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At least with my spreadsheet it's extremely easy and straightforward to see where I over under spent! 
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Jan 30, 2015 21:54
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Bugamol posted:Here Knyteguy. I always beat you up, but I had a pretty horrible month myself. I took my parents out to dinner a few times because they had a hard month and worked a few 60+ hour weeks which caused me to eat out for both lunches and dinners. Knyteguy posted:BUGAMOL, you rear end in a top hat! I'm DONE with this thread!
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Jan 30, 2015 22:27
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I believe that is called a "joke." Well played, both of you.
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Jan 30, 2015 22:50
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Bugamol posted:At least with my spreadsheet it's extremely easy and straightforward to see where I over under spent! Along this line, what did you use to create this sheet?
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Jan 31, 2015 02:02
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IllegallySober posted:Along this line, what did you use to create this sheet? Excel, what else! A link to dl it is in this thread, from last fall.
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Jan 31, 2015 02:38
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Jan Budget Update:  Discretionary was used to pay for overages in other categories. Our original discretionary budgets were I think $150/$150/$100. Baby category: we got a $1,700 refund check from our doctor, and the money refunded came from the HSA. We tried to redeposit it at the bank where the HSA account resides, and they told us we need to wire it back into the HSA after depositing it at our main bank. Does anyone know if we can just keep the money, and use it to pay for the delivery's medical costs? I'm just worried about the potential tax liability, and also the yearly contribution limits. Should we bother considering we're going to use it in 2 weeks? The bank representatives where our HSA is at could tell us absolutely nothing. Graphs:   The net worth dip in February is from rent and groceries. Obviously not final as we still have income to make in Feb and the baby expenses to be added. In the income vs expense remember we paid off $3,500 worth of debt this month. So yea there was progress made in January, at least. Just gotta keep at it, keep the thread updated, keep the baby fund full, and avoid debt like the plague. There's no more room for fuckups. Baby's due date is February 16, 2015. Coming up quickly. e: updated income vs expense report Knyteguy fucked around with this message at 17:52 on Feb 2, 2015 |
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Feb 2, 2015 17:40
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This is the last budget you posted Did you reclassify your discretionary spending into other categories? I'm confused what happened.
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Feb 2, 2015 17:59
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Veskit posted:Did you reclassify your discretionary spending into other categories? I'm confused what happened. Correct. We used our discretionary money elsewhere to help pay for overages in other categories. I think with the way we budget (which is really just YNAB's system), the net outcome would be the best way to look at things. Or I can try to keep records of exactly what happened, but I'm not sure I can make that kind of commitment. Or perhaps I can come up with a way to import bank transactions for the month into a second spreadsheet like Bugamol's which gives a little more info. I dunno. Before we were just throwing overages into our discretionary category, but it was hurting the way we looked at expenses, since it wasn't accurate (like groceries). e: if everyone wants a "originally budgeted:actual spent" report for all categories then I can do that, but it'll have to wait until tonight or tomorrow. Like what Bugamol posted for his budget last page, basically. Knyteguy fucked around with this message at 18:10 on Feb 2, 2015 |
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Feb 2, 2015 18:04
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Knyteguy posted:
Be careful redepositing it as it will likely be counted as a contribution unless you formally request it to be a non-reporting contribution. Normally, there is nothing wrong with paying yourself from an HSA to reimburse medical expenses. So if you can pay $1700 with non-HSA funds and keep the receipts, you should be in the clear for reconciling the total distribution.
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Feb 2, 2015 18:06
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Knyteguy posted:Correct. We used our discretionary money elsewhere to help pay for overages in other categories. I think with the way we budget (which is really just YNAB's system), the net results would be the best way to look at things. Or I can try to keep records of exactly what happened, but I'm not sure I can make that kind of commitment. Or perhaps I can come up with a way to import bank transactions for the month into a second spreadsheet like Bugamol's which gives a little more info. I dunno. It gets confusing when you move money around mid month. It also makes it harder to reconcile what really happened. I don't think you should use discretionary to cover "overspend" in other categories. Your over and under spend should stay in whatever category it originated from. Otherwise it just makes it really difficult to follow. Especially when you report it one way on the 15th and then a different way on the 31st. Overall it looks like you did okay, but you completely blasted your $300 grocery budget you were sure you could stick to. You even blew through your adjusted $400 grocery limit as well. Overall I find YNAB relatively confusing from a financial reporting standpoint, but if it works for you keep at it.
