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Celot posted:But it seems like I don't want to retire and still pay rent, when I could instead just pay insurance, upkeep, and taxes. And as I said, I am saving up for a down payment. I just don't see the advantage to renting over home ownership. A few things. The main advantage is that you don't have to pay when things break. The second advantage is that you can diversify your investments instead of exposing yourself to risk by keeping a lot of your money in a single house in a single market. As far as retirement, it may just be a conceptual thing, but there is no net difference if you simply save enough to pay rent forever rather than assuming that your housing costs will be lower after retirement and saving for that. I'm not advocating paying rent forever, but there's nothing implicitly better in owning a house and 300k less in other assets than renting and owning an additional 300k in assets and paying rent with that return. (300 000 at a 4% withdrawal rate gives you 12 000/year to spend) Of course, that 300k takes longer to save because you still have to pay rent instead of having the money go towards owning a home. And you probably won't incur that much in costs in homeownership accidents in your lifetime. But yeah, it's important to stay open to the value of mobility in your lifestyle and liquidity that stocks have over a house that nobody may want in 5, 10, or 20 years. I'm not personally sold on homeownership as some sort of panacea of retirement strategy or life stage or whatever, but I also have a small piece of land in rural Nova Scotia where I plan to live in a yurt so I'm kind of odd.
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Dec 9, 2013 05:17
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tuyop posted:SOMEONE has clearly never weightlifted before. It's a pretty technical activity, especially if he's interested in Olympic Lifting. I'd consider a good coach to be a form of health insurance against awful injuries or sloth. I and millions of other people go lift weights at the gym without any sort of professional assistance beyond a buddy to spot at the bench press. Now, it could well be that he's training at a level that justifies having a professional coach, but for that kind of expense, it's a question worth asking. Celot posted:But the bonus comes every two weeks. It can even become the primary source of income. Sorry, I misread initially and thought it was biannually. That does complicate things a bit. What I'd do in your position, I suppose, is to be sure I was always living on last month's income, as YNAB puts it. Your bonuses only get budgeted towards next month's expenses. Also, when you get a bonus that seems larger than average, don't just throw it into more fancy dinners, only budget what you think the average is and roll the rest over into a buffer for making up the difference when you get one that seems smaller than average. Keep records of every bonus you get so you're always getting a better estimate of what the average is. When you have enough of a buffer and you've gotten enough historical data to make a solid guess as to your average, you can start budgeting that every month as a flat amount and keep using that buffer to keep the actual difference rolling forward. Also, make sure that your non-discretionary spending, routine savings, and obligations (so stuff like your gym membership where even though it's discretionary you can't just skip a month) never exceeds your actual paycheck so that you don't get caught with your pants down if that buffer were to run dry. Never stop keeping records, so that if it seems like your bonuses do start trending away from the norm, you have the numbers to go back and revise your assumptions. Celot posted:But it seems like I don't want to retire and still pay rent, when I could instead just pay insurance, upkeep, and taxes. And as I said, I am saving up for a down payment. I just don't see the advantage to renting over home ownership. S'why I suggested reading the OP down in the house-buying thread. It goes into detail why "renting is just throwing your money away when it could be building equity" is a myth.
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Dec 9, 2013 12:24
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Kilty Monroe posted:... only budget what you think the average is and roll the rest over into a buffer for making up the difference when you get one that seems smaller than average. Keep records of every bonus you get so you're always getting a better estimate of what the average is. Once you've established your best estimate of income, follow up with allocating a percentage of income to your expense categories. Extra things go last, of course, which helps to limit superfluous spending in this model. Remember to leave some income as generic savings, either to move around for minor emergencies, to help build up your safety net for unexpected maintenance, your "six-months ahead" fund, and so forth. This allocation of income will feel a bit tight because you've under-estimated your actual income, but it will help you save. It goes without saying that you have to be able to pay your bills. If you don't even have money saved to pay rent right now, you have to get out from under that first. If you don't know when bonuses come in, you can't really count on them as income at all if you're living paycheck to paycheck. You have to know that you've saved for monthly rent, electricity, and so forth. The benefit of the percentage method is that income always goes into your expense savings in the same way. If a bonus happens to be a bit larger, you end up saving a bit more in each category, and you don't have to sit around worrying about racing a bunch of money around or not eating for the entire month. You may still have to move some from "generic savings" at times, if the unexpected happens, but you should always have an amount saved that's close to your expense expectations. At the end of the year, assuming no major catastrophe, which is true of any budgeting technique, you will have necessarily saved 5-10% of your annual income. Don't ever look at your rent savings and decide that you "have $10 spare dollars to spend somewhere else after paying rent" because you don't. Get yourself a spreadsheet and maybe some other software for expense tracking, to make sure you don't go over in categories. Feel free to read the OP for more info.
