YNABJ - Everyone needs one! - The Something Awful Forums

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > Business, Finance, and Careers > YNABJ - Everyone needs one!

Fezziwig: Jun 7, 2011

Yep. You'll just have to make the adjustment entry. But on the bright side, its like you found 30 dollars you didn't have before!

# ¿ Apr 29, 2014 14:48

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# ¿ May 22, 2024 03:46

Fezziwig: Jun 7, 2011

It's not showing up as an expense. It's showing up as an outflow. Moving money from checking to an off budget account is an outflow from your budget.

It helps to change your thinking from "expense" to "outflow".

# ¿ May 29, 2014 17:27

Fezziwig: Jun 7, 2011

If it's always a flat $250, just enter it as income separate from your paycheck directly into your HSA. Then budget it immediately into your medical category.

# ¿ Jun 9, 2014 14:46

Fezziwig: Jun 7, 2011

Eight Is Legend posted:

Do you guys use the scheduled transactions option at all? I know I'll be transferring some money from my checking account to my credit card at the beginning of January, but can't I just input the transfer in the main transactions/transfer field instead and put in the date I know they'll be transferred?

I mostly use it for monthly, non-variable bills, like Netflix. Otherwise, I just manually enter the transaction (and post date it if it's an automatic withdrawal).

# ¿ Dec 28, 2014 17:19

Fezziwig: Jun 7, 2011

GreatGreen posted:

Cool, I'll probably do it that way then.

I have another question though. Maybe I'm not understanding the software as much as I should... but let's say I have enough money to budget for three months in advance. I get a check today, in January, and want to mark it as income for March. How can I do this? The only options I see let me mark it for either this or next month.

Should I just always mark everything for income "this month" then just increase the budget for "Savings" by the same amount to zero out the budget for the current month?

Have a line item for "emergency fund" that contains all your savings not assigned for something else and log all income for next month. This way, this month's income is always next month's spending.

# ¿ Jan 4, 2015 03:19

Fezziwig: Jun 7, 2011

Lady Gaza posted:

So I'm finally on Rule 4, which feels great. My salary comes in on the 25th, but I've already got enough money budgeted for rent/bills etc that come out on the 27th/28th. On top of this I've also got a 1 month emergency fund budgeted. When my salary comes in on the 25th, I'll mark it as income for February, and then in February budget that for rent etc.

Now I've got to this stage, what now? Increase my emergency fund to 3 months/go for other savings goals? I've been focused on getting to Rule 4 that I hadn't really thought about what happens afterwards.

This is really entirely up to you!

Personally, I would pay down any debt first (that isn't something cheap, such as subsidized student loans, or a low-rate mortgage) and then start maxing out retirement accounts. If you are more risk-averse, because you don't have a very stable job, or you might have medical expenses or whatever, then you might want to put more money into your emergency fund first.

However, if you feel that you want to save for a vacation or a new car or whatever first, that's again up to you!

ashgromnies posted:

How do you plan for "I need X dollars on Y date" in YNAB? Is there a better way than just dividing the total cost by number of months and budgeting X/Y dollars per month?

E.g. I know I'll need money set aside to pay for taxes in April, and have an estimate of what I think I'll need.

For any of those non-monthly bills, like taxes, then that really is the best way to handle it per YNAB's rule 2.

# ¿ Jan 4, 2015 16:12

Fezziwig: Jun 7, 2011

I think either method works. The idea is to make sure you're not spending more than you have, which both ways cover.

Having a cash account has the advantage of being much more useful for reports, so you can see exactly where your cash spending is going to. The disadvantage is it takes more time to track.

Not having a cash account has the opposite advantages and disadvantages; it takes far less time, but you lose the ability to see where you are spending your cash.

Really it just comes down to personal preference and you could argue about it all day.

# ¿ Jan 8, 2015 04:57

Fezziwig: Jun 7, 2011

beedeebee posted:

I tried YNAB a couple of times in the past, and I'll probably start again today (or maybe 1st of February? Not sure what would be best).

Anyway, me and my girlfriend have a shared account. We pay rent, gas etc. from that account. Thing is, she won't be using YNAB. So how do I best keep track of that account?
Set-up a non-budget account, then transfer money from my account to that shared account? Just budgetting from my account, and then transfer the sum to the non-budget account? Will that work?

There's always the option of reconciling the account more often to add her transactions. Perhaps once a week? If you don't have tons of transactions, it shouldn't be too time consuming.