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Feb 2, 2015 18:11
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Knyteguy posted:Correct. We used our discretionary money elsewhere to help pay for overages in other categories. I think with the way we budget (which is really just YNAB's system), the net outcome would be the best way to look at things. Or I can try to keep records of exactly what happened, but I'm not sure I can make that kind of commitment. Or perhaps I can come up with a way to import bank transactions for the month into a second spreadsheet like Bugamol's which gives a little more info. I dunno. First and foremost it's 5 minutes a day to enter transactions. The only reason you don't have time is because you forgot to make time. Secondly, your way of doing things is incredibly confusing and time consuming. I'll give an example. I have 10 dollars in my discretionary budget, and no dollars in my grocery budget. If i go out and I buy a steak to eat for dinner tonight, you don't put the steak under discretionary because there's 10 dollars in the budget (the left column), you instead charge it to the grocery budget. Now that the grocery budget is over 10 bucks, you subtract out 10 from the left, and add 10 to groceries. Reclassifying is doing things like instead of calling razors discretionary, you instead call it a home good. Is an energy drink a grocery bill item or is it discretionary? Things like that. You need to add/subtract THE LEFT COLUMN to roll with the punches and balance your budget, NOT RECLASSIFY YOUR PURCHASES. Lastly to drive the point home, I buy coffee and count it as a grocery when it could be considered discretionary. Coffee from the store will always be a grocery item, no matter what, period. Each individual purchase you make should be that category forever. Bugamol posted:Overall I find YNAB relatively confusing from a financial reporting standpoint, but if it works for you keep at it. He's doing his best to make it as confusing as possible.
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Feb 2, 2015 18:25
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Veskit posted:Reclassifying is doing things like instead of calling razors discretionary, you instead call it a home good. Is an energy drink a grocery bill item or is it discretionary? Things like that. You need to add/subtract THE LEFT COLUMN to roll with the punches and balance your budget, NOT RECLASSIFY YOUR PURCHASES. . Right this is how we proceeded roughly mid-month, and I changed the data to reflect everything more accurately. We subtracted from the left of discretionary and used it for other categories. We did similarly with funds we no longer needed to pay for taxes. Before we were reclassifying which was I think making it most difficult of all, even for us. I'll come up with a report template going forward to end all of the confusion. For you guys, and for us, so we all have a better understanding of the month. If I just leave everything red and don't take from discretionary for overages throughout the month then we're going to spend more than intended, so a separate report is necessary here I think.
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Feb 2, 2015 18:35
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No that's not the problem. Your discretionary spending went from 360something to 315 over a week. How did that happen, specifically.
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Feb 2, 2015 18:40
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Veskit posted:No that's not the problem. We had groceries and household goods classified as discretionary in YNAB. I then changed those expenses to match their actual categories, so we had a better idea of what money was actually being spent on, and then lowered our discretionary budget for the month to cover said overages. It's still not perfect in January, but going forward my hope is that it will be more accurate. It's how we should have been doing it this whole time.
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Feb 2, 2015 18:43
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Knyteguy posted:We had groceries and household goods classified as discretionary in YNAB. I then changed those expenses to match their actual categories, so we had a better idea of what money was actually being spent on, and then lowered our discretionary budget for the month to cover said overages. It's still not perfect in January, but going forward my hope is that it will be more accurate. It's how we should have been doing it this whole time. That makes more sense but you need to explain how and why you went over each line item you over budgeted to be able to fully understand your mistakes and move on. I count around 250 over budget not including your snafu with the apartment. Also why is your internet over budget?
