YNABJ - Everyone needs one! - The Something Awful Forums

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

greazeball: Feb 4, 2003

Any tips for reconciling cash accounts? I haven't really bothered yet because we keep the current account reconciled and I figured it would just be a pain in the hole. But we do pay with cash and make transfers between accounts for atm withdrawals. Now I'm finding double entries in the budget because the app will default to one of the cash accounts sometimes and then I'll find a "missing" transaction on the bank statement and add it in. I think reconciling will help narrow these down and keep us in line. The biggest problem is that we have some big coins here in Switzerland ($1, $2 and $5 more or less) so I have a coin jar with sometimes up to $500 in it and I can't be arsed counting it up to get my balance. Any advice?

# ¿ Jun 4, 2014 22:42

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# ¿ May 22, 2024 01:33

greazeball: Feb 4, 2003

I sympathize with the multi bank account hassle. We've got some legacy account transfers that mean my savings balance in YNAB doesn't match the bank balance. Just gotta figure out which accounts to close and where to keep the tax/holiday/savings money and then we're sorted. I admit we tried keeping some savings accounts off-budget and that was dumb and stupid and a pain in the rear end.

Nthing the rule 4/get a month ahead. loving hell it has changed everything. Being able to plan how big forgotten expenses get covered (once, because they're all getting budget categories) is such a different experience than trying to figure out where the money will come from this month. The wife and I have been using YNAB since March and it's been an incredible help as we come into a period of big school and transportation costs plus holidays and then Christmas.

# ¿ Aug 6, 2014 00:15

greazeball: Feb 4, 2003

Something weird is going on (or I'm being dumb, which is not that weird).

I'm trying to reconcile my current account, there have been about 10 transactions since I last reconciled on the 8th. But somehow I'm getting a difference of 15000 Swiss francs. Just to confirm that I wasn't blind and missing some giant thing in my bank statement, I tried to reconcile from a date we've already reconciled to and there's a 14000 CHF difference:

Here, the balance on my bank statement matches the cleared balance on the date:

But then I don't understand what's happening here:

I've been reconciling this account for about 8 months and it's always been pretty straightforward but now suddenly I don't get it. Can anybody help?

# ¿ Oct 24, 2014 11:34

greazeball: Feb 4, 2003

Tamba posted:

Do you have any cleared transactions with a date in the future? Those don't show up when you reconcile.

I've done it again, unclearing the ones on my current statement and it happens again. Does it look like YNAB is just not reading the first 2 digits of my statement balance? I mean I entered it as 14606.37

and then it shows 606.37 here

# ¿ Oct 24, 2014 12:03

greazeball: Feb 4, 2003

Tamba posted:

Try it without the comma

e: just tried it myself, and the thousands-separator shouldn't make a difference, but I'm in a region where . and , are switched...

gah gently caress you're right, I just figured it out myself

also in my first post-- I M DUM

thanks for the help!

greazeball fucked around with this message at 12:27 on Oct 24, 2014

# ¿ Oct 24, 2014 12:22

greazeball: Feb 4, 2003

What do people do as far as hiding Christmas presents from their partners? I don't really want her to find out I've been shopping at expensivejewelery.com and I don't want to just be doing the reconciliation and see a charge for deliciouswhisky.com either. Just use fake names for everything and then change them in January? Don't enter things in til after Christmas? Is there a way to be discreet with the amounts? I don't think either of us really give a poo poo about that but just to really keep it out of sight, out of mind?

# ¿ Nov 17, 2014 01:27

greazeball: Feb 4, 2003

Defenestration posted:

I've been wanting one for myself too. You think it will go on sale for the holidays?

I won't be in my hometown very long so I won't have a lot of time to teach her.

Set up some kind of screen share app while you're there. It takes using it for a couple of months to really get the hang of it. Not that it's complicated, just that at the start of the month there's a new budget to make, and there's also reconciling and other things that you only do every so often.

