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toolkit for YNAB added Sankey diagram income breakdowns - here's an example from my budget (I cut out the income side of things because it has my employer's name) you can hover each flow to see the total and filter/change dates and categories - it's pretty neat 
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Jul 5, 2019 23:54
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| # ? May 14, 2024 10:03 |
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Could use some UI cleanup, but that's pretty neat. I got a big ol chunk of OVERDRAFT going to the input of my Budget since my wife is on maternity leave.
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Jul 8, 2019 21:37
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So, I'm moving from a job that pays semi-monthly to one that pays bi-weekly. How do people normally budget when they get paid bi-weekly? Since some months you get paid three times, do you budget as if each month you only get two checks and then the third is a "bonus" or do you budget as if it was paid out semi-monthly?
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Jul 27, 2019 14:20
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Budgeting as if it were semi monthly seems messy. My wife's income is biweekly, and we budget for two paychecks a month and put the extra paycheck towards savings goals. Only happens two months a year so not a big deal.
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Jul 27, 2019 14:37
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Chaotic Flame posted:So, I'm moving from a job that pays semi-monthly to one that pays bi-weekly. How do people normally budget when they get paid bi-weekly? Since some months you get paid three times, do you budget as if each month you only get two checks and then the third is a "bonus" or do you budget as if it was paid out semi-monthly? I do the two-check type thing, with a few awesome bonus months each year. My categories are labeled according to how much I fill them up each pay period, essentially the monthly amount needed divided by two. e.g. Rent - $450/pp Car - $175/pp Insurance + Reg - $85/pp Every time I get paid, I first add those listed amounts to each category. I then take the remainder of my paycheck and fill out my discretionary categories. On bonus months with three paychecks I've already hit my monthly totals so that money goes wherever (typically emergency fund and long-term savings goals). I use YNAB4 so this system works well but I believe it's even better with nYNAB since you can leverage the monthly goals feature.
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Jul 27, 2019 18:57
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When I was getting paid biweekly I would just treat the three paycheck months as a bonus
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Jul 28, 2019 02:52
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Third paycheck is prime Variable Expenses category fodder. Vacation, car repairs, gift funds, additional investment fund contributions, basically anything that isn't a regular (i.e. periodical or "planned") expense. Edit or debt payments like below. That's probably a better use for it. Or "Living on last month's Income" buffer. Beach Bum fucked around with this message at 14:29 on Jul 29, 2019 |
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Jul 28, 2019 09:35
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for me it was extra student loan payment
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Jul 29, 2019 12:31
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Yeah so because I have bi-weekly paychecks I found budgeting kind of is a pain in the rear end. So because I had some money in savings I did this. Pulled 1 paycheck worth of money out of savings and out into checking on a month I got paid on the first of the month. Now I have a 'months' (2 paychecks) worth of pay. So each time I get paid I stick that money in a category called 'next months budget'. Then I budget on the first of the month with 2 paychecks worth. When I have my 3 paycheck month this is a bonus and this time it will got to replenish savings. The time after that it'll be a pure bonus which I plan on sticking 1/2 in savings (I plan on having no loans by then) and 1/2 to pay for Christmas 2020.
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Jul 29, 2019 16:47
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The way to handle biweekly paychecks is to stop looking at the budget on a monthly level and look at it on a pay-period level. When you receive a paycheck, you simply budget the money based on where you need it to go before your next paycheck comes. Sometimes this happens across a monthly boundary and it may make it a bit confusing because of the way YNAB is laid out, but I think it's generally a good rule to follow. If you are lucky enough to have money left over after taking care of your expenses for the current pay period, now you can go ahead and budget into the next pay period (whether it's within this month or next), and this is how you get ahead. The way I try to organize this in my budget is by giving each category a due date and ordering them by priority based on that. Simplified example:  Regardless of whether I'm in a 2 or 3 paycheck month, I give priority to categories that are due closest to whatever the current date is, and only when everything in the current pay period is accounted for do I worry about the stuff outside of it. Typically, savings categories that are things like once-a-year expenses or emergency/vacation savings get the lowest priority and only get funded when there's a surplus within each pay period (which, thankfully for me, is pretty often).
