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We've messed up and "charged" overages in discretionary categories to our buffer before. Its primary use is to grow to our next month's income and then be depleted and refilled every month, but I don't consider it emergency money. It's more like... well, a buffer to iron out significant unpredictable increases in expenses. Now, to borrow from, say, an amortized annual or biannual line category like insurance or tires, that's something I'm super careful not to do. It just fucks with the whole works.
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Aug 27, 2013 15:09
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I use mint, YNAB, and Excel for all the budgeting we do. Mint has a more... pleasing categorization scheme for my tracking purchases and captures balances and transactions from everything in a very time-saving way. I use a more straightforward categorization scheme in YNAB but it's the best thing for all the enveloping and rules and stuff. Excel has long-term forecasts, total debt graphs, my automation flowchart(s), and quick notes using formulas that I want to save. Speaking of automation flowcharts. That is the best loving intermediate step to take in your financial life. Comme Ca:  This is quite different now, but that's the image I found from my thread.
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Aug 28, 2013 01:46
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I wouldn't say that 10% of your income toward debt repayment is a "breakneck pace", but at least you have a plan!
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Aug 28, 2013 12:23
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DirtyTalk posted:I don't really like Mint. Idk why but it never seemed to do it for me. It is way too convoluted in my opinion. You can also just get a 34-day free trial to see if you "get" it. What about a google docs spreadsheet? Just put your statement amounts into that manually and use simple columns and formulas to figure this stuff out.
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Aug 30, 2013 12:31
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DirtyTalk posted:Good news. I found a discount for it so I just picked it up. This is great, but you should make sure to follow the advice that PhantomOfTheCopier has posted throughout the thread. He's awesome and YNAB isn't really a total budgeting solution.
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Aug 30, 2013 16:49
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spinst posted:Here's my first shot at a budget in YNAB: Regarding your line items, your phone and internet bills are ridiculous, but you don't seem to have TV so that's a big win right there. You might also consider not saving for an emergency fund while you have debt and opting instead for some kind of springy debt thing, a la MMM. For debt repayment, there are two basic methods: mathematically correct and "debt snowball". The mathematically correct approach says to take the debt with the highest interest rate and hammer it until it's gone while paying the minimum on all your other debts. This approach minimizes interest paid but it can be a long slog plugging away at that 12k line of credit (if you have one) while your $750 credit card balance laughs at you. The debt snowball says to pay your debt with the smallest balance first in the same fashion. This may cost you more interest but some people find it more psychologically satisfying and that satisfaction helps to keep them on board. Personally, in the past three years I've paid off more than $42000 in debt using the maths approach (and not really saving any sort of emergency fund), so yeah. tuyop fucked around with this message at 04:15 on Sep 8, 2013 |
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Sep 8, 2013 04:03
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Hopefully using YNAB helps! My car payment is $299, but I am aiming to pay at least $350 a month. $400 when the credit card is paid off. Or should I pay the minimum on the auto loan and extra on the credit card? The auto loan has a much lower interest rate... but I get a kind of "double paycheck" in November, so the credit card will be paid off in full then anyways.
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spinst posted:It's a $17k car loan (@ 2.99) and the two credit cards ($665 @ 12). Haha, yes. I mixed that up! Pay off the highest interest rate first.
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Sep 8, 2013 04:14
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 In line to save/pay off $4100 this month then the wife hits another car. Bye bye $1000 deductible. Also, grocery budgets can suck a dick.
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Sep 19, 2013 12:53
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How does it work if you cook for two like, always?
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Sep 20, 2013 20:19
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Omne posted:So what does everyone do with the leftover dollars and cents in a given category? Say you budget $150 for cable, but it's actually $148.75. Do you just leave the $1.25 in that category, or move it into a buffer? Is your cable going to always be 148.75? If yes, then only budget 148.75 (or punch yourself in the face because WTF, cable?). If it's like heat, and sometimes you spend 200 a month and sometimes 60, then determine an average and budget that much. The rollover balance will take you through the expensive months without stress.
