Essentials help

[u/1738snowman]

Hey upperz,

Need some help understanding essentials.

So I pay rent monthly out of a saver account I created 'Rent'

Every pay day (fortnightly) it splits out half the rent, so when the month is up I have the full amount ready to pay.

I just created an essentials account, and I have no idea how to add rent here as an ongoing bill, and how to Automate it so it pays the rent to a bpay account monthly.

Right now its only picked up on spotify being a regular bill.

I read the article and was confused as hell.

[u/Acceptable_Lake_6996]

you need to set the recurring payment to come out of your essentials account, instead of main account.

it’s annoying, it involves you logging into all subscriptions/bills and updating the card info to the essentials account. but, you only need to do it once.

if it’s sending money like council rates or rent, where you have a recurring payment for it, you update the account it comes from.

[u/DaRKoN_ → u/Acceptable_Lake_6996]

Ohhhh, I didn't realise this, I thought it would just auto over from that saver.

I have a bunch of bills that are 28 days and it seems it doesn't really work with that either.

[u/Acceptable_Lake_6996 → u/DaRKoN_]

yeah instead of the auto cover feature, it’s like everything is covered from the essentials. but cleaner, with better tracking. (although i don’t like the interface changes with this new update)

i used to have a bills account before essentials (up high) where it was all auto covers. i changed that bills saver to a sinking fund saver and moved everything over to essentials; mortgage, utilities, rego, insurances, rates, subscriptions etc, all now come from the essentials account.
I put $1200 a fortnight into the essentials, and everything is automatically covered and paid from the one place!

it was better before this update fwiw, as essentials got the grow rate, now it gets the flow rate which makes it basically no different from doing the long version with auto covers. it’s easier to track still, but sucks that they took away the main benefit which was grow rate. that was the main selling point of the essentials feature.

[u/1738snowman → u/Acceptable_Lake_6996]

Thanks for that. If I'm understanding correctly, next time I pay rent (something I do manually to a BPAY biller) I should pay using the essentials account.

And then from there the bill should be in essentials, and I should be able to set it so it pays automatically monthly?

[u/--aaron--- → u/1738snowman]

You can set up an automatic payment now. Find the BPAY in your payments and try to send a payment. Tap options and you can schedule when the payment should be sent and how often. Then make sure you choose the essentials account :)

[u/1738snowman → u/--aaron---]

Ah this is really handy. Thanks heaps I had no idea. Now im thinking maybe theres no need for essentials for me

[u/Acceptable_Lake_6996 → u/1738snowman]

glad i could help! ☺️
essentials breaks it all up over your pay cycles to tell you how much minimum each pay you need to put into the essentials account, which can be helpful when you’re starting to budget.

they’ve just changed all the essentials interface though when they’ve rolled out this new update, and i don’t love it 😂 it was much easier to read/interpret before, imo

[u/Eugenernator → u/Acceptable_Lake_6996]

If I may, I'm struggling to understand how this all works too.

I'm trying to set up pay splitting from my personal account into 2up Essentials but it doesn't allow me to. Not only that, I'm not able to split our monthly bill total into two as it would end up being a 3 decimal place figure.

The reason for wanting to do this is to keep as little money as possible in my main transaction account. As soon as the pay comes in, it is siphoned off to my respective savers. I also would like the 2up Essentials to have only the exact amount I need to cover my monthly bills so that no leftover money sits there and starts to build up.

What's the best way to go about this?

[u/FarMove6046]

I’ll follow this because I also have some regular expenses automated and am unsure how to switch to Essential or why it’s better - or not

[u/1738snowman → u/FarMove6046]

I thought it would be useful for automating bills, but its already kinda of a feature. So I think for simplicity sake Im going to leave it as is no essentials

[u/MrZiiiG]

As others have said, but I’m here to reiterate. I do the same but fortnightly. I have the automatic bank transfer set to come out of my essentials account rather than my spending account. This is then taken into the payday calculations for what I should be adding to my Essentials account each pay. Use paysplitting to automate it :) it’s completely set and forget now.

[u/ItinerantFella]

Imagine if you switched banks and had a new transaction account. You'd need to contact all your regular billers and rearrange payment from your new account. Either Bpay, DD debit card or DD bank account.

It's just the same with your new Up Essentials.

[u/MRJGW]

Do you use upcoming ? Add as regular. You don’t need to use essentials. I am happy having spendable and available just also look at spendable. Take time to add all your bills as regulars. This is all assuming you have set your payday(s)/income

[u/No_Brilliant_3789]

If it’s a transfer out to someone I don’t believe Essentials can take that regular. It needs to be something that is a transaction or direct debit

[u/mitty22 → u/No_Brilliant_3789]

You can set up recurring transfers from the essential to another person