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Annoying new-year new guy popping in. I'm thinking of moving to YNAB because I hate quicken so much, and I think my wife and I need to be more hands-on with our money. On the plus side, we're "ok" with money, and I think we're pretty much coming into this on step 4(?). We have a pretty healthy checking account balance and some other sub-accounts for step-2 type purposes. My first question is, when I'm setting up YNAB for the first time, making the assumption that I feel like we're already a month ahead, am I going to be taking the ~$10k or so in checking and deciding what starting balance I think we should have for each spending category in there? I was thrown off in the intro video for YNAB because I don't have any immediate needs for the money that's coming in. My second question is, should we eliminate our bank's sub accounts? Is it extra work "spending" the money from your budget to a different account because it's out of our checking account? I think I'm ready to do this, my #1 gripe is that my wife and I just don't really care enough about the budget because it's just not a priority. But using YNAB will be spending to a budget, and not a bank balance.
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Jan 8, 2015 22:16
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Gothmog1065 posted:If you can pay all of your bills straight from the budget and you don't need your sub accounts anymore, you can probably get rid of them, I think sub accounts are for people who need a way to put money to the side for paying bills and what not. Xik posted:I guess it depends what purpose the other accounts serve? Thanks, I decided to merge my two extra accounts back into my checking, one was specifically for car repairs, the other was irregular, large expense (insurance, heating, etc). I also deposited my cash envelope of blow money to just keep track of it in YNAB, which will be much more convinient. We more or less started february's budget of what we think we're going to be spending and applying that to our starting balance for this month to put us a month ahead in each category, any excess was put away as our emergency fund. Next question: Overbudgeting. My wife is off work right now and we're going to be spending more money than we make until she's back and her checks start rolling in again. Is being "overbudget" a big deal? Should your "available to budget" always going to be 0? I guess it's hard for me to understand until we start entering expenses for next month to see what's going to happen when you're living off your surplus. I got paid today and I added those to "Income available for February" but I'm still overbudget by quite a bit more than my next check will be. If it helps I can add a screenshot. I think it will take us a month or two to grasp what's going on and tweak, but I'm excited.
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Jan 9, 2015 17:09
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I've been using YNAB for a month, and I think it's going "OK". My wife and I were talking about it on some lengthy car trips this weekend and we need to make adjustments. We started on step 4, we had a healthy amount sitting in checking so we already had our "live on last month's income" buffer. When I started I YNAB I then just cut up the checking + savings amounts into what I thought should go where (what balance each category should have). Two of my more expensive categories (Daycare, mortgage) I put a big enough balance in there that we were already had an extra month's payments in there. Now I think I'm going to more or less zero out my balance in each of those categories each month. My rationale is we will just have a larger "emergency savings" category and daycare/mortgage don't really change that much like medical expenses or electricity. Our jobs are stable, so I don't really see a benefit of setting aside $XXXX specifically for the mortgage other than our emergency fund. My wife is just now back to work (maternity leave) so it next month will probably be back to normal for us with getting regular, full paychecks. It's hard to get a good idea of what we can be saving since we've been living on mostly my check for a while. I've been over budgeted for this month because my wife only got paid for ~4 days last month, so I haven't had the income coming in we usually will. By eating into my balance I set aside for mortgage/daycare, I have money to allocate elsewhere now. tl;dr: Should I worry about carrying a balance in my fixed monthly expense categories when we already have money set for "emergency savings"?