# ¿ Jan 28, 2015 13:29

Fezziwig: Jun 7, 2011

Pinball posted:

Kind of a weird question, but I hope you guys can help me out. I'm currently living off savings (as I am a poor grad student), with two small paychecks coming in monthly from my part-time job and another monthly check from one of my parental units (who refuses to stop giving me money, and I've tried to make her stop), all of which goes into the savings account and gets withdrawn at the beginning of the next month. Obviously, YNAB doesn't like this weird situation, and when I try and set up the budget for the next month, it insists that I'm overbudgeted. How do I get it to understand that withdrawing money from my savings is technically income?

Set your savings as an off budget account. When you transfer it to an on budget account, categorize it as income.

# ¿ Apr 29, 2015 23:50

Fezziwig: Jun 7, 2011

Karthe posted:

I'd highly recommend starting on June 1st. I started using YNAB in late March, and I went back to mid-March and input everything up through when I started using YNAB. Despite feeling like I'd started off the right foot, I eventually found myself with some category overflows because of how my money gets used during the course of a typical month (pre-paying rent with the previous month's income, etc...). It eventually became too unwieldy to reconcile and I was never able to figure out how get it to reflect the real state of my assets without showing a bunch of "overspending". I ended up starting fresh on May 1st and since then things have been going way better.

tl;dr: start fresh on June 1st.

YNAB doesn't care about transactions before you start using it, and I think they even recommend ignoring everything before you started. If you started using it today, it would simply ask you to budget all the money in your on budget accounts for the remainder of the month. Once June rolls around, you would budget that whole month, etc.

That being said, it can be easier to just start on the first, although you do lose a little bit of tracking info for the current month.

# ¿ May 20, 2015 03:28

Fezziwig: Jun 7, 2011

baby puzzle posted:

Why is my "available to budget" so high? It clearly comes from my initial bank balance but I would be broke soon if I budgeted and spent 20x my income in one month. Why doesn't "available to budget" come from my income instead? The number just isn't useful to me right now. How do I make it more useful?

If you have 20x your income in the bank, budget 19x of it into a category called "savings" or whatever and budget one months income into whatever bills are due for the rest of the month, plus spending money on whatever else.

# ¿ Jun 14, 2015 03:28

Fezziwig: Jun 7, 2011

Eight Is Legend posted:

Question about student loans: How do you guys track that? Do you have a category that just says "Student Loans" to which you allocate a certain amount of money each month, or do you instead have it set up as an account (like Pre-YNAB debt) so you can see exactly how far you are from paying it off whenever you budget for it and so you can also track your exact net worth?

I have my student loans set up as an off-budget account. This way, when I transfer money from my checking to student loans, the money comes out of the budget.

I typically will reconcile the account once a month to add the interest in there as well.

# ¿ Jul 21, 2015 22:44

Fezziwig: Jun 7, 2011

Karthe posted:

And now it's my turn for a question. It's the first of the month, which means it's time to address some overspending. How do you guys handle it? Do you siphon out excess from the categories that have them, then apply it to the categories you might have overspent? Or do you leave it all and make adjustments in the current month's budget until Overbudgeted is back to $0?

I really think this just comes down to a preference/discipline thing. Either is fine, it's just a matter if you're OK siphoning off of certain categories to make up for your overages.

I prefer to just carry the negative balance over - this keeps me honest, so if I spend too much "fun money" this month, next month I will have less to play with so I stay on track with my savings goals.

# ¿ Aug 1, 2015 17:06

Fezziwig: Jun 7, 2011

myron cope posted:

I'm still having trouble with off-budget accounts, I should just stop using them.

We have a checking account that we don't really use, so I have it off budget. There's a credit card we have that we paid this month and it turns out it was from the account that's off budget (they're both PNC accounts, I guess I wasn't paying attention). It was $57. I had the payment in my on budget checking and it wasn't clearing, so I went looking for it and it was in the other account. In YNAB, I moved it to the off budget account. Then it wants a category in the credit card section, which throws off my budget (the spending was already budgeted). If I move the other checking account back on budget (and actually update how much money is in it, since I don't pay attention to it). There's 26.something in the account now, so to take it from 0 to have a balance of 26, YNAB reconciled $85 into it. The only problem with that is now it's saying I have $85 to budget.

So to "fix" this, I said the $57 payment came from my main checking account, added a $57 "deposit" to it, then created a budget category for the excess $57 and hid it. Is there an easy way to fix this so it's "correct" in YNAB?

YNAB is doing this because you are adding $57 to the budget as a result of using the off-budget account.