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Feb 2, 2015 18:48
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All of the areas you overspent - do you carry that overspent money into next months budget? Ex: You budget $400 in groceries, you spend $450, so next month you have $350. This would allow you to continue to stick to your budget, but if you want to buy a bunch of food in January that gets eaten in February it still works out. If you are overspending in certain categories every month, and covering it with discretionary, then you are just improperly budgeting. Agreeing with most of this thread that KG is gaming/loving with YNAB in a fashion that is both confusing and not really budgeting. KG has more that enough historical data to accurately estimate his costs for all of the things in his budget. KG is also totally willing to blow any line item in his budget instead of delaying the expenses or finding cheaper options. quote:We tried to redeposit it at the bank where the HSA account resides, and they told us we need to wire it back into the HSA after depositing it at our main bank. Unless you're running into some issue with exceeding the annual HSA contribution limit, this money must go back into your HSA. The money you paid the doctor is pre-tax HSA money, and if you just pocket it, you can run afoul of the IRS with regard to that stuff. Have the money wired back into your HSA and pay for future medical expenses with it.
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Feb 2, 2015 18:50
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Veskit posted:That makes more sense but you need to explain how and why you went over each line item you over budgeted to be able to fully understand your mistakes and move on. I count around 250 over budget not including your snafu with the apartment. No problem, I can talk about all of the overages when I get a little time, probably after work. Internet: I need to look at our history. It's in the red because either our billing date changed (I think this is what happened) or they overbilled us. I keep leaving it red to remind me to look into it more closely, as I haven't figured out the reason for sure yet.
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Feb 2, 2015 18:52
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I have a general question. What do you do in your free time? Time and time again you come into this thread saying you didn't have time, you'll do it later, you've been busy, etc. etc. etc.. If you don't mind me asking. What are you so busy with? I mean I've worked 60+ hour weeks all through January, had three parties to go to on Saturday/Sundays, and hosted a Super Bowl party with my wife yesterday. I still find time to reconcile my budget at least weekly. And I play video games, go out for drinks with people, and generally gently caress around/watch TV. Is/Was "I've been busy = I was lazy and slept all day?"
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Feb 2, 2015 18:56
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Bugamol posted:I have a general question. n8r I'll get back to you. Well I don't feel like I've said that lately. I'm busy now, today, at work. Not so busy I can't browse a minute, but I can't write page long posts either. Busy can mean a bunch of things for me, but it generally means family time or work time. I usually wake up at 7:00am-7:30am every day, even weekends, so it's generally not time sleeping no. Since my wife is working the closing shift after work I'll probably use the time I'm alone at home productively. I'm also still trying to get a business off the ground, and a side opportunity may be coming up at work with my boss and the company next door. With the baby coming time is going to get crazy soon.
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Feb 2, 2015 19:03
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I don't see the problem in saying "we're over our budget in groceries, so we're going to subtract from out discretionary budgets to pad the grocery budget." It's not re-classifying purchases. He's becoming more aware of where his money is going and how it's affecting him. I believe this is part of the YNAB "method". This way long-term he has a clearer picture of his actual habits and trends, and can budget and adjust more intelligently in the future. It may not be the way other people do things, but different strokes for different folks. The whole point is to have more understanding of how you spend your money.
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Feb 2, 2015 19:34
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If you cover budgeted items with 'discretionary' you're not accurately budgeting. You set numbers that are reasonable and you stick with it. In this case you've got a lot of incentive to not actually control your spending because you've got this discretionary thing as just a padding for the other numbers. Properly budgeted, if you overspend one month, you make up for that overspending by under spending the same category the next month. A budget is nothing if it isn't accurate and you're not actually sticking to it.
