After making a rather large furniture purchase, I returned the item. I had paid for it out of one of my set aside buckets for furniture when the expense appeared on the credit card stmt. How do I go about reimbursing my furniture bank bucket now that the expense has been reimbursed? I don’t want to use the credit for other categories, but it’s now reflected on the revolving credit card stmt as a credit & is getting scooped up for groceries, etc. I was not given the option of a refund any other way than the credit to the card.
If I understand correctly, call your credit card provider and ask them to refund the furniture credit amount to your savings account.
When the cash advance shows up on your credit card, all it is doing (in essence) is returning you money you have already spent. To have an accurate budget, you then simply transfer that same amount of money back from your checking account into your “furniture” bucket again — as if you had been reimbursed in cash. This transfers any cost reimbursement out of groceries or spending. Although, if you are tracking with budgeting software, you would simply record it as a refund to the furniture category so those funds are available in the future.
I didn’t know that I could request this credit to be sent to my bank directly rather than showing up as a credit on the card. I will explore this more, as this would make things a lot easier when using bookkeeping software.
Thank you! I can make this work in the budgeting software, but it is challenging to ‘find’ that amount again in the ckg to reimburse the money mkt furniture bucket. But conceptually I understand what you’re saying.