add blog post about using goal templates (#291)

We have a blog, so I wrote a post for it.

Its about how I use the goal templates in the hopes that it will inspire
some people on how they can use goals and some budgeting strategy baked
in.

---------

Signed-off-by: check-spelling-bot <check-spelling-bot@users.noreply.github.com>
Co-authored-by: Matiss Janis Aboltins <matiss@mja.lv>
Co-authored-by: Matiss Janis Aboltins <MatissJanis@users.noreply.github.com>

.github/actions/spelling/expect.txt

@@ -24,3 +24,4 @@ Synology
 ubuntu
 VRT
 websecure
+youngcw

blog/2023-12-15-automate.md

@@ -0,0 +1,251 @@
+---
+title: Automate Your Budget With Goal Templates
+description: An example of how you can automate all of your budgeting by using Actual's goal template feature
+slug: 2023-12-15-automate-your-budget-with-goal-templates
+tags: [budgeting, goals]
+authors: youngcw
+hide_table_of_contents: false
+---
+
+Hello budgeters!
+I hope you are all enjoying Actual as much as I do!
+As a new year is approaching so is the goal-setting and reflection season.
+I'm hoping to help some of you with potential new years resolutions by making budgeting as easy as possible while still reaching for your goals.
+I believe that Actual is a great tool for this whether you have a simple budget or a complex one.
+
+One hurdle that many have with budgeting is that it takes constant effort to stay up to date.
+Entering transactions, assigning categories, reconciling with your bank and others can hold us back.
+I hope to give you some pointers and strategies today to reduce some of the stress of budgeting by streamlining the budgeting processes with goal templates.
+
+<!--truncate-->
+## Introduction
+I've been using Actual for a while now.
+In that time I have become very familiar with the goal template feature and would like to share with you how I use the goal templates in hopes that it will help inspire you.
+I use goal templates to budget all of my paycheck for me.
+All I need is a few seconds, a few clicks, and my budget for the month is done.
+I only budget what I have, nothing more.
+The goal templates can dynamically fill categories that have more need, and skip ones that are filled.
+The goal template feature is incredibly flexible and you can cater them to your situation.
+Chances are good that you can leverage it in some way to speed up your budgeting, or to meet your budgeting goals.
+
+### My Goals and Strategies
+As we go along I will be showing how I use goal templates to meet my budget goals without having to fuss over what to put where.
+The high level of these goals are to follow the **Month Ahead** strategy and the **Pay Yourself First** strategy.
+I also have some side savings goals such as funds for home maintenance that I budget for.
+I am able to meet all of these with minimal continuing effort because my monthly financial goals are baked into the goal templates I use
+
+Below I give a brief overview of these strategies, and a introduction to goal templates.
+If you are familiar with those you can skip to [my budget examples](#how-i-budget)
+
+#### Month Ahead
+This one is really straight forward.
+This means that all the money you are spending _this_ month was money you earned _last_ month.
+Actual makes this pretty simple already, by allowing the user to "hold" funds for the next month.
+What Actual doesn't do for you is budget those funds, and that is where the goal templates come in.
+
+It may take some time to work yourself up to this if you are currently living paycheck-to-paycheck.
+That's okay, Actual is here to help you forward and has the tools you need to accomplish that!
+
+#### Pay Yourself First
+The idea with pay yourself first is that you are prioritizing saving and investing over spending.
+To achieve this you do need to first have a decent idea of what your base spending is.
+If you have a good feel for what you **need** then you can start pushing yourself on how much you can **save**.
+My current goal is to save 30% of my monthly, after tax income.
+That is aggressive, so don't feel like you need to be that high.
+Its pretty common to shoot for 10-20%, but do what _you_ can.
+Any savings is better than nothing.
+The reason behind this is to push yourself to not spend what you could be saving by deliberately saving first.
+
+How the pay yourself first strategy is implemented is pretty simple: **you pay yourself before you pay others**!
+In more specific terms, you pull money out of your paycheck for savings before you spend or allocate any on bills and fun things.
+In the context of a budget this can be achieved by allocating savings first, then allocating the rest to everything else.
+I'll show you how the goal templates make this super easy.
+
+## Goal Templates
+At time of writing the goal template feature is experimental.
+That is primarily because the maintainers would like there to be a GUI to create the goals before fully releasing the feature.
+
+The goal templates allow you to tell Actual a set of rules and priorities so Actual can budget for you.
+Isn't that awesome!
+No more manually assigning categories, unless you want to, of course.
+
+You create a template by adding a line to your category note that looks something like `#template up to 50`.
+The `#template` at the start is how Actual finds your template to know what you want to do.
+I'll outline a few of the templates I find most useful here, but I recommend you read through the full [goal template docs page](../docs/Experimental/goal-templates).
+
+#### Simple
+This is the most basic template.
+It will budget the amount you tell it to.
+Simple!
+
+If you want to budget $50 use: `#template $50`.
+