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Feb 2, 2015 22:11
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n8r posted:If you cover budgeted items with 'discretionary' you're not accurately budgeting. You set numbers that are reasonable and you stick with it. In this case you've got a lot of incentive to not actually control your spending because you've got this discretionary thing as just a padding for the other numbers. Properly budgeted, if you overspend one month, you make up for that overspending by under spending the same category the next month. A budget is nothing if it isn't accurate and you're not actually sticking to it. That's not how YNAB works. And discretionary (or "fun money" or whatever) is fine to have for this reason. If they have leftover discretionary and went over on groceries it is fine. The point is that they are accounting for it. As long as they are moving from less important categories to cover the difference it is okay. It is not okay to be pulling from rent or insurance or other fixed bills to cover variable things. If they are doing this consistently it means they haven't budgeted realistically for that category (hint, this is what is happening with Knyteguy). But most months with YNAB something gets slightly over, and you don't beat yourself up over it, you compensate. Often times rolling the overspend over into next month is a failure too, because you took an already too low number and made it even lower. The only category that you should be rolling over like that is discretionary stuff (and you shouldn't be making those go negative in the first place).
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Feb 2, 2015 22:20
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Old Fart posted:I don't see the problem in saying "we're over our budget in groceries, so we're going to subtract from out discretionary budgets to pad the grocery budget." It's not re-classifying purchases. He's becoming more aware of where his money is going and how it's affecting him. I believe this is part of the YNAB "method". This way long-term he has a clearer picture of his actual habits and trends, and can budget and adjust more intelligently in the future. I'd agree with you if he didn't actually reclass a bunch of purchases and make it CONFUSING AS gently caress.
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Feb 2, 2015 22:30
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I don't care what he does as long as he does it for more than 1-2 months before completely changing how he budgets. We've been beating on his head for 6 months now to get this poo poo squared away before having a baby so he had a reliable, consistent, and easy to manage budget. That way he could stay on track when things get hectic with the baby. He has shown time and time again that when he stop tracking it leads to a dramatic increase in overspend. Hell I do the same thing. Out of sight, out of mind. Which is why I reconcile my budget weekly. Sometimes daily.
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Feb 2, 2015 22:34
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Bugamol posted:I don't care what he does as long as he does it for more than 1-2 months before completely changing how he budgets. We've been beating on his head for 6 months now to get this poo poo squared away before having a baby so he had a reliable, consistent, and easy to manage budget. That way he could stay on track when things get hectic with the baby. He has shown time and time again that when he stop tracking it leads to a dramatic increase in overspend. Hell I do the same thing. Out of sight, out of mind. Which is why I reconcile my budget weekly. Sometimes daily. Will get to everyone asap, but I just wanted to clear this up real quick: we do reconcile at least weekly. Usually daily, but sometimes we'll go 4 days or so. Importing from our bank account is a godsend, but we just figured out how/why to do in January.
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Feb 2, 2015 22:40
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Can't for the life of me figure out why it's so difficult to key 5 transactions tops a day.
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Feb 2, 2015 22:41
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I don't really care how YNAB works. The way KG is using it doesn't appear to me to be effective. If you have a set budget amount of $400 / month on food, and you decide to make a costco run at the end of the month, it totally makes sense to carry the money over. Looking at the balance column on the January image he posted, it does appear that YNAB has some capability to carry numbers across. Using discretionary as a way of covering up overspending in a particular category isn't effective. Given the numbers in January (I know some food was purchased for February) you have $470 + $150 spent on food/restaurants. This adds up to $20 a day - this isn't exactly living on rice and beans. It total, it appears that KG is saving money, which is a good thing, I would just contend that if he worked a little bit harder - especially on the food/discretionary/restaurant/pet costs side of things he'd have a lot money he could put away. If KG can manage to not crotch punch himself via taxes/lease breaking/car buying in the next year he'll be very far ahead from where he is today. KG's goal by the end of this year is to have the whole car fiasco thing figured out. If he worked hard on stashing money away he could get out from under that car and into a cheap ~$5k car by the end of the year.
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Feb 2, 2015 22:42
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Veskit posted:Can't for the life of me figure out why it's so difficult to key 5 transactions tops a day. Seconding this and it's why I asked what he's so busy with all the time. Especially since by the sounds of it his wife works when he's home and vice versa. It shouldn't be that difficult to square away 15 minutes a day to reconcile your budget. And most days it will only take <5 minutes, but he always treats it like it's some exorbitant chore.
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Feb 2, 2015 23:36
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You're talking about someone who gets 'surprised' when they run out of food and as a result blows money eating out at restaurants.