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Feb 9, 2015 15:07
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OK, glad my thinking makes sense then. I also like the idea of a "buffer" category to soak up minor overages. Obviously after we do this a while the need for that should be diminished since we'll have built a balance on discretionary type accounts, but until then it seems like it will be an ok solution as opposed to constantly pulling from "emergency savings"
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Feb 9, 2015 19:37
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Chin Strap posted:IMO you should get to a point where "emergency savings" can actually be hidden as a category, so that you can only see it if you truly truly need to hit it. I agree. We're pretty good typically at not touching our savings, it's just been different the last 3 months while my wife has been off. We might be overthinking things but we've added new categories like: - "Fun with friends" - Bachelor party coming up, wife is going on a wine weekend with her friends - "Entertaining" - Beer or pizza or grilling out etc that we should have to take a hit to the grocery budget or something - "Large purchase" - We'd like to buy a recliner sometime, last month I bought a new blender, etc I think I need to be more granular because I don't care if we spend the money for something, so long as we've planned for it. I just hate robbing our grocery budget if I decide to have some friends over for grilling and beer, for instance.
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Feb 9, 2015 20:46
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I'm starting to hit my stride with YNAB, I think. I used our tax return to top off some of our spending accounts that we overspent or for expenses we knew were coming up, and then even though we're still playing catch up with my wife's paychecks, we were able to balance our budget for next month using this month's income (about $500 short). Having a plan 
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Feb 24, 2015 15:34
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I've been wearing the Champion C9 series for a few years. I don't have a frame of reference because I haven't had any other brands but they are awesome and not real expensive.
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Feb 26, 2015 20:29
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I'm fairly new to YNAB and I did not know that I could edit my budget on the iPad app. I cannot on my phone and remember hearing "no mobile budget editing" so this was a nice surprise. I just started next month's budget on my iPad last night and I think it was even easier than on the computer, going through each category it showed me my average spending, what I budgeted last month, etc without an extra click. Thumbs up.
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Apr 9, 2015 18:46
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TraderStav posted:I work a corporate job which affords me several hours of free time a day that I choose not to always advance my projects. I usually take fifteen minutes every day or two to reconcile and add new transactions I missed by going to all my bank sites. Same. I'm an office drone and I usually check my bank every day for new / cleared transactions. YNAB is the first finance software I've ever reconciled and I usually do that every day too just to keep up That said, I have a really simple setup. One bank, all spending from checking, etc. dreesemonkey fucked around with this message at 14:54 on Apr 12, 2015 |
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Apr 12, 2015 14:51
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Could you just adjust your initial starting balance from your savings by -$1134.01 and then categorize your bank transfer as "income for April"? A transfer in YNAB won't effect your monthly income since YNAB doesn't care where your money is (checking/savings).
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Apr 29, 2015 18:14
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ElGroucho posted:Out of curiousity, how long did it take most people to fulfill rule 4? I'm a jerk and it was right away for me. I was just sick of quicken and wanted to get into tracking individual category/balance tracking. We got into a bad habbit of spending to bank balance instead of earmarking money for things. So far it's been helpful!
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Apr 29, 2015 19:41
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I'm on step 4, and I'm getting my first 3 paycheck month since using YNAB. My plan was to just top off the categories we've been burning through or have some upcoming expenses in that we hadn't been specifically planning on. Still, that will probably only be about 1/3 of the extra paycheck money. I don't really see any benefit to being more than a month ahead on since we have emergency savings already, so I guess I would just probably put the excess in there since we don't really have any other plan for the money. Am I missing something?
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May 18, 2015 13:54
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Slimchandi posted:If I have overspent in one category, how should I be rectifying it at the end of the month? Pinching from an emergency fund? Or an underspent category which will be funded fully next month? Or do I need to do it at all? I do a little of everything. This past month I on a whim decided that I wanted to do some fairly major landscaping at our house so I wiped out my "big purchases" category and pilfered the rest from my emergency fund (worth it, by the way). In other instances I'll just let the negative balance roll over to the next month and try and absorb the overage then. The months following that I try and determine if I've just budgeted poorly and need to earmark more money for that category going forward or if it was just a fluke and shouldn't happen again. I've learned that our "restaurants" category needs to be upped, we've been doing horrible there. Failing that, I will try and steal from some other discretionary categories. I usually do that as a last resort as I like getting balances in these categories so I don't have to think as much about "can I afford to buy this gift for XYZ", etc. I do find that it's hard to keep balances in some of these categories as my wife is now spending to the category balance (as opposed to the bank balance). It's hard to get to her to think about future purchases. Baby steps, I guess.