Leave the checking account you don't use off budget. Have a "transfer" transaction from the off-budget checking account to the credit card. It will want a category because you have money affecting your budget now.

From here, you have two options. You can assign this to a budget category. This will create a positive balance in that category. You can then reduce the budget by that amount to bring it back to its original value. Alternatively, you can assign this as income, and then budget the $57.

# ¿ Sep 13, 2015 04:47

Fezziwig: Jun 7, 2011

IllegallySober posted:

Stupid YNAB questions incoming:

I had a $1000 emergency fund separate from any bank account that I had not accounted for anywhere in YNAB because I didn't want to think about or see that money- I wanted to pretend as if it didn't exist. However, last week, my car broke down and I had to use $500 of that money to repair the car. How do I now account for this transaction in YNAB? And how do I then go about replenishing that emergency fund in YNAB? Do I create a new category and then hide it when I've replenished it or something? Please talk me through this like I am a small child.

Since the money was spent from an account not in YNAB period, then you don't need to enter anything in the software from that initial purchase.

As you refill this account, you will enter an outflow and log it as car repairs or whatever.

This would be the same if you had this money as a nonbudget account, except you would just log the initial purchase as well. It just wouldn't have a category because it is off budget.

# ¿ Nov 10, 2015 15:59

Fezziwig: Jun 7, 2011

The way YNAB works with money is it takes all of your on-budget accounts and puts all of that money into one big pool of cash. It doesn't care what account the money is, only that it is on budget.

From there, it takes money from that large pool and puts it into envelopes.

In your example, if you had $1k in your checking, you would have $1k in that big pool. If you add your savings account of $500 to on-budget accounts, you will now have $1.5k.

If you try to pay bills totaling $1.5k from your checking account, you will of course overdraft on your checking account because you only have $1k in there.

To prevent this, you need to just be aware of how much money you have in what accounts, and try not to budget actual outflows beyond what's in your primary spending account.

# ¿ Nov 12, 2015 13:58

Fezziwig: Jun 7, 2011

IllegallySober posted:

This is what I realized after the fact. Thank you for the clarification though Having to keep track of making sure outflows I'm adding is less than what's in the primary account seems cumbersome, though, and easy for an idiot like me to screw up. I suppose I could just throw all my money into the one checking account? (the "big pool" you referenced?)

That is one option. If you prefer keeping emergency funds in a savings account, you can always throw that into an off-budget account (in YNAB) and when you add to the fund you can count it as an outflow from your budget. Then you don't have to worry about buying something or paying bills with money that isn't in your checking.

# ¿ Nov 13, 2015 00:47

Fezziwig: Jun 7, 2011

tyler is a joke posted:

I'm not sure I'm clear on what you're asking, but YNAB doesn't do future budgeting. If you want to write up next's month's budget but don't have money to cover it, you will be in the red. You only budget what you have. Once you start having excess money (i.e. your cash on hand covers more than your current month expenses) you can start budgeting ahead with that cash.

One day, I'll be there.

New YNAB does do future budgeting. Any income is now marked as "to be budgeted" and you can budget it as far out as you would like. When you do so, it is earmarked as "budgeted in future".

# ¿ Jan 9, 2016 19:36

Fezziwig: Jun 7, 2011

Moneyball posted:

I've created kind of a mess.

For a few months, I have been putting as much of my spending on credit cards as possible, due to the 0% APR, and using all my cash to pay down my car loan. Everything on my account looks normal, except there's a $4,800 over spend (soon to be $7,800) in the car payment category.

As you can see, I just sort of fill in whatever is leftover unbudgeted to bring it down. That's fine, and will go away, but what happens once I pay that off and start paying down the cards? Cards are on budget, so I'll just be doing on-budget transfers. The money to budget will start piling up, with no outflows.

Should I have started with something like this instead?

You are spending money you don't have. You are budgeting all of your income towards normal expenses, but not your car loan, so when you make your car payment, YNAB sees you didn't budget for it, and is recognizing you are over spending.

Basically what you are doing is playing a shell game with your debt, and not really paying down a significant portion of it. Once your car is paid off, you will need to pay off the credit cards.

Essentially the overspending YNAB is showing on your car payment is the escalating balance on your credit cards.

# ¿ Jan 14, 2016 13:36

Fezziwig: Jun 7, 2011

Karthe posted:

I can't get any of the numbers to balance out but everything's reconciled just fine. I'll chalk this up to my logging a starting balance and a couple of transactions on that card from when I restarted my budget.