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Jul 29, 2019 17:11
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tater_salad posted:Yeah so because I have bi-weekly paychecks I found budgeting kind of is a pain in the rear end. Fano posted:The way to handle biweekly paychecks is to stop looking at the budget on a monthly level and look at it on a pay-period level. Fano, that happens not to be the case. The "issue" is addressed by Rule 4: Live on Last Month's income (just as tater_salad did) [piss on that "Age your money" poo poo, it's "Live on last month's income]. You don't have to count paychecks or split months if you're living a month ahead. YNAB4 made this a lot easier by allowing you to allocate today's paycheck to next month. nYNAB has all income in a single envelope, making it slightly confusing for someone who's not used to Rule4. Every time you get paid you should be allocating the money to the next month's categories. If you can't, you're behind. I wish they'd implement the "Income for this/next month" functionality in nYNAB. edit: as always, nolesrule nails it better than I can: https://support.youneedabudget.com/t/63pgpp nolesrule posted:The Old Rule 4 (Live on last month's income) and the functionality (Income for Next Month category) realigns your budget from having to match your income cycle to matching your expense cycle. As a result it reduces the pressure on your budgeting process and allows you to open up and see the bigger picture. It completely changes your awareness of the income>budget>spend cycle. Many users have reported that it enabled them to get out of debt faster or save faster than if they were budgeting every single paycheck. Beach Bum fucked around with this message at 17:53 on Jul 29, 2019 |
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Jul 29, 2019 17:31
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Fano.. you should be doing any budget with ONLY the money you have not what you will have. Doing it the way I do ensures I actually have the money I spend. My biggest financial issue always was I'd pay bills late because I'd be worried I didn't have enough to carry me to end of month now I am sure I can get to the end if I follow budget
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Jul 29, 2019 17:38
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I may have worded my post incorrectly, but I'm not sure how what I described is violating rule 4, I am not budgeting money I don't have, and I am in fact living a month ahead (sometimes 2). Many people are still transitioning to that mentality, and this is the way I did it when I first started budgeting. 3 paycheck months don't have that big an impact on my budget because I usually already have the next month completely covered before the 1st, but when I don't, I simply give priority to whatever bill or goal comes earliest and go from there. Maybe the disconnect is that I don't have categories for "income for next month", when I get paid I just click on the arrow to go to next month's budget and simply allocate money as needed. I also never used YNAB4, so I'm not sure on how people set up their budgets on that platform compared to nYNAB Fano fucked around with this message at 17:59 on Jul 29, 2019 |
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Jul 29, 2019 17:49
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Fano posted:I may have worded my post incorrectly, but I'm not sure how what I described is violating rule 4, I am not budgeting money I don't have, and I am in fact living a month ahead (sometimes 2). I may have gone a bit militant, allow me put my pitchfork back on the wall. When you said "stop looking at the budget on a monthly level and look at it on a pay-period level" I got my hackles up. Then, when you talked about allocating money where it needs to go before the next paycheck comes, it sounded exactly how the paycheck-to-paycheck cycle works. Beach Bum fucked around with this message at 17:58 on Jul 29, 2019 |
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Jul 29, 2019 17:56
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Yo, I have no idea why people are struggling with bi weekly payments. You get $1000, you add $1000 to your account, then you figure out where the money needs to go. IF you current month is all in the green, then click on net month, and budget that $1000 for next month. Simple. I have been using YNAB4 and nYNAB on either bi weekly paychecks when I worked retail or "oh lord where is my next income coming next?" now I am working in the arts and I never once struggled to budget. If anything, those bi weeklys kept me in line and I was likely to take a litlle but of money from other categories and put it in my SHAME category.
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Jul 29, 2019 18:43
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DrNewton posted:Yo, I have no idea why people are struggling with bi weekly payments. You get $1000, you add $1000 to your account, then you figure out where the money needs to go. IF you current month is all in the green, then click on net month, and budget that $1000 for next month. Simple.
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Jul 29, 2019 18:45
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Beach Bum posted:I may have gone a bit militant, allow me put my pitchfork back on the wall. Even with YNAB, some people still live paycheck to paycheck. ( I did. For a while) Also, you can get the money bi weekly but have your month covered. Great, so click on the next month and figure out where the cash goes first.
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Jul 29, 2019 18:45
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Fano posted:This is basically what I was trying to say in my post but I am bad with words. Don't worry. I understood what you were saying. 
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Jul 29, 2019 18:47
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DrNewton posted:Even with YNAB, some people still live paycheck to paycheck. ( I did. For a while) Oh, me too. I have been on and off the budget horse a couple times since 2012. I got back on in May and just got up to a month again.
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Jul 29, 2019 18:55
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Beach Bum posted:Oh, me too. I have been on and off the budget horse a couple times since 2012. I got back on in May and just got up to a month again. I simply just was working part-time minimum wage, and though I was covering my costs, including savings, there were times I couldn't reach all of my goals until the next paycheck. *shrugs* It sucked, but eh, sometimes no amount of budgeting can help you.