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May 26, 2015 16:04
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If the problem is you're unsure of whatever you'd like that money to do, just assign it to a generic "buffer" category or something until you do decide.
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Jun 3, 2015 14:25
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When I receive a windfall and am already living on last month's income, I'm going to make the assumption that it's ok to mark this windfall as income for this month so I can use it right away?
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Jun 23, 2015 13:58
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Beach Bum posted:It's your money, you do what you want, as long as you are Rule 4 compliant. Yea I'm going to save most of it anyway but I did want to purchase a few small things in categories that I'm over in.
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Jun 23, 2015 14:23
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I wish YNAB had better reports, that's about the only thing I miss from Quicken. I don't think the income/expense report is all that helpful because I may be regularly spending more money than I have as income for that month, but if I'm not going over my category balances (i.e. saving for something ahead of time), the fact that it "looks bad" in the month I decide to buy my wood pellets for the winter is silly. A "overspent categories" report would be much more helpful, I think.
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Oct 14, 2015 15:45
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Whoa, I didn't know you could export your budget, that's pretty awesome. I can do things in Filemaker, but the chances of anyone else on here having (or buying) that program is slim to none. I guess I could try and make it a runtime. Hmmmmm. I may put it on my to do list, because I can at least do the exact report that I wanted. Cool!
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Oct 16, 2015 16:37
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dreesemonkey posted:Whoa, I didn't know you could export your budget, that's pretty awesome. Well I'm feeling rather pleased with myself. Now I just need to think of more things that I want to examine. 
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Oct 18, 2015 02:19
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Sockser posted:Looking at this, a question It definitely is a "do whatever you want" kind of thing, but I personally would rather see a overage so I could tell when I planned (or executed) poorly. Sockser posted:E: also how hard is the ynab format to parse? Could probably do some neat poo poo with all that data. Or at least use sublime to take care of some nonsense real quick and fix some issues that I've been too lazy to sort out. If you don't mind doing an export, it's easy as can be. It spits out two CSV files, one for your budget for each month (which I have been using primarily) and one for your register (i.e. all your transactions). I don't find the register export particularly interesting right now because YNAB you can do most reporting on those individual payees already in YNAB. 100 HOGS AGREE posted:
I'll look into this over the next couple of days. I need to decide how to treat these different things(s? reports? insights?) so it's not all a mismash. Both of these are totally doable, though. Speaking of insights, I added another one to tell me the overall net worth gain/decrease from the inception of me using YNAB. I only blurred it because I was sharing it with a couple of friends. 
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Oct 24, 2015 21:20
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100 HOGS AGREE posted:I'd really like a report that shows monthly and average amounts budgeted per category so I can compare it to the income/expense one that YNAB already has. Ok, not sure if this was what you were looking for but I added an insight for budgeting (and spending) averages. This is the "crazy data" view where it lists every month for every category. You could also just show the category summaries without the details.  100 HOGS AGREE posted:And one with a graph much like the net worth report in YNAB that I can look at the balance of any category over time, for stuff like my savings categories that grow month-to-month, but rarely get spent out of. I have this in theory, but don't have the report controls setup yet.  I'm not just cockteasing, I'll share a dropbox link eventually when it's a bit more polished. You'd have to download a trial of the software to test it out, I can look at making a runtime but I'd rather not do that until all the bugs are really worked out and even then I'm leary of telling people "Trust me! Nothing wrong with this 30MB .exe file!"
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Oct 27, 2015 01:56
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I think it's fair, they probably figure a lot of people aren't going to "upgrade". I don't mind paying for services that I use and get value from (and they have a business to run), but I am happy with YNAB4/dropbox now so I'll stick to that for the forseeable future unless there is something super compelling in the works. As much as I use/like YNAB, I can justify $50/year for it.