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Dec 9, 2013 15:11
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You guys are ridiculous. Celot has no debt at all, is saving 1600 to 2000 dollars a month and you guys want to discuss 80 dollars a month on a weightlifting coach? Who gives a crap? He can afford it. That's his hobby. There's people in here that spend more than that on their cats every month (myself included). Some people spend twice that on coffee every month or Pokemon or Wonderhangers, whatever. Celot, Regarding buying a house, renting is not 'throwing money away', renting is keeping your options open. If you know for a stone cold fact you're never leaving the area for 10 years go ahead and buy. I won't do the entire writeup of how much money you 'throw away' buying a house but it's not insignificant. By renting you have options, you can leave when your lease it up, if Oil activity around OK slows down and you need to get to Eagle Ford or the Dakotas for work, you just end your lease and move on, you don't have to worry about selling a house. It's a mobile workforce these days and tying yourself down to a piece of property doesn't make much sense.
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Dec 9, 2013 22:00
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I never understand why people say renting is throwing away money. You're exchanging money for a place to live, you're not exchanging money for nothing. Do people just believe this because they don't have some tangible item in their hands after they make a rent payment or what? It's like being mad at a hamburger you bought for not still being there after you ate it because you paid for it so therefore you should still have it. Is this just successful marketing by real estate agents or what? If you get a $100,000 mortgage loan, by the time you pay it off you'll have paid ~$175,000 because of interest. http://www.myamortizationchart.com/30-year/100000-dollars/4_25-percent/ How is that not throwing away money? I mean, that is literally throwing away money, you're giving almost the entire value of your house to the bank for the convenience of being able to make monthly payments. I'm in no way saying renting is always better than buying, it's totally unique to each person's situation. I just think it's crazy that so many people think buying MUST be better financially when for a lot of cases, renting for a while would actually save a lot of money. Everything is throwing away money. Every dollar you spend on literally anything is throwing money away.
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Dec 11, 2013 02:30
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razz posted:I never understand why people say renting is throwing away money. You're exchanging money for a place to live, you're not exchanging money for nothing. Do people just believe this because they don't have some tangible item in their hands after they make a rent payment or what? It's like being mad at a hamburger you bought for not still being there after you ate it because you paid for it so therefore you should still have it. Is this just successful marketing by real estate agents or what? If you get a $100,000 mortgage loan, by the time you pay it off you'll have paid ~$175,000 because of interest.  Kenny Rogers fucked around with this message at 09:24 on Dec 11, 2013 |
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Dec 11, 2013 09:22
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Celot posted:Second question: is this reasonable so far? Am I being wildly excessive in how much I spend on food and random poo poo? Should I up the automatic savings deposit to like $1200 per pay period? Reasonable except for one thing: I'd recommend putting more money into the 401k. It's tax advantaged, and generally you will want at least 10-15% of salary saved for retirement per year. This can easily come out of savings, or other expenses you cut as you see fit. The 10%-15% is a baseline, and the more you have beyond that, the quicker you can retire. For your savings brokerage, you will want to be extremely conservative as you want to buy a house. For your 401k, you need to be extremely aggressive as that's money you wont access for a long time. As for buying a house, there are tax advantages and huge advantages of not having to move, so it's something that you should do at some point. Just make sure that you will be staying in the house you buy for 10+ years.