I had the same issue. I just adjusted my budget so that when paid on full, that budget line goes to zero. Not a big deal, but it was kind of annoying that I couldn't figure out why our how it happened.

# ¿ Jan 27, 2016 19:13

Fezziwig: Jun 7, 2011

GlitchThief posted:

Rule Four, motherfuckers.

Now what?

Good job! Everything feels much easier when you are a month ahead.

Now is the time you knock out your next financial goal. Do you want to pay off debt? How about build a larger emergency fund (and raise your age of money to 90, maybe even 180 days)?

The choice is yours, and yours alone!

# ¿ Feb 18, 2016 13:22

Fezziwig: Jun 7, 2011

tyler is a joke posted:

Same here. I just had a moment where it felt so good. I just paid a utility because I noticed I hadn't paid it yet. Before YNAB, I would have put off paying it for as long as possible. It's not that I didn't have the money, it's just that I worried I would get to the end of the pay period and not have any left. And I didn't know how low I could let my balance get because who knows what random subscription charges were going to post.

Now everything is in the budget. I make payments on time without even a hint of worry about how much money I will have.

I recently moved my credit cards to on-budget which now makes total sense to me and I like it. It's keeping me honest. When they were off-budget I'd charge things (guiltily) because I knew I wouldn't have to take them out of my budget. And that was ok, I will still trying to get used to just managing my cash. Now I'm managing my cash and debt.

I wonder if folks could give me their thoughts on on budget savings accounts.

I currently have my savings account off-budget because I budget for it, make a transaction, and it zeros it out, but I'm thinking about moving it to on-budget since that's the way it's supposed to be but I didn't like it that way previously. Does anyone have any strong feelings for or against?

I keep it on budget because it affects my "age of money" in nynab. I just have a few categories marked as "savings" and my savings account balance should match the sum of those categories

# ¿ Feb 21, 2016 20:37

Fezziwig: Jun 7, 2011

Gothmog1065 posted:

What is that cc payments line for then? I'd it a pre ynab balance?

New YNAB has a pre-built line any time you have a credit card account. Any time you create an outflow in the category you make a purchase from (i.e. spending money), the program creates an inflow in the credit card category. When you make a transfer to the credit card account, it automatically create an outflow transaction.

This should mean when you do not carry a balance on the card, the CC category goes to zero. I've seen the program screw this up on occasion and leave a category balance, even when the card balance is zero. I'm not sure what causes it though.

# ¿ Mar 1, 2016 15:09

Fezziwig: Jun 7, 2011

IAmKale posted:

Are you saying I should set my credit cards up under a different type of account since I don't carry balances on them?

Yes, because the be system with CC accounts acts funky of you do any number of things, and can really screw with balancing your budget. I just set my credit cards up as "Cash" accounts and now it works swimmingly.

# ¿ Mar 28, 2016 13:50

Fezziwig: Jun 7, 2011

nYNAB handles credit card accounts very poorly. I just created Cash accounts for my two cards and treat them as regular accounts and it's alleviated all of my confusion. Not having to deal with those awful budget lines for the credit cards is a godsend.

# ¿ Nov 1, 2016 17:45

Fezziwig: Jun 7, 2011

I actually prefer nYNAB over 4, with the exception of how it handles credit card accounts. Fortunately, you can just not use that feature by adding your credit cards as Cash accounts and running a negative balance on them.

# ¿ Mar 23, 2017 13:03

Fezziwig: Jun 7, 2011

Does anyone else have nYNAB running extremely slow all of the time? It's gotten worse over time and now it's becoming very difficult to manipulate anything without supreme patience. Is there a solution to speed it up?

# ¿ Aug 19, 2017 14:06

Fezziwig: Jun 7, 2011

FateFree posted:

Are you using chrome? It runs entirely in the browser so you need one with a good JS engine.

I am using Chrome. I'll look into using a different browser to see if that helps.

# ¿ Aug 20, 2017 00:46

Fezziwig: Jun 7, 2011

Combat Pretzel posted:

Yea, probably something about the JavaScript backend bullshit firing tons of events for all loaded transactions whenever you scroll. Then again, I've unhidden all my reconciled transactions for testing and nothing went to poo poo. So I don't know.

Thing is, I have all my reconciled transactions hidden. It also runs poorly whenever I enter a payee.

I guess I'll try culling my payee list and see if that helps. Thanks friends!

