I was thinking about living expenses the other day. I know a lot of people that literally have no idea what they spend, and getting them to guess at it upfront may be next to useless. :)

So I was thinking, what do they know? They know their salary, DC pension contributions, and they can probably tell you how much their mortgage, taxes, and insurance (or Rent) is, and maybe they have some other recurring taxable investment contributions.

And that’s it, I think. But then you could calculate their gross living expenses from those inputs.

Practical implication: as an onboarding workflow, you could ask people “Do you know your expenses? If not, don’t worry, we’ll estimate them.” And then ask for all of the other information first, and then spit out an estimate for Living Expenses at the end. Some people may be shocked by how high it is, or they may even get a negative number (which is bad news), but still good information.

Budget pretty much

Yes. “Sustainable living expenses” should be the “solve for” variable.

I entered a suggestion that appears to be a duplicate of this one, so I’m copying my original post here:

Expenses build up from sub expense details One of the hardest parts of financial planning is knowing actually what you will spend before and during retirement. The current high level expense descriptions (i.e. Living Expenses) keeps the UI clean, but it makes it very difficult to actually track and remember what is bundled into that number. I’d like to see the ability to have sub line items that add up to the total. For living expenses, you might have groceries, water bill, electric bill, household supplies etc. that all add up to create the living expense number. For healthcare you might have premiums, co pays, prescriptions, etc. This would allow the user to ensure that they have everything in their budget accounted for and easily see how they have those numbers changing over time in their plan.

Budget, yes.. Ideally Plan, Forecast and Actual with bank reconciliation would be amazing!

depending on how granular you want get, a link/import from quicken/excel, etc might be useful.

I do not see this as all that valuable. I have a couple of expense items in PL - living expenses for utilities/insurance/etc. and another expense item for discretionary items. I have added another for Travel because that is a major expenditure for us - PL is providing all that I need in this area.

Agreed. But how about allowing us to enter it year over year so we know how its going up compared to our net worth.

A flexible Expenses table would be nice. I have a separate spreadsheet for tracking Expenses (from my regular accounting software) and I bundle the expenses into Health Care, Living Expenses, Discretionary. Then I just add those 3 totals to PL as Custom Expenses. For Real Assets > Housing, I enter the Mortgage and then the rest of Housing expenses under “Home Maintenance” and ignore the other fields. Having a few subtotals under custom expenses allows for some of them to come out of different accounts (tax deferred vs roth vs HSA etc).

This would be great! Especially if the extension builder for syncing with YNAB could take average historical and populate spend categories based on the budget categories in YNAB. Like two peas in a pod.