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Jul 29, 2019 19:11
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Let's maybe not poo poo on people who are trying to get out of paycheck to paycheck by using budgeting software... For biweekly I used a spreadsheet to make sure I had somewhat evenly split my monthly bills over the two paychecks so I didn't have all my big payments in the second half of the month or whatever. We budget bills out a month now but still give ourselves discretionary funds every 2 weeks because we are children that have trouble making $100 last a month but can make $50 last 2 weeks
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Jul 29, 2019 20:44
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Fano yeah sorry you sounded like you were budgeting for a month but didn't have cash in account. Yes budgeting biweekly if you are living check to check sucks and one of your financial goals should be to stop doing so by sticking extra monies into your budget for next month category till you can get ahead..
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Jul 29, 2019 21:06
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Can anyone with YNAB4 tell me how they handle their mortgage/home value? I just forked over $3k as earnest money towards a home purchase and I am not really sure what I should do with it. Assuming eveything goes as planned and I make it to closing, I won't actually have the mortgage for another month. I guess once I get it, I can keep it as an off-budget account that I'm paying down, but I also like being able to track my net worth. 
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Aug 29, 2019 15:20
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I think I'd just create an off-budget account called Home or Home Value and a Mortgage off-balance account. For home value, you can just keep an adjusting entry that you delete and replace (or edit I guess) whenever you want to update the value. For mortgage, whenever you want to record interest, just add an outflow for that amount and since it's off budget, you don't have to account for it. When you make a payment, the money you transfer from an account to the mortgage account will have to be categorized, and it's up to you whether or not you want to break it up between principal and interest. So that should keep the mortgage account shrinking, while tracking the interest.
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Aug 29, 2019 16:00
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I have an appraised value account and a mortgage balance account, both off budget of course. I keep track of my principal payments and deduct them from the mortgage balance account in an independent transaction inside the mortgage account instead of splitting the mortgage payment transaction that comes out of my checking account and sending the principal to the off-budget account
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Aug 29, 2019 16:15
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YNAB is a budgeting app, not a personal finance tracker, so it's not super appropriate for doing things like tracking your equity in your mortgage, but as others have pointed out, you can kinda-sorta shoehorn it in, if you really want to. For me, though, mortgage payments are just an expense against a budget category, same as a cell phone bill. The equity in my mortgage isn't 'available funds,' so YNAB doesn't track it.
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Aug 29, 2019 16:21
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I just zillow'ed my house once a month and did a manual balance adjustment on the off-budget account. My mortgage came out of a mortgage budget line item. I didn't bother tracking interest and poo poo. Although probably possible, that sounds not good to do in YNAB.
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Aug 29, 2019 17:18
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Henrik Zetterberg posted:I just zillow'ed my house once a month and did a manual balance adjustment on the off-budget account. Yeah I think this is the approach I'll probably go for. Easy enough and gives me at least a rough idea of where I stand with everything. I know YNAB isn't really for personal finance but I do essentially this same process with my student loans. Gives me a certain peace of mind and also keeps all my money poo poo in one place.
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Aug 29, 2019 17:23
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TheCenturion posted:For me, though, mortgage payments are just an expense against a budget category, same as a cell phone bill. The equity in my mortgage isn't 'available funds,' so YNAB doesn't track it. Yeah, this is how I do it as well.
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Aug 29, 2019 17:30
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If you do a transfer of funds from an on budget account to an off budget account it counts as budgeted spending. Same if you take funds from an off budget account and move it into an on budget account, it counts as income to budget. Consequently I divide up my mortgage payments into principle and everything else, and the principle goes into a transfer to the mortgage off balance account, and it looks like any other kind of spend but reconciles the mortgage loan balance correctly.
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Aug 29, 2019 20:49
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Mortgage is just an expense for us in YNAB 4 and we keep the mortgages as off budget and adjust over time. My vote would be to not shoe horn in a valuation of the property, and to work all that out in some other application or a spreadsheet or something. In saying that, I totally feel you about wanting to open up YNAB and not see a huge red negative number even when you are budgeting well  .
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Aug 30, 2019 00:37
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Xik posted:Mortgage is just an expense for us in YNAB 4 and we keep the mortgages as off budget and adjust over time. My vote would be to not shoe horn in a valuation of the property, and to work all that out in some other application or a spreadsheet or something. I was going to post why do you want to see your net worth if it's going to be a negative six figgies? Then I realized you could show your house value and get it back up I suppose. But honestly none of that informes my daily choices so why bother. "Oh Zillow says my house has gained 25k, let's get the bigger boat honey!" Honestly when I feel poor is when I save well, which is why zero sum budgeting helps me so much. It may say that I have whatever in the bank but I can only spend this three figure amount. The bad news is when I realized I have a fudge factor built into that and can stretch it, but it's still limited. And treating my kitties when there's a surplus in the pets budget satisfies my need to consume and doesn't blow my overall goals.
