Thanks for your reply! That calculator is SO helpful!
I guess I didn't phrase my question very well though. I basically divide my expenses into:
- 'Daily', expected things like food and all my bills, rent, car payment, birthday gifts, etc, which is paid by my salary (anything that I don't use goes into savings) and I graph this monthly to see how I'm doing on the 'normal' stuff;
- 'Other', which is any big purchase that I have to plan for such as a vacation, new snowboard, unexpected car repairs that put me over my monthly salary, etc, and this gets paid for out of other income such as bonuses or monetary gifts.
I guess I have two things I'm trying to track - 1) that my income from each funding source is bigger than my expenses from that source, but also 2) what kind of trend my 'living' (daily) expenses are following. I've been using all my leftover salary each month to make principal payments on my car, and if I count this as 'daily', it (obviously) shows my monthly spending as being always equal to my income, even though I could've done really well that month and made a big extra payment, which is really a form of savings in my mind. I am (like everyone here) very Excel-savvy but I'm just trying to 'theoretically' decide which attribute of these payments (funding source? or define some new attribute?) I should change so that I can most efficiently track those two things. :)
Also, do you think it's a bad idea to consider 'big purchases' separate from monthly spending?