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spwrozek posted:
Ann Arbor is super overpriced, actually, because of all the rich college kids. Anywhere else, and you'd have to go top of the line to pay more than $1000 a month for a 2 bedroom.
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Nov 14, 2014 03:40
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ChipNDip posted:This will really depend on where in Michigan he is moving. Grand Rapids, Lansing, and Ann Arbor this could be possible, anywhere else though not so much. Ann Arbor is super overpriced, actually, because of all the rich college kids. Anywhere else, and you'd have to go top of the line to pay more than $1000 a month for a 2 bedroom. [/quote] I just meant you can get a room in a house in those places (no where else is this really possible in Michigan). I knew a lot of people at UofM that split rooms and lived in poo poo holes but it was cheap. Any of my friends moved outside of AA once they graduated because it is way more affordable. When I was living in Jackson $715 a month got you a very nice 1/1 apartment. Grand Rapids is getting pretty pricey based on what I am told by my cousin who lives there. Super cool place. I would live in GR if I was still in Michigan.
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Nov 14, 2014 03:47
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I'd appreciate some advice on how to balance my 401k contributions with filling up my emergency fund. Here's the story so far: Age: 25 Monthly net income: $1600 Current 401k: $12,000 Current pension: $8,000 Current emergency fund: $300 Monthly budget: Student debt: $467 Rent+utilities: $465 Food: $150 Public transit pass: $100 Gas: $25 Insurance+tabs+AAA: $90 (paid biyearly, yearly, and yearly, respectively) Cell Phone: $33 Charity: $25 Misc, but necessary (haircut, oil change, toothpaste, etc.): $100 For sanity: $100 Grand total spending: $1555 Now, my company offers 401k matching 1:1 for the first 1% and 1:2 for the next 5%. If I make the full 6% contribution that's another ~$160 off my income. $1600 is about the minimum I can expect for my income, realistically it is occasionally possible to hustle some more hours. My question is, given my age, income, and size of my retirement package, does it make any sense to walk away from any amount of the 401k matching, even temporarily, in order to grow my emergency fund? I would rate my job security as "pretty good." And any amount I don't spend from "misc" category gets dumped into my savings. fwiw, I'm in the process of looking for more gainful employment.
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Nov 21, 2014 23:33
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A Bag of Milk posted:I'd appreciate some advice on how to balance my 401k contributions with filling up my emergency fund. If you were to lose your job tomorrow, you'd be in a serious financial jam. It's worth building up your emergency buffer, especially if you're looking for better employment anyway.
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Nov 25, 2014 19:45
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I just got a new job and I'm moving from like 42k/year to 60k/year, and 65k/year if I do well for the first 120 days. Right now my wife and I have spending accounts that we put a set amount of money into every pay period. My plan is to take the extra money and NOT increase our spending accounts by a cent. Then we pay down credit cards. Right now we live in my wife's parents' basement. What kind of financial shape should we be in before we move out?
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Dec 19, 2014 19:33
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signalnoise posted:What kind of financial shape should we be in before we move out? I think it depends on how risk averse you are. I think having 12 month's worth of expenses in an emergency fund is very comforting. I recently got then almost immediately lost what I thought was a "good job." So be very careful about ramping up your expenses when your income increases. I actually got pretty lucky, in a way. The day I got fired we were about to sign a lease on a place that was way too expensive for being unemployed.
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Dec 19, 2014 19:41
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posh spaz posted:I think it depends on how risk averse you are. I think having 12 month's worth of expenses in an emergency fund is very comforting. I recently got then almost immediately lost what I thought was a "good job." So be very careful about ramping up your expenses when your income increases. I actually got pretty lucky, in a way. The day I got fired we were about to sign a lease on a place that was way too expensive for being unemployed. 12 months?! What the crap.