# ¿ Aug 20, 2017 20:38

Fezziwig: Jun 7, 2011

Henrik Zetterberg posted:

Alright, so why do I have notifications on my phone about needing to categorize/approve imported transactions, but when I open up the web view on a computer, there's nothing to approve?

You might need to refresh the app. Just drag down and it should refresh.

# ¿ May 11, 2018 20:47

Fezziwig: Jun 7, 2011

Mikey Purp posted:

Oh yeah, I get that. My issue is that the amount it's stating I have to be budgeted is not the same as the amount I know I have in my budget accounts. Even after setting all available amounts to zero I still can't make the math work. I just want to get it to a point where I can have those two numbers be the same so that I can be confident that every dollar is truly accounted for and given a job.

Might have already checked this, but when you have credit cards as a checking account, the negative balance they have detracts from your To Be Budgeted. If you are then budgeting to pay the balance on the cards, you're technically double-dipping and your amounts won't match.

# ¿ Jun 9, 2018 13:51

Fezziwig: Jun 7, 2011

We just have a line item called Emergency Fund that contains our buffer. We only budget one month ahead.

# ¿ Dec 4, 2018 04:10

Fezziwig: Jun 7, 2011

tuyop posted:

The new webapp... less so.

Yeah, I'm always irritated at how slow it is when entering a payee. Let alone if you need to unhide reconciled transactions.

# ¿ Feb 8, 2019 13:52

Fezziwig: Jun 7, 2011

The way nuYNAB handles credit cards is very poor. Just make the account a checking account and never have to worry about positive credit card budget lines again.

# ¿ Feb 9, 2019 23:16

Fezziwig: Jun 7, 2011

WithoutTheFezOn posted:

I just want a monthly expense/spending tracker, though. And just by chance I’ve got five bills that are all due between the first and the sixth of every month, so they always get payed the previous month.

I know it’s not an important thing, but I find it annoying that what I consider May payments are partially shown as April and partially as May. Not claiming it’s a rational peeve, but it bugs me.

You don't want YNAB if all you want is a tracker. Use Mint or something similar, although I'm not sure if they let you assign things to particular months.

I, and most BFC posters, would recommend you actually budget rather than just track expenses though.

# ¿ May 4, 2019 12:22

Fezziwig: Jun 7, 2011

Residency Evil posted:

What do you mean by transaction? Right now, all ynab seems to see is that I owe Chase a few thousand next month. Will it ever see that $200 of that was gas?

I'm assuming you had a balance on the card when you started. Once you start entering transactions (aka, you enter a purchase for gas) it will show up in the category you assign it to.

# ¿ Jan 9, 2020 22:30

Fezziwig: Jun 7, 2011

Rosalind posted:

I'm sorry but that's way too much work. I know budgeting isn't effortless but, when it gets to the point of "If you go out with friends, you need to remember/get a receipt for every transaction then enter it manually into this thing then reconcile it a few days later," then it's just too much. If I wanted to do that, I could do that with an Excel spreadsheet and not pay these people extra.

Once you get used to entering transactions as you make them, it doesn't take very much effort at all. You'll find it's much easier doing this in the app on your phone than trying to juggle a Google spreadsheet or Excel document on the go.

The entire program and process is built around being aware of where your budget is before you spend money, and entering transactions as you make them so you are aware of what's going on. If you aren't tracking what you're spending, you're not going to be following your budget very well.

# ¿ Jan 17, 2020 16:55

Fezziwig: Jun 7, 2011

TraderStav posted:

nYNAB is stupid about credits and rewards that are posted to the credit card. I don't recall exactly how it is handled but it doesn't behave as you described or that a reasonable person would expect it. It seriously is just the best to convert it to a checking and move on.

Specifically, if you take a reward as a statement credit and enter a positive transaction on the card it will throw the credit card category out of balance. Which then means you need to move the money out from the category to another category.

# ¿ Jan 27, 2020 14:25

Fezziwig: Jun 7, 2011

TraderStav posted:

You shouldn't be budgeting out farther than the current month.

A good post all around, but I would like to clarify that it's okay for income from the current month to budget for the following month, if you have enough cash that the current month is already 100% paid for.

Would not recommend budgeting further out then next month though.

# ¿ Mar 2, 2020 13:13

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# ¿ May 22, 2024 03:46

Fezziwig: Jun 7, 2011

But why deal with all of the extra steps if you're paying it off in full every month? If I'm using a rewards card and apply a credit to my statement, I don't want to have to move a bunch of money around my budget after I add the transaction.

Just classify it as checking and keep it simple.

# ¿ Apr 18, 2020 18:22

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