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Dec 12, 2013 08:19
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ntan1 posted:As for buying a house, there are tax advantages... Why? Let's look at the numbers. At the Federal level you get a deduction for the amount of interest you paid on your home. Using this example from earlier again: http://www.myamortizationchart.com/30-year/100000-dollars/4_25-percent/ The first year you own your home, you pay $4,217.41 in interest. If you itemize, you can deduct that $4217.41. (There are some variables that can change this number, but for most people, that would be very close to the number.) However, the Standard Deduction is $6100, so you need to dig up another $1882 in deductions before you derive any tax benefit from your home thus far. If you're young, or healthy, or both, we hope that it's unlikely that you've also had a couple grand worth of medical bills the same year that you can tack on to raise that deduction to over $6100. You don't get 100% of the value of the deduction back, it lowers your taxable income by that amount. So, If you made 40k (taxable, after all other deductions), your taxes are $6036. If you made 40k (taxable, after all other deductions) and are able to additionally deduct your interest payments, your taxable income is $35783, and your taxes are $4974. It appears that the Estimated Value of this tax 'advantage' is -$3155.41 for this year, the year you will pay the most interest, and therefore get the largest deduction. To be fair, you can often deduct property tax, on some level, as well, but it works the same way - lowering your taxable income by some percent. Let's presume you live in a super high tax place, and they levy a full 1% in property tax per year, so you can deduct an additional $1000. You paid $5217 in interest and in property taxes, which you can deduct. Taxes on $34,783 are $4789. Presuming you itemize, the Expected Value of the tax 'advantage' after accounting for two home ownership deductions is -$2970.41 This may or may not be where my logic goes off the rails, but it seems to me that in this case you could (in theory) rent a place that costs $939.47/mo¹ and 'break even', before you even account for the Cost of poo poo That Broke This Year, playing My Little Tim Taylor with your new home, or Dammit, I Forgot Had To Buy A Lawnmower. And A Weedeater. And a Compressor to Blow Out The Sprinklers. poo poo. poo poo. poo poo. ¹ This is based on your -$2970/yr 'tax advantage' spread over 12 mo. added to your $491.94 Mortgage Payment and another $200/mo. for PMI, HOA, whatever utilities are separate, etc, in this case. Kenny Rogers fucked around with this message at 20:49 on Dec 12, 2013 |
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Dec 12, 2013 17:41
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It's just another way to make you think you're saving money. You get a big tax return when you buy a house but you obviously aren't getting back more or even close to what you will pay in interest. But since you get that money back in a big chunk on your tax return, and since you don't see it getting taken directly out of your paycheck like a standard state/federal tax deduction, it's easy to think of it as "free" money. It's like my brother-in-law getting excited when he got a bigger tax return when they had a baby. Yeah they got a lot of money back but it's only a fraction of what they spent on the baby during that year. Having a house/kid is a tax advantage only in the sense that you get a bigger tax return. It's not like you save money overall, you just spend slightly less.
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Dec 12, 2013 20:22
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razz posted:It's just another way to make you think you're saving money. You get a big tax return when you buy a house but you obviously aren't getting back more or even close to what you will pay in interest. But since you get that money back in a big chunk on your tax return, and since you don't see it getting taken directly out of your paycheck like a standard state/federal tax deduction, it's easy to think of it as "free" money. Right, but the thing is, the way tax deductions work you actually get less back from the government unless you have a really expensive property tax. The standard deduction to your taxes is 6100. However, it doesn't get added to other deductions, the other deductions take its place. So if you had a 4000 deduction from a house, that would replace the standard deduction and you'd be worse off. Same with giving to charity -- if you only give less than the standard deduction it's better not to try for a charity tax break at all.