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Dec 19, 2014 19:43
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spwrozek posted:12 months?! What the crap. I was unemployed for about 6 months, then I got a job for a couple weeks, then I was unemployed for another month before I found another job. If you have enough of a social safety net, where you can live with relatives if poo poo hits the fan, then maybe 12 months is a bit much. I mean, the point of planning for emergencies is that the length and nature of them is not entirely predictable. I certainly didn't expect to be unemployed so long. Lots of people are unemployed for longer periods, too. I'm sure they didn't expect it either. Let's say you have 3 months of expenses saved, you're unemployed for 4 months. You either have to sell assets in a hurry (expensive if possible), borrow money (expensive if possible), or be evicted (difficult to find future housing). It's pretty tough to find a job while homeless. Each person's situation is going to be unique, but there comes a point where holding a few extra month's expenses in savings is worth it, considering the downside risk of running out of money. posh spaz fucked around with this message at 19:58 on Dec 19, 2014 |
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Dec 19, 2014 19:53
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spwrozek posted:12 months?! What the crap. As you grow beyond constantly being in debt, you have to move to a bit of fuzzy arithmetic. Are investments wholly play money, or part retirement, or part liquid assets? Are you sitting on a bunch of commodities that could be sold in an emergency? Have you slowly reduced your savings account to more-rapidly increase retirement savings that you could self-loan in a severe emergency? In the end, you have to ascertain your risks and prepare accordingly.
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Dec 20, 2014 00:06
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YNAB is currently on steam sale 25% off until January 2nd. It has gone to 50% off in other Steam sales (and even once to $15), so I'm holding out for now. Please post if you notice it gets cheaper.
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Dec 20, 2014 04:04
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Grumpwagon posted:YNAB is currently on steam sale 25% off until January 2nd. It has gone to 50% off in other Steam sales (and even once to $15), so I'm holding out for now. Please post if you notice it gets cheaper.
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Dec 20, 2014 06:06
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Found something really weird in my budget; there's apparently a month where I didn't have rent budgeted, or paid. It was a few months ago, and everything in my budget lines up with my bank account, and I'm not late on rent. The only thing I can think of it that I accidentally put it under another category. Do any of you have any other idea?
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Dec 24, 2014 01:06
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So...look at your transactions?? Pretty simple.
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Dec 24, 2014 03:36
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SiGmA_X posted:So...look at your transactions?? Pretty simple. Yeah I realized it was a silly question after I asked it. edit: I figured it out. It's because that's when I changed from putting my rent in the month before it was due (because that's when I paid it) to putting it in the month it was due (because that's when the check clears). Emmideer fucked around with this message at 07:21 on Dec 24, 2014 |
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Dec 24, 2014 03:39
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YNAB is on steam sale for $15 until 10pm PST today (1/31)
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Dec 31, 2014 14:22
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Ok, so I kept avoiding budgeting because I am a student and my work hours fluctuate. However after totally spending my money for January, I obviously can't keep winging it. I will be coming back and editing the post I think. I also don't have any immediate questions, but I'm sure goon scrutiny will help. Determine the 'period' (weekly, monthly, quarterly) I stop being a student in May, so I will be working on a monthly budget. But for now, because school has yet to start I will have a weekly budget until February Estimate income (monthly, yearly) I have a part time job right now, working 5-7 hours M-F. School starts the 19th, so that will change then. Min income for this week then should be 175$, however I may not get paid for another two weeks. I should check. Decide major categories of expenses and long-term savings goals I am in the dorms so this week, I just really need to feed myself. I have 10$. So, it's going to be a cup ramen week. Itemize your expected expenses and long-term savings Well, I guess the expected expenses would be 10$. Genuine Long term goals start an emergency fund Pay off cc debt That is all I have for now. Not very exciting because I am super poor right now, and that is purely because of my lack of budgeting. I want to do better this year. I will probably update weekly for a bit.
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Jan 12, 2015 02:37
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Edgar Allan Pwned posted:Ok, so I kept avoiding budgeting ... Do you have any income after the 19th? You have seven days to create a budget. Just think of what you could have at the beginning of the summer if you don't blow it all on guys/girls/drugs/haut cuisine in the next six months.
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Jan 13, 2015 00:36
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I have a few monthly recurring subscriptions (Online TV channel subscriptions mostly). I'm cutting expenses so I tried to cancel them, but for many I couldn't find a way to cancel them online. I signed up for them with my debit card # so I assume if I just cancel the card and get a new one the charges stop. My question is, would doing this lower my credit score?
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Feb 3, 2015 22:38
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Uh, call the company and ask to cancel? If there's literally no way to stop the charges, file a lawsuit because that's fraud?
