handle all those ins and outs in Inzolo and still have correct accounts and envelopes?

The answer to this is essentially the same as how I handle using credit cards with Inzolo. If you are tracking each savings account in Inzolo, when you make a transfer you should have two transactions that are imported – one for the withdraw and one for the deposit. I have a created an envelope called “Bank Transfers”. This is where I keep all these transactions for auditing purposes. I put both the deposit and withdrawal transactions in this envelope.

Envelopes are not tied to a particular bank account by design. I did this because I may spend grocery money from my debit card, or from a Costco AMEX card. I wanted both funds to come out of the same envelope. If you have an envelope that represents a savings account, you would just keep that balance in sync manually by transferring or allocating the funds you need within Inzolo.

Note that there is a feature request in the feature voting system to add this account transfers envelope automatically if you are tracking more than one account. I will likely add this feature at some point in the future, but for now, creating a envelope yourself is the workaround and only needs to be done once.

Tip: I used to have a few savings accounts with my bank to help me separate my emergency fund & other savings. Once I started using Inzolo, I stopped using these separate bank accounts because 1) I wasn’t really earning any extra interest worth the effort of transferring funds, 2) I didn’t need them anymore. I look at my bank account as a big pile of cash. Inzolo is the method for me to organize that pile of cash. I don’t really look at my bank account balance anymore other than to verify that it matches my envelope balance. 3) It wasn’t worth the time I spent making the transfers (I didn’t have any automatic transfers set up with my bank).