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Feb 3, 2015 00:17
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Chin Strap posted:That's not how YNAB works.
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Feb 3, 2015 00:20
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n8r posted:I don't really care how YNAB works. The way KG is using it doesn't appear to me to be effective. If you have a set budget amount of $400 / month on food, and you decide to make a costco run at the end of the month, it totally makes sense to carry the money over. Looking at the balance column on the January image he posted, it does appear that YNAB has some capability to carry numbers across. Using discretionary as a way of covering up overspending in a particular category isn't effective. Given the numbers in January (I know some food was purchased for February) you have $470 + $150 spent on food/restaurants. This adds up to $20 a day - this isn't exactly living on rice and beans. OK. We do roll over categories sometimes; it just depends. Pets this month will have a rollover effect for example. I like the dynamics of the budget with YNAB. Basically the point they make is that no one can accurately budget every single month in advance, and that there is no such thing as a "normal" month that is exactly the same as previous months. I actually don't have enough data for things like groceries, home goods, grooming, clothing, etc because we've been reclassifying expenses into categories once an overage happened since we started this. That behavior has now stopped. Overages Knyteguy posted:Jan Budget Update: Alright for the explanations: Pets - Frontloaded some food expenses. We'll be making up for that this month with a lower pet budget. Car Insurance - Stealth rate raise. Fixed for Feb. Utilities - Not sure, but just got a power bill and this one will be $148 with an estimated $25 on water. Renter's Insurance - Went up without me noticing from moving to the house. Clothing Grooming - Didn't take much got haircuts and my wife got some makeup. We didn't account for grooming in the budget at all. Didn't go buy designer jeans. Home Goods - Didn't account for home goods in budget at all. Groceries & Restaurants: See below Total Overages: $299 Under Budget or Frontloaded Expenses: Fuel: $4 Discretionary: $82 Phone: $45 Pets: ~$65+ frontloaded for February Total Overage: ~$118 Considering we didn't originally have lines for grooming and home goods ($32 and $47 respectively), then we busted by about $40 if we had been accounting for those two categories, which we should have been. The two biggest problem areas as shown above were restaurants and groceries, which I'm hoping we've taken steps to do better in Feb. We got a Costco card and got some bulk items we generally buy singly and in individual trips (chips and salsa is my bane), and we're going to try to cut back as much as possible on restaurants via premade meals, which we've made quite a few of and we'll continue to make up until the point the baby is born. Plus, ya know, a crazy pregnant wife drinking me out of house and home with insane amounts of orange juice and other citrus beverages  (mostly joking).I'm not making excuses for this all, I'm just explaining what happened as requested (I would've preferred not to explain it all). Just gotta strive to do better. e: and also one of us reconciles pretty often I didn't say we don't find time for that. I don't think you guys realize how much time I really dedicate to our finances though either on this forum, or YNABing, or discussing it with my wife, or trying to plan, or doing business accounting ($770 net last year), etc. It is by far the dominant topic in my life and really in our marriage, and it has been for awhile now. I find it interesting and frankly fun, but I'm not sure where the idea is coming from that I'm not dedicating the time for this. Knyteguy fucked around with this message at 06:52 on Feb 3, 2015 |
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Feb 3, 2015 06:39
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80k posted:Be careful redepositing it as it will likely be counted as a contribution unless you formally request it to be a non-reporting contribution. Normally, there is nothing wrong with paying yourself from an HSA to reimburse medical expenses. So if you can pay $1700 with non-HSA funds and keep the receipts, you should be in the clear for reconciling the total distribution. OK thanks so as long as I keep receipts for the medical bills we should be able to keep the money? I've already got it accounted for hospital bills in YNAB if that's the case. It seems like it wouldn't matter as the end result is exactly the same.