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Feb 3, 2015 22:41
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Pertplus posted:I have a few monthly recurring subscriptions (Online TV channel subscriptions mostly). I'm cutting expenses so I tried to cancel them, but for many I couldn't find a way to cancel them online. I signed up for them with my debit card # so I assume if I just cancel the card and get a new one the charges stop. My question is, would doing this lower my credit score? At the absolute worst, your bank should be able to resolve any transaction to a vendor ID and provide a phone number, but you should be able to find those numbers online.
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Feb 3, 2015 23:58
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Pertplus posted:I have a few monthly recurring subscriptions (Online TV channel subscriptions mostly). I'm cutting expenses so I tried to cancel them, but for many I couldn't find a way to cancel them online. I signed up for them with my debit card # so I assume if I just cancel the card and get a new one the charges stop. My question is, would doing this lower my credit score? Pick up the phone and call the various providers.
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Feb 4, 2015 00:28
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Amazing thread with a lot of information on making a budget. I have a question, sorry if I missed the info in the thread some where. Does any one have a formula cheat sheet for excel to help with kind of automating a budget.
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Feb 6, 2015 06:22
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Bigfabdaddy posted:Amazing thread with a lot of information on making a budget. I have a question, sorry if I missed the info in the thread some where. Does any one have a formula cheat sheet for excel to help with kind of automating a budget. I used to have an Excel book set up semi-automated for budgeting, with a tab for each month that used a dropdown list for Category and then a full year totals tab that used lookup formulas to capture all those monthly transactions in their correct month and category. So all I had to do was record expenses/deposits and Excel would do the rest. At least, that's all I had to do until I decided I wanted to start carrying over in some of my categories. And wanted to track the balance of my savings account without showing it as a loss in my checking account. And wanted to see the current total balances on my mortgage and auto loans. Basically, I'm saying you should cut to the chase and use YNAB (or Mint, if you prefer).
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Feb 6, 2015 20:44
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Does anyone who uses Mint know if there's a way to make it stop categorizing my auto-payments to a Best Buy credit card as purchases? It's basically double dipping since it has already counted those individual purchases on top of the whole-payment "purchase". Other than going into each transaction and saying "Hide this transaction" I can't seem to figure it out.
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Feb 11, 2015 16:18
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drat Bananas posted:Does anyone who uses Mint know if there's a way to make it stop categorizing my auto-payments to a Best Buy credit card as purchases? It's basically double dipping since it has already counted those individual purchases on top of the whole-payment "purchase". Other than going into each transaction and saying "Hide this transaction" I can't seem to figure it out. Will categorizing it as a "Transfer" or "Credit Card Payment" do the trick? Those categories are not counted as spending. Once you do it a couple times, it'll learn to categorize that transaction type as such in the future.
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Feb 11, 2015 16:27
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Rick Rickshaw posted:Will categorizing it as a "Transfer" or "Credit Card Payment" do the trick? Those categories are not counted as spending. Hmm, maybe... The option says "Always rename Best Buy as Best Buy and categorize as Credit Card Payment." yet sometimes purchases at Best Buy are just purchases. I hope it figures it out and only recategorizes the ones with "BEST BUY AUTO PYMT" in the text, but I'm worried I will forget to check up on it later and it'll start ignoring purchases I did actually make at Best Buy.
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Feb 11, 2015 16:49
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I'm going to have to try a fresh start on YNAB i think. I hate to lose all the spending data I've captured so far but I can't use it all for its intended purpose since it always thinks I'm overbudget by ~$2k to $7k.
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Mar 2, 2015 15:37
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Dantu posted:I'm going to have to try a fresh start on YNAB i think. I hate to lose all the spending data I've captured so far but I can't use it all for its intended purpose since it always thinks I'm overbudget by ~$2k to $7k.
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Mar 3, 2015 00:18
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Dantu posted:I'm going to have to try a fresh start on YNAB i think. I hate to lose all the spending data I've captured so far but I can't use it all for its intended purpose since it always thinks I'm overbudget by ~$2k to $7k.
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Mar 3, 2015 00:54
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SiGmA_X posted:Why don't you go back and fix where it went wrong?? Yeah, if all your accounts balance, then just reorganize the budget. If they don't balance, then reconcile, and reorganize. It's not like you have more money than whats in your accounts, so reconcile, zero out every budget, and reassign each dollar you have. I guess the real question is, why do you think it shows you being over budget?