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Nov 11, 2015 17:20
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gariig posted:It depends. Why are you doing this? What benefit do you get for putting the $1000 into an off budget account? If you think you'll check your account balance, realize you have an extra $1000, and buy a PS4... then hide it! However, I think keeping way more cash than you can spend on hand and in your checking account is the easiest. You don't have to worry about over drafting because your net worth is accessible right now but you're spending to your budget not your account balance. Yea by hiding money from yourself, you're kind of missing the point of YNAB in the first place. gariig is right, spend to your budget and not your account balance. Checking account balances are irrelevant outside of emergencies, you look to YNAB to tell you what you have available in your subcategories. You still need willpower to keep yourself from "well I have 1000 in emergency fund savings but I'd really like to buy Fallout 4, despite not budgeting it, I'll pay myself back next month". It's a learning process. This is not meant to be rude, but constructive: Given that you've had two threads in this forum and you're still wanting to hide money from yourself, you've got to work on planning and impulse control.
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Nov 13, 2015 14:57
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IllegallySober posted:While I know you prefaced your last comment with saying it wasn't meant to be rude, I kind of can't help but take it that way. You're suggesting that because I wanted to set up an additional safeguard to help myself save money for emergencies, I need to work on impulse control? I mean if you have a plan that you're cool with, by all means have at it. I was genuinely not trying to upset you, what I took away from your post was that you were looking to hide the money from yourself for whatever reason, I just assumed it was for impulse control. I don't have any off-budget accounts so I'm not exactly sure how they would work, so I can't comment on your original plan. I hide stuff from YNAB too for my own reasons that may only make sense to me. I don't have any non-liquid accounts listed in there since I'm not concerned at all with net worth, just categorizing my "cash on hand" accounts. I consider my 403b/Roths/529s to be untouchable, so there is no point for me keeping them in there. My only debt, a mortgage, is also not in there, it's just a category in YNAB that I budget the same amount every month.
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Nov 13, 2015 19:48
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It really wouldn't be that hard to recreate a basic YNAB4. Unfortunately I'm no Web programmer.
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Jan 8, 2016 02:29
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DrBouvenstein posted:Double edit: Aww crap, I realized it's even more complicated than that...I can't just do a transfer of the amount minus the escrow, because a good chunk of the payment is the interest...so I think the easiest thing is don't bother trying to figure out transfers, just make it a single transaction, make the payee something like "Mortgage" or "Bank" for the full amount, and then just once a month manually reconcile the mortgage balance. I assume this is so you can have an accurate-ish "Net Worth" number? I don't particularly care about net worth, so all of my stuff is an outflow, mortgage included.
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Jan 8, 2016 18:13
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I was not aware nYNAB didn't allow you to carry over negative balances. We're rule 4 and most categories (and I have a lot) are discretionary spending, so I like knowing that I overspent last month and I have to make that up when planning the next month's budget. I think that losing that kind of information obfuscates that there was overspending (not planning well enough). I've been thinking about upgrading to nYNAB because I do want to support them, I like classic a lot and it's helped me tons, but it seems like something I wouldn't particularly like.
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Jul 29, 2016 18:26
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Chin Strap posted:You can still make up for it next month, it just forces you to take it out of *somewhere* in your current budget for now. So you overspend 200 in a category, you have to make up for it out of another category (emergency fund or vacation fund or whatever), because you really honestly do not have that money any more. Next month you can budget 200 less in the category you overspent on and put that 200 back in wherever you took it out from. Yea but with Rule 4, I DO have the money since I'm budgeting a month ahead. I get it, I guess I'm just too much in the classic YNAB mindset. Today is a great example, I just went grocery shopping and spent ~$100. I didn't have that left over in my budget for this month, but you know, it IS the last day of the month. So I'd potentially have to do some budget shimmying for one day?
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Jul 31, 2016 16:27
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Teeter posted:The only downside to YNAB 4 is that I can't edit my budget using the app, and the desktop version requires an install so I can't run it at work when I'm much more inclined to push around numbers. FYI you can edit the budget with classic YNAB if you have the iPad version.