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Sep 21, 2013 04:44
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Dantu posted:One thing in YNAB that I'm struggling is why transfers can't have a category. I hate that I can't move $25 into my savings account and say it's for my emergency fund without getting errors.  Saving is a budget line item, not an expense.Unless your e-fund is off-budget somehow, then it has a category even if you treat it as a transfer.
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Sep 24, 2013 01:11
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Dantu posted:Before, it was in my checking account. I kind of get that it doesn't matter where "where" it is to YNAB, but it does to me, I want it to be in my savings account (which is on budget). Have you considered maybe moving that account off budget?
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Sep 24, 2013 03:04
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I really like the point in this blog post about the number of accounts you maintain:quote:What’s the big deal with having two or three checking accounts, or two or three credit cards? It’s all in the administrative overhead. That’s one more account you have to import transactions from, reconcile, search for discrepancies… when you’re entering a transaction on your phone, that’s one more decision you have to make: “Which card did I just use?” Or when you’re at the store purchasing: “Which card should I use?” It's like the self-improvement gurus tell us. Every day you're only given so many attention points, and every one you spend on the administrative overhead of yet another account in your life is another one fewer that you have to spend on actually living. And for what? fourteen cents per month more interest? We're in the process now of thinning things out from a high of 22 on-budget accounts. We've still got seven, but the chequing and savings account consolidation will be complete by November.
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Sep 24, 2013 13:15
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Me in Reverse posted:
Ok, here we go: Chequing and Cash Cash His chequing Her chequing Her old chequing (transitioning bills and stuff took a few weeks) Savings accounts His savings (PC Financial) Her savings 1 (ING) Her savings 2 (Scotiabank 1) Her savings 3 (Scotiabank 2. I was about this, too) Our savings (ING) His TFSA His RRSP His LIRA (Questrade) His LIRA 2 (TD, just tried this out, it'll get closed) Credit Our Line of Credit His Student Loan His Car Loan His old card Our balance transfer card Our card 1 (groceries) Our card 2 (everything else, up to 5% cashback woo) Her card 1 Her card 2 Now, we have: Cash Our chequing Her chequing (another transition to just ONE account) Our savings (kind of want to close this) Grocery card (I need to figure out if it's worth the rewards to have two cards for this, or if the cashback one will suffice) Everything else card. We still have the Line of Credit but keep it off-budget because it's pretty much just ultra mega emergency credit, and it keeps efund money working toward paying off the car loan. This is a contentious issue, I know. 
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Sep 25, 2013 12:30
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I would love to see that list
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Shadowhand00 posted:A little nitpicky, but can you put a purpose to each checking/savings accoutnt? (because that's what you seem to have there) Are you talking about my post? Those accounts had no purpose. I honestly have no idea why they all existed, that's why I closed all but six of them with one or two more on the way!
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Sep 25, 2013 17:46
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Produce is by far the cheapest food to buy, are you in Alaska or something? As for how happy you'll be if you stop spending money on poo poo you don't need, you should try cultivating a love for free things and internalizing your expectations and happiness.