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Mar 3, 2015 06:18
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If you're consistently over budget by that kind of money, then I'd be willing to bet that you're budgeting money you don't yet have. E.g., you can't budget for what you're going to do with a particular paycheck until that money is actually in your account.
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Mar 3, 2015 06:29
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Are there any recommended iPhone envelope budgeting apps? I literally just have an iPhone and my computer at work that I don't have administrator privileges on, so unfortunately YNAB isn't an option. I can definitely buckle down and put effort into using Mint if that's the best iPhone-only option there is. Or if Mint isn't that great I can go old-school with a ledger!
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Mar 12, 2015 03:50
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Dave Ramsey released a 'free' budgeting app yesterday: https://www.everydollar.com/ I've yet to read the ToS and see how safe my info is/isn't, so I haven't played with it yet.
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Mar 24, 2015 20:02
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SiGmA_X posted:Dave Ramsey released a 'free' budgeting app yesterday: https://www.everydollar.com/ If you want to link accounts for automatic transactions it appears to cost $99 a year (only option I saw there's no option for monthly payments). It also doesn't appear that you can setup an interest amount for debts so it looks like you'd have to manually add it in every month or lose line of sight to what your actual balance is. It's a mediocre Excel template in website form from what I can tell, but I just poked around with it for a few minutes.
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Mar 24, 2015 21:09
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I've been using YNAB and while it's a nice program, its philosophy just doesn't suit me. I'm not in debt, I don't live hand-to-mouth and I'm not struggling to save. I've read tutorials on it, but it seems like it won't do what I want, which is to just put all my earnings and known bills in for the next 12 months and see what's left, and have a detailed record of past transactions. Do I just need to make my own spreadsheet, or is there a good program that will suit me?
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Mar 28, 2015 18:30
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Konsek posted:I've been using YNAB and while it's a nice program, its philosophy just doesn't suit me. I'm not in debt, I don't live hand-to-mouth and I'm not struggling to save. I've read tutorials on it, but it seems like it won't do what I want, which is to just put all my earnings and known bills in for the next 12 months and see what's left, and have a detailed record of past transactions. Do I just need to make my own spreadsheet, or is there a good program that will suit me? https://quicken.intuit.com/support/help/tracking-your-spending/how-to-project-balances-and-cash-flow/INF24039.html
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Mar 28, 2015 18:56
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I don't think Mint does any sort of forward projection. Assuming you don't want to buy something I'd just use Mint and then quickly calculate the forward projection in a spreadsheet.
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Mar 28, 2015 19:39
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I recently just started using the Mint Goals section, and it does some forward projection, i.e "I want to save X dollars by Y date" and it'll do the calculations based on your current budget and it'll tell you when you'll reach that goal. If you just want to see how much money you have left over every year you might just have to use Excel.
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Mar 29, 2015 22:54
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Konsek posted:I've been using YNAB and while it's a nice program, its philosophy just doesn't suit me. I'm not in debt, I don't live hand-to-mouth and I'm not struggling to save. I've read tutorials on it, but it seems like it won't do what I want, which is to just put all my earnings and known bills in for the next 12 months and see what's left, and have a detailed record of past transactions. Do I just need to make my own spreadsheet, or is there a good program that will suit me? You should be able to add transactions for your income for the next 12 months along with carrying your bill amounts out for 12 months in YNAB with manual transactions. I'm not at home to try it but I think you can run a report on it also after you enter that if you wanted. I put all of the transactions in for anything I have that is a guaranteed payment (cell phone, mortgage, car payment, uverse) out until the end of the contract. It also helps me to realize when the contract is ending and I need to call in and re-negotiate. When you sync in your bank data it will find those transactions and let you pair them with the actual bank statement.
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Mar 30, 2015 17:32
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Sooo this might be a bit preemptive, but how do people deal with being absolute gods of budgeting, where a budget is so solid that you have no worries about paying bills for three-to-six months, have emergency funds covered, have instant data about maximum available play money, and.... don't have to enter receipts but once every two months, can record payroll 45 days after you get it, and finally start to wonder if some of your money could do more work for you somehow? Do you purchase software that fixes run-on sentences or what?
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Mar 31, 2015 23:37
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