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Sep 2, 2016 19:32
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Signed up with financier! Honestly I would have been happy to give YNAB my money as well, but $12/year is a lot easier to stomach when you've already bought YNAB4. I honestly think they'd be making more money with a lower ask, but I guess they're a lot larger too. I'm going to maintain both for a while but my wife seems to not care which we use and aside from the mobile experience not being great, I have no real complaints otherwise yet.
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Nov 23, 2016 16:45
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I'm the same way anitsirK, I don't really care about my net worth in YNAB, I just use it as a tool for managing my liquid assets. Personally, the value of my house is almost irrelevant, I don't plan on selling it ever/anytime soon. I have a personalcapital account just for quick-glance type stuff and it's annoying how my net worth fluctuates with zillow's dumb zestimate. I use it mostly to see how my retirement stuff is going.
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Dec 22, 2016 14:58
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Financier But really, I would have a really hard time not being able to carry over negative category balances. It's one of my favorite features! And if you're "rule 4", I see no actual harm in it.
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Feb 8, 2017 14:00
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Chin Strap posted:But then you aren't actually rule 4 any more because you didn't rely solely on the month before for all your budget. nYNAB is just making you be honest about that fact. When I was still using YNAB4 I found out that you could export the data to .csv. I could then run my own data analysis on my budget data and to me, one valuable metric is how often I carried over a negative balance in a particular category(shown here). That gave me an idea of what I'm most often under-budgeting/overspending, and if I readjusted my budget I don't think it would then be something I could historically refer back to over time. Now, if I had developmental control over how nYNAB works I could theoretically log home many times a category balanced has changed to see kind of the same thing.
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Feb 8, 2017 17:04
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I see what they're trying to do with that (all spending has to come from somewhere), but if you're "rule 4" this is unnecessary. You're not counting on money that hasn't come in yet, it's very specifically there and waiting for your next month or however many months you're ahead. I don't know if they still have "rule 4" or not with nYNAB.
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Apr 17, 2017 19:41
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Budgetwise seems like it could be interesting. I feel like I'm pretty easy to please, but right now no split transactions is a deal breaker. I will absolutely keep an eye on it, though. I like financier for the most part, but some things that I don't like about it: - It's not far from abandonware at this point, no real development happening. - Pretty much zero reporting. Something like a pie chart of "Spending over time" and/or a "Spending by payee / category" would probably be sufficient for me. I don't feel like those are unrealistic. - Dumb stuff like "losing money" when one of your split transactions doesn't retain it's category assignment. There is no visual indicator that something is amiss with the transaction. One day I expanded like 3 months worth of split transactions and found there was a non-trivial amount of money not categorized, which then reduces your "money to budget". Just give me a little red flag on the transaction line so I know to go back in and fix it. - Similarly, when you have a Category for "Gifts" for instance. If you type out "Gifts" instead of "Gift<enter>" (with it's auto-complete), it will not link it to "Gifts". It's quite annoying and the cause of my previous complaint. - There are times when I WANT to leave a transaction uncategorized (non-split transaction). Like if my spouse buys something and I enter the transaction only so I can reconcile, I'd like to be able to leave the category blank until she goes and fills it in. You CAN do this, but only if the Payee is not recognized (otherwise it will default to something used before). The workaround is make it a split transaction, and then delete all the split "line items" and it will do it. Sheesh. - I recently had an issue where I COULD NOT get my account to reconcile, it was something stupid like $.66 off. So I got mad and just made an adjustment transaction. A day or two later I'm reconciling again and I'm off by that loving $.66. So I delete my adjustment and then it's all fine and good. I reconcile multiple times a week strictly to avoid dumb problems like that since I'll only have a few cleared/unreconciled transactions that could cause a problem. - The spouse doesn't really like it due to some of these issues and has trouble accessing it from her work computer. Must be something to do with permissions/the couchDB backend it uses or something. - A decent mobile interface. I don't need an app. A "responsive design" blah blah blah web interface would be more than fine. Man if I were a big boy programmer I would absolutely make my own "slighty better financier". I don't care about automatic transaction imports and stuff. Financier without it's quirks and some reports would be just about perfect for me.