+If you want to budget $1050 use: `#template $1050`.
+
+A slightly more advanced option would be if you want to make sure you have $100 in your category, but might have some leftover from last month and not need to add the full $100 this month.
+You can do this by using `up to` like: `#template up to $100`.
+
+#### Schedule
+If you have taken the time to curate a list of schedules of expected transactions, you can automate budgeting them with the schedule template.
+
+An example would look like `#template schedule Rent`.
+
+This will automatically budget the money you need to pay your rent based on your `Rent` schedule.
+
+#### Percentage
+Say you want to budget a percent of your income, or a percent of what you have available.
+This is useful for savings, or to keep fun spending within a limit.
+Some examples of this are:
+
+* `#template 10% of all income` to budget 10% of all income categories.
+* `#template 10% of Paycheck` to only include the "Paycheck" category in the calculation.
+
+### Template Priorities
+Okay, so you understand the templates pretty well now.
+Now for, in my opinion, the most useful part of templates.
+We can set priorities!
+Setting a priority to the templates does two things for us
+1. It tells Actual to not budget more money then shows in your `To Budget`.  This is not the case by default.
+2. It tells Actual in what order to apply the templates.
+
+So now, if we use priorities, we can entirely automate the distribution of funds both in a set order, and only what we have.
+Isn't that awesome!
+
+#### How Priorities Work
+Priorities are processed in numerical order, so 1 first, then 2, then 3, and so on.
+You can think of the priority value as which pass does this template get run.
+If the priority is 1, the template gets processed on template pass 1.
+If the priority is 7, that template gets processed on template pass 7.
+Feel free to space out the numbers, Actual will skip priority values that don't have any templates defined.
+This way it takes the same amount of time to process templates with priorities of 1 and 2, as it will to process templates with priorities of 7 and 10000.
+The order is the thing that matters most when setting the priority values.
+
+Templates with priorities look like this: `#template-10 schedule Rent`.
+Where this has a priority level of 10.
+
+## How I Budget
+Now that we have the needed background knowledge, I will walk through my workflow each month and examples of the templates I use.
+My setup is designed to require the least effort possible on my part to start the month.
+Currently I budget all of my available funds with a single click.
+All the categories that I normally would budget for get handled when I click the "Apply Budget Templates" button.
+
+### Preparation and Setting Up Month Ahead
+During the month, when my paychecks come in, I "hold" my income for the next month.
+This way I know that I am staying within my goal of being a month ahead.
+
+I also have a few `#cleanup` templates.
+This isn't necessary if you don't want to worry about it.
+If you are interested you can read the [end of month cleanup docs page](../docs/Experimental/monthly-cleanup).
+
+### Paying Myself first
+The highest priority templates that I have are in my savings category.
+They are:
+* `#template 30% of previous Paycheck`
+* `#template 30% of previous Dividends`
+
+I call out these two income categories specifically because I have other income categories that I don't want to get used here.
+By calling out the specific income categories I do want, I exclude those others.
+But wait, _what is that "previous" keyword?_ you may be asking.
+Using the "previous" keyword tells Actual to not use this month's income, but to use _last_ month's income.
+This is how I can use both pay yourself first AND month ahead together within the template structure.
+You could also consider something like `#template 30% of available funds`, but that includes things like rollover, which I don't want here.
+
+Because these templates don't have a priority they get set to priority 0 by default.
+This means they will be run first, thus meeting my goal of saving before allocating any other funds.
+You could use priority 1 and get the same effect while also protecting against over budgeting, but it doesn't make a difference in my workflow.
+I will always have enough funds for this because I held all of my paycheck forward so it is available in the same month as these templates are run.
+
+### Covering My Needs
+After I have pulled out what I want to save, I move next to my base needs.
+This covers my mortgage, groceries, utilities and such.
+Here are some of the template I use for this:
+* `#template-1 schedule Mortgage` in my Mortgage category
+* `#template-10 400 up to 700` in my Groceries category
+
+All my other needs categories are some flavor of these two basic templates.
+I use priority 1 for my mortgage because its the most important thing, then I use priority 10 for all my other needs level templates.
+You don't need to space your priorities out like this.
+I do it so if I ever decide to add new categories in between, or feel the need to be more granular with my ordering, I have space and don't need to shift all of my templates to have space.
+
+The mortgage category will get budgeted to what I need to cover the payment for that month.
+My groceries category will normally budget $400, but I include the "up to" keyword to not accidentally build up funds here.
+This helps handle month to month variation in stride without needing to move money around on months that happened to have more trips to the store.
+If I happened to build up a lot more than 400 the template won't ever allow there to be more than 700 available to start the month.