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Oct 4, 2013 15:42
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UnhealthyJoe posted:Anyone with handy strategies to try to alleviate my problems and create a good budget. I don't know what your problems are, but fill this in with your monthly values: Income: Expenses: Total: (this is income - expenses) Assets: Debts (APR): Here are some common expenses to get you started: Rent: Home/Renter's insurance: Electricity: Oil/gas/heat: Groceries: Household goods: Emergency fund: Phone: Internet: Subscriptions (ie. Cable/Netflix/Hulu): Auto payment: Auto insurance: Auto fuel: Auto maintenance: Toy savings: Restaurants/Bars: Misc fun money: Pharmacy: Health care: Dental: Vacation savings:
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Oct 6, 2013 17:14
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Combat Pretzel posted:A mid/long-term strategy is tracking everything in a tool or application and then tear things apart in the relevant reporting functionality. Soon I'll finally have a year worth of data in YNAB, but drilling down into the reports, it's eye-opening how much money goes to stupid poo poo. Yeah, once you have the data it's time to start doing a Pareto Analysis of your spending. Basically, a large portion of your happiness or satisfaction or whatever will probably come from a minority of your spending. You'll have a discretionary budget that kind of looks like this: Phone: 80 Cable: 60 Restaurants: 200 Bars: 200 Volleyball: 60 And it's up to you to look at what, in your past month and $600 of blown money, you really loved. Say, in this case, that you loving LOVED volleyball. You just live for that poo poo. But the vast majority of where your money went was kettle chips at Boston Pizza that honestly kind of sucked, and cover and whiskey sours at clubs that you didn't really have much fun in and only served to give you a vague sense of guilt and worthlessness. A Pareto, or "80/20" analysis, will show that you really ought to spend more time and money on volleyball and less on bars and restaurants. So you rejig the budget the next month and end up with: Phone: 80 Cable: 60 Restaurants: 100 Bars: 100 Volleyball: 260 You're now taking lessons in volleyball, saving to go to an away intramural game and playing twice as much per week. You notice that you're really not using your cable anymore because of all the volleyball you're playing, and if you stop drinking on Fridays you can do another day on Saturdays. And so on. Through analysis and honesty, you've increased your happiness and decreased the amount of poo poo you've wasted. The "volleyball" is irrelevant, but nearly everyone has a metaphorical volleyball in their budget and a metaphorical bar/restaurant line.
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Oct 6, 2013 18:05
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Demon_Corsair posted:I've actually started tagging stuff with #junk in YNAB so I can quickly and easily see how much money I am blowing every month. Well it's really supposed to be sliced deeper than that, like sure you spend 100 on groceries, but if you want to optimize that, look at how much goes to veggies, meat, etc. The same goes for everything else.
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Oct 8, 2013 16:20
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Demon_Corsair posted:How do you even manage that? Do you go down your grocery bill line by line and add them to separate categories? I only grocery shop once every ten days so it was pretty straightforward. I just bought my groceries, took the receipt went into a spreadsheet, and recorded dollar amounts for poultry, fruit, veg, grains, beef, pork, etc. Oh, then I made a pie chart and it was like, man milk and cheese do not give me that much happiness. 
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Oct 8, 2013 21:05
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I may just be weird but I also do this as a cost/calorie or gram of protein field as well. I find value in knowing that eggs are like 5.6c/g of protein or whatever I guess. v  v
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Oct 8, 2013 22:44
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Rurutia posted:What's your ranking by protein? I haven't done it that way because it's pretty much guaranteed that chicken will win any day. (69c/lb versus 3/lb for beef and 7/lb for seafood) This is Canada, and I haven't done it again since moving to Edmonton so the values are significantly different: Cheapest -> Most expensive Bulk Whey Concentrate (~7.50/lb) Eggs (~$3.50/doz) Beans White fish (sole in particular) (~$2/lb) Low fat cheeses Tuna Weird organ meats (~$3/lb) Pork Beef Chicken (~16/lb) (Canada is loving weird this way) tuyop fucked around with this message at 00:55 on Oct 9, 2013 |
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Oct 9, 2013 00:52
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Kenny Rogers posted:Seriously? I could probably FedEx you chicken on ice for less than that. When I was in high school, my friend's dad made a good side living selling illicit cheese, chicken and marijuana out of his basement.
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Oct 9, 2013 03:14
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I'm pretty sure that the cheese and chicken taxes are directly paying for our sweet health care. So yeah, sure cheddar cheese costs $9/lb, but if you break your leg it doesn't cost anything! The savings!
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Oct 9, 2013 12:50
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Hey how would you guys categorize a car insurance deductible expense? It's coming out of my "Debt repayment pool" category (which is my defacto e-fund as well), but it's not debt so I can't categorize the transaction that way. I'm just going to subtract 1k from that and then allocate it to... another category. It's not really an emergency, so it doesn't feel accurate to put it in the emergency fund line. It's also not a car insurance payment, so yeah. Should I have a specific deductible category that I save into in the future as a sort of car-specific e-fund?