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Dec 6, 2018 20:47
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100 HOGS AGREE posted:I'll probably jump to Budgetwise once they add in the stuff in this upcoming update. I've been using Financier for over two years now and I miss having reports.  Looks like split transactions are supposed to be coming <soon>, that's kind of the last thing I'm waiting for. Combat Pretzel posted:Too bad the Budgetwise guy got held up with this bank import bullshit, which didn't help progression of his app. He was pondering to ice development of it to focus on actual improvements. I wonder how that turned out. He's abandoning it, at least for now. https://blog.budgetwise.io/2019/03/18/march-update-bank-sync-intercom-and-general-development/ dreesemonkey fucked around with this message at 17:26 on Apr 4, 2019 |
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Apr 4, 2019 17:24
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Careful Drums posted:I can't imagine a harder software product to sell than a recurring fee for a budgeting application. Eh, I've been previously self-described as cheap/frugal, but I have no problems with spending money on things that provide value for me. Budgeting, to me, is one of those no-brainers. Peace of mind, less stress, better financial shape. Can anyone confirm if split transactions are live in budgetwise? It was mentioned "soon" in the March blog, and then nothing mentioned about it in the April blog. My trial has long ended and I don't really want to pay for it until I know I can attempt to use it full-time.
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Apr 30, 2019 16:36
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I bought the budgetwise lifetime pass after my trial had long since expired. I can't really recommend it at this point. It is SO SLOW (using chrome, haven't tried another browser yet). There are multiple second delays between mouse inputs/keyboard tab/scrolling. Maybe there is something going on with my specific budget that I'm not aware of because I can't imagine most people are putting up with it. There are other quirks/things I don't like either, but I think those can be fixed. I've been making a list and I'm about to spam the budgetwise subreddit with recommendations.
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May 21, 2019 15:47
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tater_salad posted:Someone have a link to financier? Maybe I don't have the right one? You shouldn't need to download anything, it's completely in browser. https://financier.io/ Desktop site https://app.fmobile.io/ 3rd party mobile site, as I understand it Financier is my "daily driver" but I'm hoping to move to budgetwise eventually. As others have said, there are effectively zero reports with financier which is pretty annoying. It does work well for how I use it, though. In my opinion budgetwise isn't ready yet. There is a redesign coming soon that should address a lot of the lag issues I was having, but I'm still waiting on some other functionality before I can switch over for sure.
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Jun 28, 2019 19:11
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Bread Set Jettison posted:Question for you all, do you include Alcohol in your "food" budget or is it in like a "Fun" budget? I was FOREVER having it in my food budget. I moved it to a "social life" catagory group because it made more sense there. For reference my Food Budget group is Groceries, Restaurants, Coffee, and cafeteria (for eating at work because those transactions felt weird in "restaurants"). My philosophy is "when in doubt, add a new category". Somehow my wife has put up with it because we have an absolute gently caress-ton of categories. We have several categories that booze can come from. It's way overkill for most people, but I like the granularity (I'm a database developer by trade and organizing is a quirk of mine, I guess) - "Entertainment" category that we usually put our personal, at-home booze under (as well as like buying books, going to see a movie, etc). - "Entertaining" category, which we use to subsidized "people are coming over, let's get beer and steaks" type purchases. - "Fun with friends" category that is used for going to a golf tournament / out to dinner with friends type of things. Just for fun I counted our budget categories in Financier - avert your eyes! 1 Charitable category 33 Recurring/Monthly bill categories 22 Variable "everyday expense" type of categories 27 Savings categories for short/long/general savings I added about 8 new savings categories this month alone because I wanted to be mindful of things we'd like to do to our house in the future, even if it's years away. I don't mind spending money as long as I planned for it.
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Oct 3, 2019 18:34
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