## What is a Plan?

Your plan is exactly what it sounds like—a plan! It’s a tool you can use to plan out your monthly income and expenses ahead of time, before those transactions actually happen.

Think of your plan as a reference for how you want to fund your envelopes throughout the month based on your estimated monthly income.

You can find and manage your plan from the “Plan” screen, which you can access from the top of the “Home” tab.

## How Creating a Plan Can Help You Manage Your Money

Your plan helps you to see the big picture of your monthly income and expenses. You can create a plan for the month using estimates of how much you expect to earn in income, and how much your bills and other spending will likely cost.

This helps you to be prepared to set aside the funds for your envelopes and feel more confident about your financial status. Your actual envelope funding may be slightly different than your plan due to unexpected things that come up throughout the month. That’s okay!

It’s important to come back to your plan regularly to see how closely you are sticking to it.

## How to Create a Plan

When you open the “Plan” screen, you will see the current month’s plan. You can start editing this right away.

### Planning Your Income

First, you’ll want to plan your income. Use your monthly take home (net) pay as your income amount. You can add additional envelopes in order to plan for multiple sources of income.

This sum of the incomes you plan will display above “Plan Income” at the top of the plan screen. This is the amount of money you will have available to fund your plan expenses with.

As you get paid and categorize those transactions as income, you will see that money display in the “Earned” column. This helps you ensure that your earnings are on track with what you planned.

If you earn a little more or a little less than you had planned, simply make an adjustment to your planned income amount. Doing so helps you proactively adjust how much money you actually have to fund your envelopes with.

To plan your income, follow these steps:

1. Select the number under the “Plan” column and enter the dollar amount you plan to earn.
2. Choose the date you plan to earn the income.
3. Select the recurrence period of how frequently you plan to earn that amount of income.
### 
### Planning Your Expenses

Once you have estimated your monthly income, you can begin to plan how you will fund your expense envelopes.

Your plan is simply giving you guidance on how you “want” to fund each envelope throughout the month. It does not automatically fund your envelopes unless you have MoneyWise Pro and you use the auto-fund option. (See next section.)

To plan your expense funds, follow these steps:

4. Select the number under the “Plan” column and enter the dollar amount you plan to spend.
5. Choose the date you plan to fund the envelope.
6. Select the recurrence period of how frequently you plan to fund that amount of money into the envelope.
## 
## How to Auto-Fund Your Envelopes From Your Plan

__Pro Users:__ You can save time and ensure you never forget to fund your envelopes with the auto-fund feature!

When you use auto-fund, the money from your plan will automatically be transferred to the appropriate envelopes based on the day and recurrence you set. It’s as easy as that.

When using auto-fund, we recommend scheduling your funding dates to align with your paydays. That way you will have money available for funding when the automation takes place.

## If I Change My Plan Does it Impact the Funding of the Envelope?

Historical funding that has already taken place is not impacted by changes made to your plan.

The only time changing your plan will impact your funding is if it is scheduled and set to auto-fund in the future.

## Viewing Your Plan’s Schedule

Selecting “Schedule” from the plan toolbar allows you to see a calendar view of your planned funding.

You can select any of the plan items on the calendar to view more details or make changes to them.

## Viewing Your Plan’s History

Selecting “History” from the plan toolbar will show you a list of all the previous plans you have created in the MoneyWise app.

You can open any historical plan to use as a reference for your current plan.

MANAGE | Sep 9, 2021

Creating & Using Plans

By: MoneyWise

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