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Dec 12, 2013 21:26
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Dude, lots of people itemize. You're trying way too hard to generalize, when the situation often depends on person.
ntan1 fucked around with this message at 21:52 on Dec 12, 2013 |
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Dec 12, 2013 21:40
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ntan1 posted:Dude, lots of people itemize. You're trying way too hard to generalize, when the situation often depends on person. Let's assume you *do* have >=$882 in other deductions¹ beyond your Mortgage Interest and Property Tax so you can itemize to at least $6100. You pay $4217.41 in interest and $1000 (1% of the fictional $100,000 property we've been using as an example) Property Tax during the first year of your mortgage. At tax time, itemize $4217 in Mortgage Interest, $1000 in Property Tax, and $884 in Charitable Contribution deductions for a total itemized deduction of $6101. Presuming (as we did before) that you grossed $40k (taxable) last year. Your taxes would have been $6036 with no deductions at all, but the $6101 itemization lowers your taxable to $33,899, and you're taxed $4654 on that. After your interest, tax, and charity deductions, you saved $1382. Awesome, right? You finish up with your e-file on TurboTax, click the button, and you'll get a nice refund direct deposited to your account in 3-4 weeks! Yay! But you spent $5217.41 to get that check. And even though you've crossed the $6101 "makes sense to itemize" line, unless you can itemize $31,800 worth of deductions², you're still going to spend more in interest than you save from the 'tax advantage'. There are a LOT of reasons to buy a house. It appears that the "tax advantage" is pretty clearly not one of them. ¹ Mortgage interest, state & local taxes, property tax and charitable contributions are the most common reasons that make it make sense to itemize. ² In order to break even between the $5217 you paid out this year in Property Taxes and Interest on your home, you need to pay at least $5217 less in taxes when compared to having no deductions at all (even the Standard Deduction. If you include the Standard Deduction, the thought of "recouping" your Interest and Property Tax payments goes from being "ridiculous" to "completely impossible". But we'll play with it just to see anyway.) $6036 (tax) - $5217 (PT&I) = $820 is the max you can pay in tax to not lose money. Look up $820 on the tax table, and you have to have <= $8200 "post-deductions" taxable income, for which you'll pay $818 in tax, and come out two bucks in the black. $40,000 actual - $8200 "target" = $31,800 in required deductions to hit your target. Kenny Rogers fucked around with this message at 01:07 on Dec 13, 2013 |
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Dec 12, 2013 23:18
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You should always view tax deductions as a bonus for things you would have done anyway, imo.
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Dec 12, 2013 23:28
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Kenny Rogers posted:There are a LOT of reasons to buy a house. It appears that the "tax advantage" is pretty clearly not one of them. Fair point. I think you've convinced me that living in your parents' house would be more financially sound than buying your own property and paying interest on a $100,000 principal.
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Dec 13, 2013 00:27
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If the apartment or house you are renting is the same quality as the house or apartment you would be owning, then surely you do not turn a profit by renting. The cost of repairs and taxes will be passed on to the renter by the owner, plus a profit. Right? ---- I want to budget the following way: Get paid. Pay off credit card. Maintain a balance of $200 in checking account for bill autopay. Transfer the rest to savings. Use credit card for all purchases. I don't know how to make YNAB work for that. It just shows that I am over budget, because you can't seem to edit the monthly budget amount.
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Dec 13, 2013 21:15
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YNAB is designed to budget only the money you have. If you haven't entered income into the register, you won't have money to budget. YNAB isn't just a spreadsheet, there's a methodology behind it which has certain implications for the way you use it. http://www.youneedabudget.com/method/rule-one EDIT: vvv The YNAB way is to budget only money you have. You spending on your credit card is creating negative balance (Debt) until it's paid off. You should have an On-Budget account for your Credit Card, and an On-budget account for your Checking. Then make a transfer to pay it off. By spending on your Credit Card without receiving any income, you are spending money you don't have yet, so your budget balance will be negative. http://www.youneedabudget.com/support/article/credit-card-payments lament.cfg fucked around with this message at 21:25 on Dec 13, 2013 |
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Dec 13, 2013 21:19
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Then I guess I'm better off using a spreadsheet. Unless there's some inherent flaw in my proposed method of spending.
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Dec 13, 2013 21:21
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YNAB is very good for helping you save more. If you're budgeting money you don't yet have, then you're not living on last month's income. I recommend getting to that stage. That way at the beginning of the month, you know exactly what you have to spend, and you already have the money for it. I also budget for the following month. I have an idea of what I'll earn, and as my paychecks come in, the number in red gets smaller. So I always know how much more I need to make this month to be able to keep my proposed budget for next month.
