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A nitpick maybe, but YNAB should be under Technique 4 (Software), since it is an application you run on your computer. It can cloud sync to the phone app using dropbox, but there is no web interface for it. I personally am using YNAB and I really enjoy it. I was worried about it not connecting to bank accounts and having to enter everything manually, but honestly I think it's much better that way. When I was using mint I spent more time correcting weird transaction import quirks than I do now just entering the drat transactions in YNAB. Most of the time I enter transactions on the phone while I'm out.
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May 14, 2013 19:41
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I definitely agree that figuring out what your categories should be and making sure they aren't too generic is an important step. There's no right answer there. Some people might have an eating out category and that would work well for them. I basically have a separate category for eating out for lunch and eating out for dinner, because that fits my lifestyle better. Most people probably have trouble with single transactions that span multiple categories. In YNAB, you can split them, and it's pretty easy, the hard part is adding up the individual items and figuring out which portion of the tax goes to each item, especially on grocery store runs where a lot of items aren't taxed but others are, etc. You can buy items from so many categories at a stop & shop or target. Usually if its 2 categories I just figure out the easier one, then YNAB tells me how much is left in the total and that's what gets assigned to the other category. I don't mind splitting so much because I'm the kind of person who likes spreadsheets and figures and crap, but my girlfriend hates this minutia. But sometimes you have to be cognizant of what the money is really for as you spend it, and not so focused on where you're spending it. Like last weekend when I took my mom out to lunch for Mother's day, I split that transaction, and half of it was for eating out and the other half was a gift. If you have dinner with a friend, and put the whole bill on your card ($100) and they give you $50 cash, you didn't just spend $100 on dinner. You have a $100 transaction at {some restaurant} which is split, with $50 against a restaurant category and $50 is a transfer to your cash account. So yeah there are multiple ways to do things and it comes down to figuring out what works best for you, and not getting discouraged along the way. If you feel like you can't decide how to categorize or record something on the spot, keep the receipt, and do it later when you have more time. (this stuff I think applies to any method, not just YNAB)
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May 15, 2013 19:00
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I still use Mint, I just don't use it for budgeting. It's like a quick dashboard where I can get an overview my accounts that I don't look at often, to see if any numbers looks way off. I started with Mint and just couldn't get into its budgeting feature (and subsequently gave up on budgeting). YNAB just clicked for me.
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May 16, 2013 17:57
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Ashcans posted:Does YNAB link to your accounts and pull your transactions/balances automatically? Neither my wife nor I have smartphones, so if I need to input stuff myself it would mean keeping a physical ledger and entering it all at the end of the day. In which case, it seems like I might as well just be keeping my budget in a physical ledger to begin with. Having Mint able to automatically pull and sort things is a pretty big deal. It also helps that I use cash for barely anything. If you use a credit/debit card for purchases, you can do this without keeping the physical receipts because you can just log into the account. I find the physical receipts are faster, and they're better if you need to split the transaction since a CC statement won't show you what you bought.
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May 17, 2013 21:37
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I don't use a lot of cash, but I find it easy enough to use a Cash account in YNAB. Every other account is accurate to the cent, Cash is accurate to the dollar for me. A $3.25 muffin is $4.00. If I buy that muffin tomorrow and use a quarter from today's change, it will be a $3.00 muffin. If I buy a bagel for $3.95 and count out $0.95 in change from car then it's a $3 bagel. Basically for me it's not cash that isn't real, it's change. This makes a cash account super easy and mostly accurate. I hardly ever use cash so again it's easier than if you use cash for everything. My main use of cash is for gas since it's cheaper and at most full service stations they top up to get a round number anyway.
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May 31, 2013 16:21
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Yes, do this regularly so that when you find a discrepancy you aren't going back to the beginning of time (budget wise) to resolve it. Still, it can be a pain in the rear end because of differences on credit/debit cards between when the purchase was made, when it cleared, and which date the bank records as the transaction date.
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Jun 19, 2013 21:14
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100 HOGS AGREE posted:It's actually 25%. So it's worth it even if the amount I'm getting from the company is less than the amount of money I'm losing per month total in interest payments on my collective loans? I did the math and it's a couple grand a year in interest, the amount I'm getting from the matching will be like... ~260 dollars If you achieve your maximum match by contributing $100 to the 401k, resulting in $25 of "free" money, the amount of interest you "save" yourself by putting that $100 against a (say) 20% loan would be $20. A net gain of $5 for you.
