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Well, hell. I'm glad I popped in here if for no other reason than to find out YNAB has a demo. I'm going to check that out once I get to my home computer. I've struggled here and there with managing my money, but fortunately the worst that's happened is I have $200 more on my credit card than I thought I did. The only debt I have is $400 remaining on my laptop, which I'm going to knock out this month. I've been tinkering around with a new budget, as in a couple months my rent/utilities change significantly, and the following month my cell phone bill is probably going to go up. So the theme of my new budget is that I figure out my monthly bills and ballpark my food/booze/video game expenses, and bank the rest. I've got a big trip to Disney in November and I'm concerned about how much that is going to cost me, so I figure shoving as much money as possible into savings to prepare for that is a good strategy. The first draft of my new, default budget looks like so. It's very simple because I don't have car payments or student loans and so on. quote:MONTHLY: 1858 I'm having trouble, though, in parting an Emergency Fund from a long-term, not-vacation fund. My current estimate is that I've got 6 or 7 months of cushion, which seems like a good amount to me. Beyond that, though, I'm not sure what to do. Anything past a bog-standard savings account is way over my head. To complicate things further, I'm a state university employee and part of some pension system I don't entirely understand. All I know is they take around $200 a month, which I don't see until I retire (and being 26 that seems so far away as to not be any issue) or, I think, when I leave the University. Maybe. Fair enough, but am I supposed to be long-term/retirement saving something else on the side?
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Jun 4, 2013 17:04
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| # ¿ May 6, 2024 08:15 |
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dreesemonkey posted:Cell phones Wow, that definitely sounds a lot better than my barely-functional 3G coverage through Sprint for $92/mo. I'm coming up on the end of my contract in October, and was looking into Verizon's monthly stuff as my next provider, since Sprint's local coverage is not very good at all. I'd like to upgrade to an iPhone 5 (especially if the 5S/6/whatever drives down the price a bit), and beyond that all I really want is reliable data coverage. I've been posting a little in the Recommend Me a Phone/Plan thread, and am hoping the 5 shows up on Verizon's pay-as-you-go plan by the time my contact's up. I'll definitely take another look at Straight Talk, though, as I remember AT&T's local coverage being pretty good when I had my 3GS a couple years back. dreesemonkey posted:Otherwise I think you're looking ok. You're saving money and you have a good emergency fund. Always "pay yourself" before you start the fun stuff. That means paying all your bills, saving what you want, and then worrying about how much left over you have for booze and games, etc. Thanks for the advice, as well. I'll switch around the order of my budget - which might help as I've spent a good chunk of the morning trying to figure out why I have $100 more than I thought I would. Also looking into my YNAB demo (which I downloaded but didn't boot up yet) would also probably help, since PNC's Virtual Wallet machine has a delay that confounds me and regularly ends up with me adding more to my credit card than I thought. PhantomOfTheCopier posted:To bounce off dreesemonkey's comment about paying yourself before the fun stuff, my only caution would be that having a big, catch-all account might seem simple, but it's also a bit too easy to rape it without noticing. "Oh, I need $20 extra for this thing here and I can get it a week early because I have $5000 sitting in emergency+vacation+stuff and $20 is 'nothing'" is what leads to credit cards and no vacations. Before my "throw all my money in a bin" plan, I got a little nervous especially as I started researching my November trip to Disney. I've never been there, and have no real idea how much I'll be eating/drinking out aside from maybe Drinking Around the World in Epcot. I've calculated the cost of park tickets ($160) and airfare ($336), but beyond that, I'm sort of floundering. My friend is footing the majority of the hotel bill, and has asked for $300 for it, with more appreciated but not necessary. Because I investigated and saw just how drat expensive the room is, I'd like to save a good deal more to give to him. I should probably just pick a number, I guess. But all of that is extremely helpful. I'm extremely new at doing anything beyond paying my bills and being  with the rest, but I'll definitely do some research and see what I turn up with. I'll report back when I have something.  One last thing - I have a Cash Back credit card, so most of the time I want to put purchases on that so I can slowly accumulate "free" money. However, given that I can't pay off the balance until it's posted on the card (sometimes days later), I end up losing track of what I spent when and when I turn around I've got almost $300 on my card that I barely remember spending. I don't know if YNAB would help with that, and/or I'm just an idiot when it comes to money.
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Jun 5, 2013 17:54
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Two weeks ago, I started messing around with the YNAB demo, and it worked great for me - up until I was like "Eh gently caress it" and didn't track when I got $10 cash to buy a DLC game with my credit card for $7. That, combined one or two other minor hiccups has tossed me about $30 I can't match up with the amount on online banking, and it's driving me a little crazy. I really like YNAB, and have thoroughly learned my lesson to log everything, because I just spent my whole lunch hour trying to figure this out, and then setting up a brand new budget. Since I've only been using it two weeks is that the way to go in this case? Burn it down and start over?
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Jun 19, 2013 18:53
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YNAB is great for me, but I recently hit a snag where the numbers are all accurate, but the actual budgeting part is way off. Due to the best security deposit return I've ever had, I had a couple hundred dollars more than I thought to manage, but YNAB seems to think it's already been allotted. Thankfully, I get very bored at work and already had a rough draft of this paycheck's budget, so I'm not really off track or anything - I just need to figure out how to make YNAB get up to speed. I think the combination of a paycheck right before the start of a new month, combined with a vacation in the middle of the month where I went ~$200 over budget is maybe what's throwing stuff off. Is this something anyone else encounters from time to time? I'm a little reluctant to start dicking around with my budget numbers just to make the "Left to Budget" amount match what I actually have left to budget, but I'm even more hesitant to scrap the whole thing and start over.
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Aug 30, 2013 19:13
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