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Dec 13, 2013 21:27
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Celot posted:If the apartment or house you are renting is the same quality as the house or apartment you would be owning, then surely you do not turn a profit by renting. The cost of repairs and taxes will be passed on to the renter by the owner, plus a profit. Right?
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Dec 13, 2013 21:30
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Celot posted:Then I guess I'm better off using a spreadsheet. Unless there's some inherent flaw in my proposed method of spending. You are likely better off with something other than YNAB, simply because your use case is much more amenable to a spreadsheet and some tracking software. In general, YNAB seems to be a hassle for forecasting, particularly with debit accounts, not to mention tracking multiple accounts as you want. It is a frequent question here, in any case.
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Dec 13, 2013 21:31
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I recommend mint with some sort of alert set so that you make sure you don't spend too much. But YNAB is really great if you're open to trying a new approach that's a bit more conservative and more focused on reducing the stress of personal finances.
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Dec 13, 2013 23:51
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Celot posted:I want to budget the following way: This is basically how my finances work, and I use YNAB. YNAB automatically defines your budget as the total of all your on-budget accounts, minus any money in your budget categories' balances and income marked as "Available next month." If you keep the bulk of your money in savings and mark it as an off-budget account, it will show you as perpetually in the red. What I do is I keep my savings account on-budget, but keep an "Emergency Fund" budget category and budget however much money I want to stay off-budget for savings into it. I never actually categorize any transactions coming out of the emergency fund. If I ever need to dip into it, I budget a negative number to it, which subtracts from its balance, and then budget to replenish it in future months. Credit cards work just fine, just add them as regular accounts. Their balances will go negative as you spend within those accounts, which is fine. When you pay your credit card bills, just add it in as an account transfer from checking to your credit card.
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Dec 14, 2013 05:26
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Wouldn't it be better to create a dedicated Savings category for that instead, leaving the allocated Emergency Funds as a Do-Not-Touch category unless an actual emergency?
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Dec 21, 2013 21:47
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I'm a YNAB newbie, but I keep the emergency fund off budget. I've never seen anyone mention this: a transaction can have both a payee to an off budget account and a budget category. Then if you need to tap into your emergency fund, you can set up a transfer to your checking account and classify it as this or next month's income. E: combat pretzel's solution works too. crimedog fucked around with this message at 23:17 on Dec 21, 2013 |
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Dec 21, 2013 23:02
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crimedog posted:I'm a YNAB newbie, but I keep the emergency fund off budget. I've never seen anyone mention this: a transaction can have both a payee to an off budget account and a budget category. Yes a transfer to an off-budget account is just an expense. That's how I do retirement accounts and my car payment. A transfer to an on-budget account like a credit card is a transfer and can't have a category.
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Dec 21, 2013 23:26
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Kilty Monroe posted:YNAB automatically defines your budget as the total of all your on-budget accounts, minus any money in your budget categories' balances and income marked as "Available next month." If you keep the bulk of your money in savings and mark it as an off-budget account, it will show you as perpetually in the red. Can one do that easily in YNAB, or would you have to create separate things for each savings category?
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Dec 22, 2013 02:48
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PhantomOfTheCopier posted:I'm a strong advocate of keeping emergency funds within the appropriate accounts, which seems to be a good idea for most that have trouble keeping around large chunks of unallocated money. That is, the first goal is getting one month ahead, then, as often mentioned, six months ahead, and so forth, but storing the extra months in each account as it steadily grows. If you can get a report of how many months ahead you are in each account, it helps to create a monthly budget that is balanced with regards to current needs and long-term savings. You would have line categories for each goal and have to learn to ignore your chequing or savings account balances. Each month you'd just categorize the amount you want into each line until the category balance reached your goal. It's the same thing, really, just categories instead of accounts.