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Aug 30, 2019 02:26
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Hey, y'all. I've been putting off dealing with the weirdness of how nYNAB handles credit cards for a while, because it seemed to be generally fine, but now I think I'm going to have to address it one way or another. I know the thread deals with this semi-regularly, but I didn't see much in the last few pages about it. Are credit cards still generally quirky, or have they fixed it for the most part by now and I am just missing something? It generally tracks okay, but I keep having situations in which I pay the statement balance each month, but it is then reflected in YNAB as an overpayment (so the card "amount" in the budget goes negative and it warns me about it). It is screwing with my head because everything seems inverted with credit cards. The actual purchases are being tracked accurately through their various categories, so I'm not sure where the discrepancy is coming from (unless it's just behind on running totals?). It's giving me weird numbers for budgeting for the next month because my totals are off. Is the go-to advice still to just redo everything using faux-checking accounts? Do I need to just start completely fresh again for that?
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Aug 30, 2019 21:13
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You can select all your transactions and copy/paste them into a new "checking" account then delete the old CC account. I believe that's exactly what I did.
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Aug 30, 2019 21:42
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I've never had an issue with credit cards on it, the process makes sense to me: 1. You add a transaction in the credit card account (same as a regular account) and categorise it. 2. The amount is withdrawn from the category you set it to and moved to a '<Card Name>' repayment category at the top. So if you spend £5 on Groceries on credit card A, then that's £5 less in Groceries and £5 more in the A Repayment category. 3. If the category ran out (or was on 0) then it goes below 0. For that month and that month only it'll show up in orange as negative whatever amount you overspent. The amount you overspent will be missing from the repayment category. If you notice that the amount in the budget for repayment differs from the amount in the credit card account on the left, then that means you overspent on something. 4. If you had overspent and then in the same month you move money into that category, the repayment category will be topped up. So if in a month, you overspend £5 on Groceries on credit card A, then A Repayment will be £5 short. If in the same month (calendar, not credit card statement date) you move £5 more to Groceries, then A Repayment will get that £5 moved to it. 5. If you had overspent and then the month ticked over then the categories that were overspent reset to 0. At that point, the only way to 'repay' them is to budget extra money directly to the repayment category (same as if you'd just added existing credit card debt, not assigned to any category). My general process is: 1. Make sure I add transactions to the credit card account regularly, same as other accounts. 2. Make double-sure I add transactions fully before the month ticks over. 3. Whenever I add transactions, I double-check if I'm over-spent on something in credit (orange not red). 4. If I am over-spent and I want to move money around to remove it, I do it as soon as I realise I'm overspent. 5. If I am over-spent and I want to deal with it the next month, I go to next month's budget and allocate however much it takes to get the repayment category Available amount to match the credit card account amount. I used to have an issue of it going out of sync, but that was because the month had ticked over and I didn't realise the Available amount in the repayment didn't match the amount on the card, so according to the budget I hadn't allocated enough to pay off the card.
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Aug 30, 2019 21:57
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Keret posted:Hey, y'all. I've been putting off dealing with the weirdness of how nYNAB handles credit cards for a while, because it seemed to be generally fine, but now I think I'm going to have to address it one way or another. Are you marking the credit card payment as Payee: transfer from checking account (instead of choosing a category)?
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Sep 1, 2019 03:07
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FateFree posted:Are you marking the credit card payment as Payee: transfer from checking account (instead of choosing a category)? Yeah, in all cases the payments are recorded as Payment from the account it's coming from, so as a transfer. Maybe it's just because I'm doing Statement Balance on the autopay date rather than just paying everything that is recorded on the card at the end of each month (I'm not even sure actually why I'm doing it that way, I should just do the entire card balance tbh). Maybe because it doesn't tick over from the previous month in YNAB, when the balance gets paid in the next month it doesn't sync up anymore?
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Sep 1, 2019 03:49
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Finally going to give this a go. If it's good I'll bite the $80 sub bullet. Since I'm in Sweden it doesn't have automatic tie in to accounts, but then again I don't really want to be tracked and am using credit cards anyway.
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Sep 1, 2019 12:14
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MrOnBicycle posted:I don't really want to be tracked and am using credit cards anyway. 
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Sep 1, 2019 15:33
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| # ? May 14, 2024 10:03 |
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I know. It's a necessary evil. I mean tracked more than I have to. Doesn't matter anyway since I'm not in US/Canada and it's not supported.
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Sep 1, 2019 16:38
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