If you have the Days of Buffering [DoB] Metric setting activated, the Days of Buffering History Lookup setting allows you to make adjustments to how your DoB is calculated. It’s a way to refine the DOB metric but it’s not a stand-alone setting. If you don’t have the DoB metric setting turned on, this setting has no effect.
If you have the DoB Metric setting activated, you can use this setting to choose the length of time in your transaction history used to calculate your DoB. If your budgeting history represents a fairly stable lifestyle, you might want to leave this set to All. However, if your history represents some unusual spending periods or a major life event, you might prefer to narrow the history used to a shorter period of time: 1 year, 6 months, 3 months, or even just 1 month.
*The above screenshots were taken of my personal budget file rather than my fictional Demo Budget file in order to accurately demonstrate the subtleties in the DoB history lookup calculation adjustments.
In the first screenshot you can see that if my entire 6+ years’ worth of transaction history is considered, based on my average daily spending, my days of buffering number is 688.
However, if the history lookup is set to one year, my DoB goes up to 759 days. That means that my average daily spending over the last year was lower than my average daily spending over the last six years. But if I change the history lookup setting to six months, my DoB drops to 709 days. While my spending in the last year is lower than over six years, my spending in the last six months has been higher than the six months before that.
If I narrow my DoB Metric to the last three months of history, my DoB drops all the way to 579 days. Clearly the last three months have been more expensive than average (and with estimated tax payments and investment account contributions, that is indeed the case — our outflows have been exceptionally high lately). And yet, if I narrow the history lookup to only the past month (below, bottom row, left), my DoB bounces back up to 787 — higher than any of the other history metrics.
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