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Dec 22, 2013 03:18
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PhantomOfTheCopier posted:Can one do that easily in YNAB, or would you have to create separate things for each savings category? I'm not sure what you mean by "separate things". But yeah, you can have multiple accounts, and keep them on or off budget. If your accounts are on-budget, then it makes no difference where you put the money. You merely budget into a savings category every month and let the number grow. The actual money is part of the same giant pool with everything else, even if it's spread over five accounts. As you said, you need to live to your budget and not your bank account. If your savings accounts are off-budget, then as tuyop said, they're treated as expenses. You still create a budget category (just as you would for mortgage or groceries), then when you make a payment, it comes out of the budget for that category. It's really the same thing, just keeping it off-budget requires an additional step of "paying" the money to a specific off-budget account.
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Dec 22, 2013 05:42
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Really, keeping savings off-budget or keeping it categorized on-budget are both valid ways to use YNAB. Individual circumstances vary and may make one approach better suited than the other, so just use what works for you. Categorizing transfers to off-budget accounts is something I wasn't aware of, though, so thanks for posting that.
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Dec 22, 2013 10:19
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Old Fart posted:I'm not sure what you mean by "separate things"... it makes no difference where you put the money... just keeping it off-budget requires an additional step of "paying" the money to a specific off-budget account. It sounds like tracking this per account requires a second set of external things, plus an extra step for each of them. I guess I say "thing" because... well, to be frank, when I read YNAB stuff I really have no idea what they mean when they use the word 'budget' as they seem to use it to mean pretty much anything and everything. They got a little "budget" happy. vvvv I don't think I've disagreed with any of that, if you have the money categorized instead of sitting in a big lump. PhantomOfTheCopier fucked around with this message at 18:13 on Dec 22, 2013 |
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Dec 22, 2013 17:35
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PhantomOfTheCopier posted:I guess I find this to be... slightly disingenuous maybe. I believe it does make a difference where the money is recorded, solely on the grounds that I know more people that will flippantly spend from the "giant pool" than I do that can save that way. It seems like more would be successful with savings goals if they put, say, $650 toward rent each month even though rent was only $600. I'd much rather know that "rent and groceries" are six months ahead than seeing that I have "about 2.5 times my monthly income sitting in a pool". It's a bit confusing but requires you to shift from viewing money in your bank account as available for spending to money in categories as available. You may have 25k in your account, but if you've internalized the categorization of your balances you'll see that nearly all of that is earmarked for emergencies and bills. You could earmark the money using a million different bank accounts or use categories or a cash envelope system if you have to. All these methods are just virtual envelopes.
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Dec 22, 2013 17:46
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PhantomOfTheCopier posted:I guess I find this to be... slightly disingenuous maybe. I believe it does make a difference where the money is recorded, solely on the grounds that I know more people that will flippantly spend from the "giant pool" than I do that can save that way. It seems like more would be successful with savings goals if they put, say, $650 toward rent each month even though rent was only $600. I'd much rather know that "rent and groceries" are six months ahead than seeing that I have "about 2.5 times my monthly income sitting in a pool". I agree, some folks would be bad with the giant pool. I'm a little shocked myself that I adapted quickly to it. The beauty of YNAB for me is that it can be used many ways. A couple of years ago, when I was intermittently employed, I actually budgeted several months in advance so I knew how far my cushion extended. I didn't put $650 every month, I just filled in $600 for six months down the line. It worked well for my situation. YNAB was very clear when the money would run out, in bright numbers at the top of the month. "If work ends today, I'm good for three and a half months." It helped me get disciplined and make my money work for me. Every month the red zone got further away. You can also do as you suggest, and just budget a little more per category, and let it roll over. I did that for a while, but I found it didn't work well for me. I was too tempted to cheat, and it messed with my OCD tendencies. At this point I have enough in the "savings" category that I don't worry about it at all. At the end of the month I take all the income from that month, and use it to create my budget for the following month. More than anything else, getting a month ahead has made my life much easier, and I've saved more than ever. That's one of the primary goals of the YNAB system. PhantomOfTheCopier posted:It sounds like tracking this per account requires a second set of external things, plus an extra step for each of them. I guess I say "thing" because... well, to be frank, when I read YNAB stuff I really have no idea what they mean when they use the word 'budget' as they seem to use it to mean pretty much anything and everything. They got a little "budget" happy. I'm not sure what you mean by tracking per account. If you want to allocate $650 every month for rent, it doesn't matter where the money lives in your bank accounts. You type a number and you're done. Or if you want to budget 25% of your income to emergency fund, again just type the number in that category. It couldn't be any easier. If you don't trust yourself to keep that money assigned in your budget and instead want to keep it in a separate physical bank account, then that's easy too. You just "pay" to that account the way you would your phone bill. It sounds like maybe you have some questions about how it works. I'd be happy to try to answer any of them.