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Jun 28, 2013 16:38
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PhantomOfTheCopier posted:Reading the recent push for YNAB stuff here and in DogsCantBudget's thread, I must say it seems like there's a great deal of quote:Initial setup sounds like 'the worst', but it leads me to ask a dumb question: Why don't you just lie to the thing and claim your income is that much higher this month so you actually have food money, and balance that by lowering your savings? If you have $10k in savings and you "know" some of it is for food and StrangeExpenseThisMonthA and so forth, why not record $9k in the savings 'envelope' and just tell YNAB that you've already been paid $1k so, woohoo, we can stuff it into these budget accounts? What I did when I set up YNAB, was to instead set up my savings as an off-budget account, so that money is not available for me to budget anyway (I would have to transfer it into an on-budget account and record it as income then), but I haven't heard of anyone else doing it that way. quote:What I do for budgeting became a bit easier to explain after reading some historical double-entry accounting stuff, and it sounds like YNAB has a flavour for some similar trickery. For example, it sounds like credit card balances need to be listed as "off budget accounts", whereas a monthly credit card payment (such as paying down a balance) would need to be listed as a separate account/category/whatever. Is that the YNAB way? If so, that's somewhat classic double-entry. When you first start using YNAB, all spending that was on the credit card from before (that couldn't have been recorded individually) just gets put into a Pre-YNAB debt category, which will be in the negative and go to 0 as you pay it off.
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Jul 15, 2013 21:15
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involved, enough so that each thing I read makes me a bit more concerned about the YNAB methods. What started off as a 'weird' feeling has been progressively turning into 
or 
or something. It still sounds reasonable for those just learning to budget, but I'm curious how long it takes for all the hidden caveats to become unnecessarily annoying. Do long term users of YNAB start looking for other solutions? What are the biggest limitations?
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PhantomOfTheCopier posted:Of YNAB, I get paid twice a month (15th and last), plus at other points in the month from side income, she gets paid little bits at a time over the course of the first 2 weeks of the month. YNAB's approach of entering income when you get it, has been really great in that regard, because even though I have a steady job, I also have side income, so both of us have "variable" incomes that are difficult to account for in a spreadsheet or other budgeting methods/tools I've seen. YNAB is absolutely about planning though; I'm having trouble figuring out why you think it isn't? I see what you're saying about saving $125/month for a $600 6-month bill.. that would work fine in YNAB (quite well actually). You just keep budgeting $125 int hat category every month while spending nothing against it. The "balance" for that category carries over each month. Want to change the amount going forward? Just do it. I budget for lots of things this way, auto insurance, renter's insurance, my scheduled dental work, Christmas, even my car registration (every 2 years). I will say that YNAB does not handle slackers like you very well (I'm not sure of a system that does). If you don't enter your transactions, you aren't looking at a complete picture, so it's difficult to make budgeting decisions. Anyway, I don't mean to keep white-knighting YNAB. You seem to have a negative impression of it and that's fine, but some of the issues you have with it don't seem to be lining up with my experiences. I think people who can use Excel effectively should stick to it; they probably won't get much out of YNAB unless they have specific pain points with the spreadsheet. Excel just wasn't for me.
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Jul 17, 2013 21:58
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", you say. "But of course, at that rate it takes you two years to save six month's ahead". Any adjustment necessarily occurs when you get your bill and find it to be $650. "Darn, so instead of being 1.5mo ahead, now I'm only 0.92mo ahead, and I should now budget $135.42/mo."
(I think the worst I remember is a clothing purchase that I entered 14 months afterwards; yeah, that was before I had a good plan for clothes purchases.)