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Feb 3, 2015 06:40
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Knyteguy posted:OK thanks so as long as I keep receipts for the medical bills we should be able to keep the money? I've already got it accounted for hospital bills in YNAB if that's the case. It seems like it wouldn't matter as the end result is exactly the same. Yea, this is considered a legit way to deal with it and is often advocated by HSA custodians that know what they are talking about. Even if you did not get a partial refund, you would still be required to hold onto all receipts against the distributions, in the rare case of an audit. In the end of the day, the HSA debit card is just a convenience. What the IRS cares about is distribution vs qualified expenses. I would not simply put it back in (as advised by another goon) even if you are not over the annual limit, because putting it back in doesn't exactly reconcile your distribution, and it is this attempted fix that will in fact cause issues with the IRS. In fact, it is messier than just keeping the refund and offsetting it with additional qualified expenses (essentially pay with non-HSA funds and then reimburse yourself with the refund), which is completely unnoticeable to the IRS. You are the only person that knows about this partial refund and your decision to use it properly for qualified expenses more than covers your rear end. The above advice is not the only way to handle the mistake. The two ways to handle repayments need to be coordinated... it cannot be simply wired back in. Some banks easily handle repayments in these cases but requires paperwork. Another way custodians often handle these is to treat it as a 60 day rollover (it is a weird way of just using a legal way to touch the money and put it back as if nothing happened) but again, this requires paperwork. But if you can take care of it easily the way I described, I know that it is considered a legit way to deal with it.
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Feb 3, 2015 07:24
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Knyteguy posted:OK. We do roll over categories sometimes; it just depends. Pets this month will have a rollover effect for example. I like the dynamics of the budget with YNAB. Basically the point they make is that no one can accurately budget every single month in advance, and that there is no such thing as a "normal" month that is exactly the same as previous months. I actually don't have enough data for things like groceries, home goods, grooming, clothing, etc because we've been reclassifying expenses into categories once an overage happened since we started this. That behavior has now stopped. I think this is a pretty good example of how you're still not 'getting' budgeting. What do you think happens in business when a budget item is set for a year? Management tries drat hard to come in under budget and generally speaking not good poo poo happens when you go over budget. Your constant changing of the numbers isn't budgeting, it's guessing how much you want to spend every month and then if you go over, welp oh well, guess you just gently caress with the numbers more next month. A budget imposes limitations. If you decide to spend $400 a month on food/restaurants. You spend $400 a month on food, and hopefully less. If you overspend one month you carry that over to the next month. If you underspend, that can carry over as well. Hopefully at the end of the year, you've ended up spending $350/month on food and have managed to toss another $600 into the bank as a result. I think trying to guess how much you spend on each little category is probably a pain in the rear end and not terribly productive. What do you think about a total out of pocket spent amount per month? Or setting max amounts spent for a few categories. Or set a savings amount per months and only working with the money left over after savings. Do you think you could live on $5k/month? What about $4500?
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Feb 3, 2015 08:57
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n8r posted:What do you think about a total out of pocket spent amount per month? Or setting max amounts spent for a few categories. Or set a savings amount per months and only working with the money left over after savings. This is exactly what YNAB says to do, and in fact what he is doing. He takes his income, subtracts off his set savings amount per month. The remaining is his total out of pocket amount to spend. Categorizing it helps some people (including me) stick to guidelines. Yes, he's reallocating some of that money after the fact. That happens. The idea is it will happen less as he sets into new habits and has more data.
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Feb 3, 2015 13:24
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I would love to see people lighten up on this point. KG doesn't even have enough data to know what's "normal", so it's silly to hold to some arbitrary number. I think we should be happy that he's tracking spending and making adjustments to meet needs. Maybe after six months or a year he'll have the information to normalize. KG isn't a business, he's a person. He doesn't have a CFO with years of numbers to make budgets. He doesn't have shareholders to please. As long as he sets aside savings first and doesn't over-spend what's remaining, does it matter how the numbers play out? Think of him as one department in the overall company. He's given his budget. Do we care if he spends it on paper clips or copier toner? If he under-estimates the ballpoint pen budget, do we care if he takes it out of his Friday bagels budget? He likes to share his process. Let's not beat him up as he thinks out loud about how his budget is adjusting and taking shape. KG, rather than auto-import from the bank, maybe you can take a few weeks to manually enter numbers? I think that's what YNAB wants you to do. That way you're really face-to-face with your spending habits. It makes it more real. Maybe it will help, maybe it won't, but is it worth a shot? Just open your bank statement next to YNAB and go through line by line. It's pretty easy to do.