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Oct 11, 2013 21:11
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Kenny Rogers posted:I'd categorize it as "Car Repair", which is where I budget all my regular maintenance items - 1/60th of a 5-year battery, 1/18th of a set of tires, wiper blades, oil changes, Car wash/detail supplies. Since you probably don't have (or haven't been using) that category so far, initially, you'll be over-budget in that category. Shuffle budget money around to cover what you can this month, and add funds to that category over the next while to 'catch it up' to zero, and then have money going in for maintenance items going forward. It really eases the pain when replacing a set of runflat tires can be $800+. Yeah, I had a $600 car maintenance fund for exactly that. I work it out by kilometer and adjust it accordingly, though. Except for tires which get their own line.
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Oct 13, 2013 18:02
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Combat Pretzel posted:In YNAB, I wish you could set a desired budget value in the settings of each category, that'll get displayed in light gray (or something) in the next month's budget column, if the category budget's not set. Cluttering the category names up with these values feels kinda icky. I've thought about how they could manage this. It seems like it would really complicate the whole "rule" system, unless they created a goal-setting mode or something like that where you could establish goals but not interfere with the learning curve of spending only money that you have.
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Oct 13, 2013 20:55
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semicolonsrock posted:What are good things to read to learn how to manage one's money? Graduating this year so I kind of need to learn what to do next. My partner and I paid about 36% taxes last year, IIRC. Welcome to adulthood. You have tax sheltered accounts (401(k) + Roth IRA in America???) available to you and you can always give some of it to charity! As for reading, I can't recommend these enough: Your Money or Your Life: 9 Steps to Transforming Your Life and Relationship With Money - Joe Dominguez, others (If you read nothing else, read this one) The Four Pillars of Investing - William Bernstein I Will Teach You to be Rich - Ramit Sethi this is ok but I think it's worth reading for the section on automation alone, it was very succinct The Millionaire Next Door Rich Dad Poor Dad And I think philosophy and money are closely related so: A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy - William B. Irvine Oh, and read all of Mr. Money Mustache, from day one. http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/
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Oct 15, 2013 14:37
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It's kind of confusing because many things tell you to calculate spending based on gross salary. I never really got that, why care about gross salary when it comes to your mortgage/rent and poo poo?
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Oct 15, 2013 14:57
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tuyop posted:I don't know what your problems are, but fill this in with your monthly values: Start here! Then sign up for mint for the hands off tracking approach, or ynab for more hands on. I think people should use both.
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Oct 22, 2013 21:24
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Dantu posted:Working my way through Your Money or Your Life, seems like the first 100 pages has been A) consumerism is bad, B) more money will make you unhappy, C) have 6 months expenses in savings. It gets better, right? I'm pretty sure the best part is the step where they go over a sort of stoic exercise for each purchase or category. Stay with it! The Four Pillars of Investing is loving excellent as well, I'm just about finished that myself.
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Oct 25, 2013 00:29
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semicolonsrock posted:That seems like sort of an odd way to think about money. I think about a job as 1, a way to get skills I want for the next thing I'd like to do, and 2, as a way to do something fun and challenging which helps people. The money I get paid along the way is nice because it lets me survive, but it isn't really why I'm doing my job. You're confusing job with money. You've correctly identified positive aspects of a job, and it sounds like your motivations for working are nice and valuable. However, if someone is paying you to do work, you're still trading your time for money. The YMOYL perspective just breaks down the steps of that trade. So if you work 10 hours and someone pays you 100 dollars, then you want to buy a pizza for 20 dollars, some people (like Taco Avenger) find it helpful see that pizza as two hours of work. If the pizza is something you do every week, then cutting the pizza out of your life saves you two hours of work, or a whole work day every month. I don't know about you, but I'd rather have a day off to spend with my partner every month than a loving pizza.