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PhantomOfTheCopier posted:Having people here discoursing over tools does bring a lot of good things to light, particularly if we can be reminded of those special tricks we use to make our money work for us: I actually just came back from a 10 day vacation, and took extra days to have some dental work, so I had like a 2 week hiatus from entering transactions (except a few cash transactions for which I had no receipt, and entered on my phone). That's the longest I've gone so far without keeping up with things, and it was all fine, just took a little longer than usual. You don't have to buy YNAB to try it; the trial is 35 days (this is mostly directed at other people who might want to try it, not trying to get you to). For that list of events you posted, I would record the following transactions: 7/31 - In my CC account: purchased $1000 of gold from Vendor in category Survivalist Equipment (as uncleared) 8/3 - Clear the above transaction (I assume that CC verifies the charge means that if I look at the account I'll see the charge and the balance or at least available credit will reflect it) 9/20 - In my checking account: record a transfer of $1000 to the CC account (uncleared). This will create an associated ingress transaction in the CC account (uncleared). 9/22 (or 9/24) - Mark the checking transaction as cleared (in YNAB they describe cleared as when the bank "knows" about the transaction, and this is generally how I use it so either date works) 10/1 - Mark the CC side of the transaction as cleared. From 7/31, the category balance for Survivalist Equipment and the amount available to budget would be affected (and that's what's most important). The account balances (as shown on the left) are affected right away when you enter transactions, it's only when you click into them that you can see the breakdown of cleared/uncleared. In this way, cleared vs uncleared is less important in YNAB and I usually use it as a way of noting that the balance I see if I look at the bank's web site won't match at this time, or more frequently I use it as a way of reminding me that I need to do something else with that transaction or review it when it clears (like with write-in tips at restaurants on credit cards, so I can be sure the final amount they entered matches what I wrote). In the end I feel like your budgeting philosophy (or the way you execute it) might just be outside the bounds of what YNAB works well for (which is not an indictment of your methods in any way). And again, I'm not trying to push a particular method or tool on anyone. Sorry to everyone if it's coming off that way, I'm enjoying the discussion.
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Jul 18, 2013 17:01
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tuyop posted:I'm pretty sure his point was that, from the day that he bought the gold, to the day that the gold was actually paid for by someone, 80 days have passed. So somehow, for that 80 days, your net worth should be staying at, say $1000 (you just transfered 1k in cash to 1k in gold), but since the cash is taking 80 days to change hands, for that 80 days you actually have 1k in cash and 1k in gold. Having 1k in cash and in gold for 80 days in this scenario is just a loan of 1k from your credit card (that's where the additional funds come from). But if you want the net worth to remain the same in the budgeting program then his pile of gold should be an account in itself, then the sequence looks like this: 7/31 - In my CC account: transfer $1000 to Gold account 8/3 - Clear the above transaction 9/20 - In my checking account: record a transfer of $1000 to the CC account (uncleared). This will create an associated ingress transaction in the CC account (uncleared). 9/22 (or 9/24) - Mark the checking transaction as cleared (in YNAB they describe cleared as when the bank "knows" about the transaction, and this is generally how I use it so either date works) 10/1 - Mark the CC side of the transaction as cleared. The only real difference here is that the net worth number and the available to budget numbers stay the same. Or if you want the available to budget number to go down while the net worth stays the same, make the Gold account off-budget and then when you do the first transfer you again have to choose a category (Survivalist Equipment).
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Jul 18, 2013 19:44
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Sulla-Marius 88 posted:I've been looking at the YNAB stuff and I guess I'm in a different situation in that I don't want a budget, I want a light-weight program that can track expenses and debts for repayment.
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Jul 18, 2013 19:46
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Drunk Johnny posted:I think it helps you keep track of how much you are actually spending. Also it will help control your spending. If you budget 200 for groceries and only need 150, you will be more likely to spend the extra 50 if you just take it out all at one time. If you were tracking it more precisely you will know to only budget 150 per month on groceries, and you can budget the 50 elsewhere. When you consider this over multiple categories I think you will be able to save more/budget more efficiently. You might be better off with the envelope method. YNAB (and maybe all budgeting) is essentially a virtual envelope method anyway. If you insist on having the cash on hand and not recording transactions, then using real envelopes might be better than YNAB for you.
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Jul 30, 2013 21:49
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One of the great things about the "flexible" aspect of YNAB is that it means less pressure to estimate everything correctly when you're starting out. You're going to overestimate on some categories and probably underestimate on a lot more. It sounds weird but in the beginning, you're kind of just learning how much you spend and on what. Once you have the knowledge, then you start realizing where you can cut easily, where you need to change difficult habits to cut stuff more effectively, etc. Your goal/motivation right now is to get out of debt, but don't let that dissuade you if it seems like you're not doing it quickly enough. Having intimate knowledge of where your money is going, even if it takes a month or 3, is going to be essential for getting rid of the debt and then making sure that you continue good practices afterward.