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Feb 3, 2015 14:59
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I've been mostly lurking this thread since its inception, but I don't understand how the last few posts can claim he doesn't have enough data to know whats normal - he's been posting and working at this since November 2013. There have been "grocery" numbers for a long time. I can look at the past three months of my checking and credit accounts and know exactly when and where I overspent on groceries (Thanksgiving and winter holiday things, we baked a lot and made half the dishes for my family's gatherings) and what the normal spending would have been without it. Just like he should be able to do. I think part of the reason he "doesn't have enough normal data" is because YNAB doesn't seem to work well enough for him. I think most of us understand how it should theoretically work, but the fact that it hasn't worked and the thread is still mostly confused by the numbers is evidence enough to stop using it or change how its being used. I tried it for a few months and hated it, so I stick to a spreadsheet of numbers, do auto-savings, and do my best not to overspend the money I have leftover by the end of the month. The fact is that its created a system for KG where he can literally change budget items whenever he overspends on them instead of doing what has been beaten into his head: thinking carefully about, and setting an actually reasonable and obtainable number each month and coming in under it. KG knows enough about it to game it like other posters have pointed out above, and once you start doing that it's probably time to change your budgeting system up. Unfortunately he does have a CFO - it's him, and he's done a pretty poor job at it so far. And yeah, I think we do need to care about whether he spends the money on paper clips or toner to continue your analogy - that is the whole problem here. Spend too much on one thing, and you don't get to spend anything else on the other because you don't have the money to spend any more.
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Feb 3, 2015 16:04
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Old Fart posted:do we care if he takes it out of his Friday bagels budget? I don't know we might be walking the line of mutiny in the ranks if we take away Friday bagels... YNAB is working well I just need to stop (have stopped) reclassifying expenses. The past few months worth of data is invalid for groceries (and I don't have data before that, as we've made a couple fresh starts). When I was digging into discretionary for groceries my main thought wasn't efficiency, so we spent too much at gas stations or the expensive grocer down the block. Our budget has enough room now to make a 2nd shopping trip later in the month. That's all we've really needed, I think. I like our budget this month I want to see it play out. Behaviorally a couple things have changed. Really though isn't the O/U pretty decent? n8r it seems like this is really what you're getting at. I understand your perspective that groceries is high, and restaurants is high, etc. For two people (one pregnant) that's about $10.50 a day; I don't think that's too terrible. I agree there is lots of room in this budget dedicated to frivolous near-wastefulness. It's absolutely something I'd like to improve on to meet our financial goals. Right now though the big focus is on the baby, and I'm worried we won't have much time or energy to work on cut backs too much for the moment. We are however going to try to cut out restaurant spending as much as we can this month. It's the one category in our budget that I'm really unhappy with right now, since it enables laziness and actively hurts other goals as well. I don't game YNAB more than it says to game it. I'll calculate the total O/U on expenses and get a report up every month. Other than that I don't see why it matters if I spend my fun money on extra groceries or whatever. It may show a lack of planning, but it's working around that without taking away money from our savings goals; isn't that ultimately the important part? Our spending last month (less taxes and the apartment) was $3516 including all non-business categories (I track this separately and only use my profit to purchase), so yes I'd imagine we could make it on anything around that. The average since October (including taxes and apartment) is about $4100. I imagine those two debts equaling $3700 really throw that off.
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Feb 3, 2015 17:53
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I found exporting budget data from YNAB to Excel on the first of the month helped. Then at the end of the month do it again and see how much you had to push categories.
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Feb 3, 2015 17:55
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SiGmA_X posted:I found exporting budget data from YNAB to Excel on the first of the month helped. Then at the end of the month do it again and see how much you had to push categories. OK I'll give this a try and try to turn it into a little report at the end of months.
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Feb 3, 2015 18:01
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