
Incoming gift money
In the past, I had considered gift money that came to us as checks (birthday money, etc.) to be assigned to a gift category. That way, I can track incoming/outgoing gifts in one category, and I could leave the To Be Budgeted category to simply be income.
Lately, I've been thinking I should simply track incoming money like holiday gift checks as To Be Budgeted, since I'm going to deposit those into our checking and then we will have access to it to allocate however we see fit.
Thoughts?
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I normally treat gifts as generic income, but we sometimes receive gifts from my parents that are earmarked for a specific purpose (e.g. "for the grandkids' college savings!") In those cases, I will directly record the inflow as "College Savings". I think that makes the reports a little cleaner: It doesn't make it appear that I earned any extra "income", and when I eventually transfer (outflow) the money over to the 529 account the net "spending" in my College Savings category will be zero. I'm just the intermediary!