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Dec 22, 2013 18:25
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I don't see what's so hard in understanding the categorization system in YNAB. It's essentially virtual accounts, no need from several physical ones. A checking and a savings account should be enough.
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Dec 22, 2013 21:23
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Yeah, I spent some time on the YNAB site and I'm going to keep the emergency fund in an on budget account and keep track of it in a budget category. Then when you need to tap into it, you put a negative number into the budget for that category to release the funds. Handling Savings in YNAB Video Setting Up Savings E: you know, first I write this post and now I think I prefer a true emergency fund to be off budget. I'm still playing around with how I want to set everything up. YNAB is pretty flexible. I've been changing categories around, adding some, deleting others, different master categories, etc. I like it, I'm getting closer and closer to an ascetically pleasing view of my spending. crimedog fucked around with this message at 22:14 on Dec 22, 2013 |
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Dec 22, 2013 21:38
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crimedog posted:ascetically pleasing view of my spending. I too have a budget line for "living naked in the forest with a big beard like a Greek sage" ($115)
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Dec 22, 2013 22:41
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crimedog posted:Yeah, I spent some time on the YNAB site and I'm going to keep the emergency fund in an on budget account and keep track of it in a budget category. Then when you need to tap into it, you put a negative number into the budget for that category to release the funds. I keep my savings account on-budget and create budget categories for my various savings goals (besides retirement and investments), because that then allows me to see at a glance how much of that account is earmarked for Emergency Savings (do not touch) and how much is earmarked for each medium-term savings goal such as Vacation, Moving, and Electronics.
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Dec 22, 2013 23:50
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Giant Goats posted:I keep my savings account on-budget and create budget categories for my various savings goals (besides retirement and investments), because that then allows me to see at a glance how much of that account is earmarked for Emergency Savings (do not touch) and how much is earmarked for each medium-term savings goal such as Vacation, Moving, and Electronics. Yeah, I probably should've not replied at all. My emergency fund is actually my YNAB Rule 4 buffer, living on last month's income. I'm in extreme debt reduction mode now. tuyop posted:I too have a budget line for "living naked in the forest with a big beard like a Greek sage" ($115) I am trying to be super frugal. 
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Dec 23, 2013 00:48
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Regarding taking from a savings category... If you want to track it a bit more than simply putting a negative in the budget, you can also do this: pay yourself from that category, which allows you to put a note. The put it right back as an inflow in another category, the same way you would when reimbursed for something. Or you can even create a payee for the transactions. Does that make sense? For example, if you need to dip into savings for a medical cost, you can "pay" to "medical emergency" from the savings category, then "receive" from "medical emergency" into the medical category. It allows a bit more tracking than just juggling numbers in the monthly budget. I spent a while massaging categories, finally have something I like. I have four master categories: Monthly Bills, Monthly Consumables, Quality of Life, and Long Term Savings. Bills are just that, Consumables are groceries, clothes, personal maintenance, etc. Quality of Life includes blow money, entertainment, vacations. Savings includes retirement and baby savings, but also bigger ticket items such as furniture, saving for a car, etc. So there's some crossover between the last two categories, but I view Quality of Life as non-tangible feel-good stuff, and Savings as larger goals.
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Dec 23, 2013 01:59
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YNAB is 75% off again on Steam! 15 bucks, go buy it.
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Jan 1, 2014 20:17
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| # ? May 13, 2024 13:11 |
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After buying YNAB back in June, I deleted the old budget excel sheet I got here in the forums. A few friends of mine are interested in getting their stuff under control, but I can't find that sheet in this sub-forum for the life of me. It was made in 2011, I think? Maybe 2012? Is there a possible lead someone could give me?
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Jan 2, 2014 01:16
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