+If something crazy happens and I get a big refund or similar that goes back into the grocery category, then the template will remove the extra funds.
+
+#### Potential issue
+The schedule templates have an extra consideration for an automated budget.
+When your schedule has a varying amount and is defined by an amount range instead of a specific amount each month, you can under budget.
+The schedule template will budget the average of the high and low bounds on your schedule amount.
+This gives the possibility of under budgeting, potentially by a lot, if you have a large amount range.
+You also can over budget, but that's usually not as much of an issue as under budgeting.
+One way I have used to get around this is to use a simple template that budgets a value at, or near, the upper limit of your schedule.
+It may just be a simple as `#template-10 75`.
+This can be used in conjunction with a `#cleanup` template to automate removing extra funds at the end of the month if you would like.
+
+### Sinking Funds and Miscellaneous Categories
+Now that the most important expenses are handled, we get to the messy middle categories.
+These categories get used semi-regularly, but start to straddle the line between needs and wants.
+These types of categories are also where the strengths of envelope budgeting become apparent.
+This stage is where we can get really creative with templates to determine what we want to budget first and what gets the leftovers.
+There are lots of interesting template strategies to try out that I haven't gone over yet, such as "by" style, repeating templates, and multiple templates in a single category with different priority levels.
+
+#### Sinking Funds
+In my system my next priority is sinking funds.
+A sinking fund is a category that purposefully builds up funds for either emergencies or irregular expenses.
+This could be something like car maintenance that we all know is needed, but can show up unplanned.
+For this type of category I use a template like:
+* `#template-30 50 up to 1000` in my Auto Maintenance category
+* `#template-30 100 up to 2500` in my Home Maintenance category
+
+The strategy here is to slowly build up funds, but not allow more that I want.
+If I reach the limit, Actual will not add anymore and I have more available for fun categories.
+
+#### Other Categories
+The next set of categories are a bit tricky.
+There is no reason I couldn't use the same strategy as used with the sinking funds, but I don't really want much sitting in these funds.
+I only want money in them if I need it.
+
+The strategy I have landed on is to only fund one "Misc Expenses" category that is a catch all for things like clothes, personal care, gifts, etc.
+I set the goal in my "Misc Expenses" category to `#template-40 up to 200"`.
+The idea is that this is enough for the other things that have their own category, but don't get used super often.
+If I spend for those categories, I transfer what I need from the funds available in "Misc Expenses" and call it a day.
+I can also directly categorize transactions in this "Misc" category if that makes the most sense.
+
+### Fun Categories
+At this point the only things left are fun categories.
+Since I know that I have already allocated towards savings, and all the needed things, I have a green light to spend the remainder on  more fun things.
+My base fun category is creatively named "Fun Money".
+In this category I use `#template-50 150`.
+
+If you have nothing else after this that you would like to budget for, you could also use `#template-50 remainder`.
+The "remainder" key word tells Actual to dump everything left in your To Budget into this category.
+The remainder can be used in multiple categories if you would like to split the remaining funds between a few fun categories.
+Or you could drop the remaining funds into your savings category to save even more!
+
+Another strategy that you could employ with leftover funds is to circle back to a previously budgeted category and add more to it.
+For example I have a sinking fund that I would like to budget more to if I have leftover funds available after my base fun money is budgeted.
+To do this I have two template lines at different priorities. 
+It looks like:
+* `#template-30 100 up to 1500`
+* `#template-60 100 up to 1500`
+
+This adds 100 to this category on the first pass and will happen before my fun categories.
+It then gets a second chance to add more after my fun categories by having a higher priority level.
+
+## Conclusion
+With this strategy for goal templates, starting a new month budget takes just a few seconds.
+The continuing effort is mostly limited to monitoring that transactions are correct (I use bank syncing to reduce there work there).
+This way I can spend my time and effort doing budget analysis over keeping it up to date.
+
+I hope that there was something in here that was useful to you in your budgeting journey.
+The goal template system is meant to be flexible enough to work with your budgeting style.
+I didn't get to my system overnight.
+Experiment and figure out what makes sense to you.
+Maybe you want to automate some things and not others.
+Maybe you want to be granular down to the penny.
+These, and everything in between, are possible with some effort.
+
+I wish you all a merry holiday season and a happy new year!
+
+Happy budgeting

blog/authors.yml

@@ -15,3 +15,9 @@ j-f1:
   title: Actual Budget Maintainer
   url: https://github.com/j-f1
   image_url: /img/authors/jed-fox.jpeg
+
+youngcw:
+  name: youngcw
+  title: Actual Budget Maintainer
+  url: https://github.com/youngcw
+  image_url: /img/authors/youngcw.png