“Save more” is not a goal. “£1,200 for Lisbon by the first of March” is, and the difference is that the second one can tell you every day whether you are on track.
Expense Diary calls these jars. Each one is a picture of a jar that fills as you add money, with the sums underneath. This is what the sums are.
Three numbers, one of them optional
A jar has a target, the amount you want. It has a date, if you have one. And it has what you have saved so far, which grows every time you add money.
From those the app works out:
Monthly amount to stay on track. Target minus saved, divided by the months left until the date. For Lisbon, £1,200 with £380 saved and five months to go is £164 a month. It is recalculated every time you add money, so a good month lowers next month’s figure and a missed month raises it. There is no penalty and no red text, just the new number.
Where you will get to at your current pace. If you have no date, or want to know whether the date is realistic, the app looks at what you have actually added over the last few months and projects it forward. Saving £100 a month with £820 to go means Lisbon in about eight months. If the date is sooner than that, the jar says so, and the monthly figure above tells you what would fix it.
Percent full. Saved divided by target, which is also how full the picture of the jar is. This one is only there because it feels good.
Where the money goes
A jar can be kept in a savings account. Add £164 to the Lisbon jar and the app records a transfer: your current account goes down by £164, your savings account goes up by the same, and the jar fills. One action, three things right.
Or a jar can just count. Some people move money by standing order and want the jar to track it without touching accounts; others keep their holiday money in cash. In that case the jar simply keeps its own total.
When you add money to a jar that is not kept anywhere, the app says so, and offers to link it to a savings account on the spot. A jar that quietly counted money you had not moved would be the wrong kind of encouraging.
Jars and safe to spend
By default a jar has no effect on your daily safe to spend figure, because money you have already moved into savings is not in your everyday accounts and so is not counted anyway.
There is a switch in Settings, Count jar contributions, that goes one step further: it holds back this month’s planned contributions as if they were bills. Turn it on and the app treats saving as a commitment rather than something that happens if there is money left. For most people that is the switch that makes the jar actually fill.
What happens at the end
When a jar reaches its target the app marks it done and stops asking for money. Archive it and it leaves the Plan tab, but the money you moved stays exactly where it is, in the savings account, with the transfers in your diary. A jar is a way of looking at money, not a place it lives.
See it in three minutes
Try it
Expense Diary is free on Google Play, and coming to the App Store. Jars are part of the free version, as many as you like.
More about the app on its page.