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Jul 31, 2013 18:57
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Hip Hoptimus Prime posted:OK, so I played with YNAB yet again, and started completely over with a blank budget on it. This time I did something differently. My husband gets paid on the first and 15th each month. I only get paid on the first. So this time, I only entered what we have gotten paid for the first, rather than the whole month. I filled in everything that is getting paid the first half of the month, which seems to have worked a lot better. Then come the 15th, I'll put his other check as an inflow and fill in the rest. Yes, it means I'll have to do this twice each month, but then at least whenever I look at it, I'm only looking at money we actually have instead of hoping what I put for his mid-month check is accurate. Usually it's the same as what we get on the first, but sometimes it isn't, like if he gets a clothing allowance tacked on or something. This might be nitpicking, but I'd rather you put $450 for groceries if you think it's reasonable and the amount is available. If you don't use that much, you can allocate less next month, like if you spend $300, then next month if you budget nothing for groceries you'd still have $150 to spend in that category. At that point you can budget $150 and have $300 total to spend. If you want to pull money out, you can (budget negative) but that hardly ever happens, usually better to let it carry over. Hope I'm not adding confusion with this.
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Aug 1, 2013 21:56
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Hip Hoptimus Prime posted:OK, so I've mentioned earlier about my husband's iMac loan. The balance is now down to $1850. I plan on putting $400/month extra on it starting next month, but there's also a $147 payment that comes directly out of his check for it. Since we don't see the check allotment, how would I account for that on YNAB? If I only enter $400 as the payment, then the decrease to $1450 would be incorrect, but if I include the $147 tacked onto the $400, it will put us over budget by $147 every time. Could I just enter the $147 payment in under the iMac account as an inflow to make it right? I wouldn't have to put down where the inflow comes from, right?
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Aug 5, 2013 19:16
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Hip Hoptimus Prime posted:OK, so I've mentioned earlier about my husband's iMac loan. The balance is now down to $1850. I plan on putting $400/month extra on it starting next month, but there's also a $147 payment that comes directly out of his check for it. Since we don't see the check allotment, how would I account for that on YNAB? If I only enter $400 as the payment, then the decrease to $1450 would be incorrect, but if I include the $147 tacked onto the $400, it will put us over budget by $147 every time. Could I just enter the $147 payment in under the iMac account as an inflow to make it right? I wouldn't have to put down where the inflow comes from, right? Hip Hoptimus Prime posted:Yes, it's on-budget as Pre-YNAB debt. I had a whole post written with 2 alternatives but after thinking about it, I like that method the best.
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Aug 6, 2013 17:12
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Yeah, categorize it as pre-ynab debt. You usually have to look at statements to find the interest (on student loans too). I also like keeping debt off-budget, but only for installment accounts. A credit card or line of credit should really be on-budget because even if you really don't want to, it's possible you'll spend out of the account again.
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Aug 7, 2013 16:01
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I project a month or two out, but the key is that I never enter income I haven't received yet. That means that my budget for 2 months from now looks like it's in the negative (because it is!). I'm also at the point where each month is paid for my last month's income. So when I enter income this month, it gets applied to next month's "Available to Budget" number. Looking at the projection for next month, I can see that negative number getting closer to zero as I add income. As other people are saying, don't look at your account balances when deciding whether or not to spend. Essentially, the account balances in YNAB should be reflections of the real balances of those accounts. This has to be accurate. The budget on the other hand, is where you allocate the money you have, even if you haven't spent it yet. You look at the "balance" column of the budget category to determine what you can spend in that category. You do that of course by entering transactions into the accounts and categorizing them properly. Entering wrong numbers into the accounts throws everything off.
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Aug 7, 2013 19:40
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Hashtag Banterzone posted:Every time I login to mint I see this alert.