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Oct 26, 2013 00:14
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PhantomOfTheCopier posted:You're confusing money with pizza. Haha, well I was just trying to explain YMOYL's exercise of equating money with time. I think the point is just to take something abstract (money) and see it as something concrete (time). I mean, I have thousands of dollars so 5 here and 30 there don't really matter to me. But everyone only has 24 hours a day.
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Oct 27, 2013 17:48
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Schiavona posted:Quick question for someone who knows Mint pretty well. It IS available income, just for spending on something later. There are many ways you could do this. You could categorize that income as the thing you're saving for. Say like, you make the savings account's income as "car". Then it'll count up your amount in "car" for you which will tell you how much you have available for car. Or you could exclude that account from mint. Mint isn't really a very good tool for planning like this. You'd be better served with some other software like YNAB or even Excel so that you can see how your line balances are increasing.
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Nov 14, 2013 00:19
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Mercaptopropyl posted:It was a lot easier to budget my money when I didn't have any and all of it went to bills/rent/gas/groceries with maybe $5 a paycheck left over. I was really good at living like that. But now that I'm making decent money I've developed a lot of terrible spending habits. Sure, I'm saving some money, but not nearly as much as I should have been saving. Or just nurture good spending habits. There's no software magic bullet that will stop you from spending all your money on gazingus pins if that's what you want to do.
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Dec 3, 2013 15:51
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BlackWidowCult posted:I'd like some input on my current budget, since I've got huge loans from a previous degree. For reference, I'm 22 years old and going back to school while working part-time. You make a shitload of money for a student and only spend ~65% of your income. If this is accurate and you're being honest about it then you're doing great! To split hairs, your discretionary expenses are pretty high. 550/2795 is potentially a lot to spend on yourself and you should run the numbers through debt-reduction calculators to see if you're willing to suspend your debt-free date by months or years to learn guitar RIGHT NOW or get a couple fewer paninis a month. But that's splitting hairs.
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Dec 7, 2013 20:22
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Kilty Monroe posted:$80 for a weightlifting coach sounds like a rather unnecessary expense to me, too. You're paying about a thousand bucks a year for a guy to tell you to pick things up and put them back down again. Okay, I may be oversimplifying a bit, but weightlifting is a pretty repetitive activity to need regular coaching in. Does this guy really provide you with your money's worth of service on a monthly basis, compared to just posting in YLLS? 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.
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Dec 8, 2013 15:39
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It doesn't matter how advantageous your loan terms are, if you're not prepared to: - Foot all the costs related to homeownership. Check the thread for horror stories. - stay in place long enough to realize a return in the form of equity AND find a buyer at that price. - Lose out on market gains that you could have made by investing your downpayment. - Take advantage if whatever a house offers you that a rental can't. Then you really shouldn't buy. However, if a home is worth all those costs to you because of the last reason, then maybe you should get a house. But you seem pretty ambiguous about the basics so that may not be the case here and you would be better served by saving, investing, and renting until your life changes.
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Dec 8, 2013 18:06
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quote:I believe I could reliably pay an appropriate sized mortgage. Property taxes in Oklahoma are about $1000 per $100,000 of market value. I've had to pay utilities for a rented house before, so that wouldn't be a surprise. Oklahoma City is my dream city to work in. And I could have pride, a garage, and an asset. And when I retire, I would only have to pay taxes, insurance, and utilities. It's not the mortgage or the utilities, it's being able to absorb the cost of a broken pipe or destroyed roof or all of your appliances dying in a three month period, or all the above without being ruined. Obviously most homeowners aren't that prepared but just because it's the norm doesn't mean it's desirable, especially when compared to dubious values like "pride" and "an asset". You're in a great place now to objectively look at the costs and benefits and make a sound decision. Also, a house for primary residence is not an asset the same way a car is not an asset. A house is a place to live. Financially, I'd* consider myself ready to buy a house with 20% down and an emergency fund equal to all of my expenses for a year. You may have a different perspective and that's ok too, I'm just putting that out there. I think that would take us three years of effort to get to including all our other goals. *married, one student, one mechanic, household income of ~$110 000 CAD and monthly expenses of ~$3000.
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Dec 8, 2013 19:32
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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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