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Aug 15, 2013 15:56
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Personally I like "letting it roll". Just to expand a bit, keep in mind that by allocating money to categories, you ARE creating a buffer (because you're spending out of the categories, not the balance). As long as you've allocated enough for your expenses, you'll be fine. Some of those things you budget for monthly aren't monthly spending, so they build up. At this point, I'm well into the last month's income thing and with all the yearly/6month/etc. things I budget for I have a few thousand just sitting. I actually created an on-budget savings account to transfer it into just so it wasn't all in checking. But there's definitely nothing wrong with a buffer category if that fits your style better! Briantist fucked around with this message at 18:00 on Aug 16, 2013 |
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Aug 16, 2013 17:58
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Me in Reverse posted:(YNAB) Budgeting Practice question: I collect records, and sometimes sell them on eBay, etc. Would you budget that income as Income, or as an inflow in my Records category? Do an experiment and see what the charts for income and spending look like when you categorize (say) $1,000 as income vs. an inflow in the Records category. In your case, I think I would categorize the sale as income, but it could go either way. An example of when I would use an inflow with a category other than Income is for a refund. I recently bought something from Zappos, returned it and bought the replacement item directly (instead of waiting for the return to process). So both purchases were categorized as Clothing, and then when the refund went through, I categorized that as Clothing also instead of making it look like I got extra income and spent extra. I say look at the charts because this is the only place in YNAB where it becomes apparent that there's a different because spending is shown as a percentage of what you had available to budget (which is affected by income). Briantist fucked around with this message at 20:15 on Aug 22, 2013 |
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Aug 22, 2013 20:11
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Kenny Rogers posted:¹ You DO have your PayPal account set up as an additional account in YNAB, right? It gets inflows and outflows and transfers, and you can use the PayPal Debit card to spend the money you earned selling stuff on Ebay to go buy gas or groceries, so it should, in theory, be listed on budget. Edit: recommended if you have and use a paypal account a lot already. I really don't like them as a company. v  v
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Aug 22, 2013 20:13
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100 HOGS AGREE posted:Sometimes I'll put income into a category if I like, put a pizza on my credit card or something and one of my friends gives me some cash to cover their part of it. I would handle the grocery store situation in the same way (but probably wouldn't need a split). 100 HOGS AGREE posted:I haven't touched my PayPal account in ages, I really only keep it open to use my credit card (points!) to buy stuff from people who only use Paypal. I don't even use the instant transfer anymore.
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Aug 22, 2013 20:56
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100 HOGS AGREE posted:Yeah, I thought about doing that but a lot of times my uncle will give me like 80 bucks and send me to pick up a bunch of things for him, and I don't want his purchases mucking up my numbers for the stuff I buy because I want to track how much money I'm spending on myself because I'm still trying to figure out my monthly averages. So I just dump it all in the reimbursement category so I know this purchase was someone else's poo poo and it shouldn't affect my planning for next month. If you dump into a reimbursement category you're actually mucking things up more (in my opinion). But if it's working for you and makes sense it's not the worst thing in the world.
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Aug 22, 2013 21:28
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Kenny Rogers posted:There is actually a problem with doing that. I wouldn't have ever put that $100 in YNAB as income. I would have bought the meth on the card, and categorized it as a transfer to the cash account (since they're both on-budget, actually there is no category). Now you can transfer the $100 from cash to checking, and then from checking to CC if you want. The key is that you never entered it as income and your purchase was never categorized as spending. You transferred $100 from your credit card to your cash. What happens from there is business as usual.
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Aug 23, 2013 18:04
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morcant posted: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. If this isn't the case, post some screenshots.
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Aug 30, 2013 19:15
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tuyop posted:Have you considered maybe moving that account off budget? The way you have it set up now (efund is On Budget) is what I'd recommend. To put $25 into emergency savings, you simply budget $25 to that category. There's technically no reason to move the funds anywhere. But I see why you'd want to and why that separation might seem important to you. So that's fine, you just do the transfer. It's still budgeted, but you won't spend against it. Next month, if you do the same, you'll budget $25, the balance on that category will be $50. So then, when you need to "break the glass" you would spend the money against that category. The category's balance would be whatever you put away for it (no matter which on-budget account it's in). Edit: Instead of spending against the category (for example if you want your car repair to appear as a car repair and not as "Emergency Fund") then you can negative budget against emergency fund (lowering its balance), and then your Available to Budget number will increase and you can budget out to the appropriate categories. This is what I would do. To do it the other way, where it's off-budget, you would transfer the money and give it the emergency fund category. What this looks like to YNAB then is that you spent $25 on "Emergency Fund". To use the money, you would transfer it back in to an on-budget account, which would also require a category. You'd probably mark it as Income and then budget normally; it would look like you received a windfall and then are budgeting it out into categories. It's a matter of opinion; I like the first option better. Consider that the second option will treat your saving as spending (which can be fine) so just consider how that will affects the charts if that's important to you. Briantist fucked around with this message at 19:37 on Sep 24, 2013 |
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Sep 24, 2013 19:33
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| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 01:10 |
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In my girlfriend's budget (we both use YNAB), it's pre-tax dollars because that's what all her income is, and she budgets for estimated tax payments. I receive money from both a regular job and side income, so my budget is in post-tax dollars. I take a percentage out of every side payment I receive for taxes so that it's like it was never mine anyway. That all happens off-budget, so that I can maintain consistency in my budget and not mix pre- and post-tax dollars. But yeah, when you have a small business that isn't its own entity, and all your income comes from that, it might make sense to just track those dollars and budget for taxes.
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Oct 15, 2013 23:12
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