# ¿ Dec 9, 2014 23:35

greazeball: Feb 4, 2003

lmao zebong posted:

Right now I just have a general Food category that takeout, groceries, Starbucks etc all gets put into. I'm still pretty new to YNAB so I don't really want to pull out Restaurants/Takeout from this general Food category until I have a better feel of what the groceries/takeout ratio is. Is there a way for me to see in the Reports page how much of a category got spent on each if I put "Groceries" or "Takeout" in the memo field or something like that? Or should I just go ahead and break out Restaurants and adjust the budget accordingly?

You should be able to see amounts for each payee in a category in a report. So you just look at your food category and it'll show you a pie chart with amounts for Albertson's, McDonald's, Giovani's Pizza, etc.

# ¿ Jan 7, 2015 10:12

greazeball: Feb 4, 2003

LogisticEarth posted:

I've seen people asking this for like 20 years now. Yes, people still carry cash, and they will for the foreseeable future. There are many cash-only businesses, I prefer to tip in cash, and it just make stuff easier to be able to drop someone hard bills instead of having a waitress split up a dozen credit cards if you're with a group of people. I kind of feel like it's responsible to keep at least like $20-100 on you as a matter of habit just so you're not stuck.

Also in some countries you can actually buy real things with only one or two coins and paper money is also actually worth something (gently caress getting rid of the penny, get rid of the one dollar bill FFS)

# ¿ Jan 8, 2015 00:29

greazeball: Feb 4, 2003

Yeah, budgeting to 0 gives every dollar a job. We've got our emergency fund and then also a buffer category. What happens is that when I go over in my beer money category, I see that I have to move money from a different category--either my work lunches or clothes or whatever. If we overspend on groceries, then we have to move money from transportation or household goods or something. Having the money in the buffer keeps us from just complacently frittering money away when we go over. We have to make changes for that month and then decide (or track) whether it was a one-off or if we need to re-evaluate the monthly budget. The buffer is there because my wife's going to head back to grad school soon and so we're trying to give ourselves a little extra cushion on top of the EF.

# ¿ Jan 9, 2015 18:12

greazeball: Feb 4, 2003

It makes it easier to reconcile if you split up the accounts. I only do the cash every few months but I got all my cards on lock.

# ¿ Feb 5, 2015 09:19

greazeball: Feb 4, 2003

TraderStav posted:

Cannot imagine what other awesome features are left. Perhaps changing budget values from the app, but that's it. Definitely not doing subscription here.

Some of us need multiple currencies, it's a big pain in the arse the way it is now

# ¿ Feb 14, 2015 19:24

greazeball: Feb 4, 2003

My wife is going back to school and so we're looking at the next 12 months with just one income (which is variable) and trying to make a careful plan. We're using our YNAB budget categories to plan our outgoings in a spreadsheet, placing those next to probable incomes and account balances so we can see when the money will potentially run out.

Here's the trick, though: we've been using YNAB for about 18 months now and several of our categories have 0 budgeted each month because they're in surplus (new phones category is good, bike repair category is good, dental/medical budgets are filled up to our deductible, etc.). So if we take our monthly budget amounts and only include those in the spreadsheet, when we do spend from our unbudgeted categories it'll mess up our predictions. What's the best way to handle this?

Option A: we add up all the full categories that we aren't budgeting towards and subtract them from our current account balance in our spreadsheet and make a new "account" there. Then we'll have to remember to assign outgoings to the different accounts when we reconcile the spreadsheet with YNAB.

Option B: I go into the budget and remove all extra funds from every category and then build a budget including everything again. This would mean that certain categories like Christmas are way underfunded whereas now we've got a grand already saved in that category. I think our budget would look terrible again, like it was when we were just starting and every few months we had a quarterly/semi-annual payment due and our numbers were all off. But it would be easy to reconcile outgoings with our spreadsheet.

Option C, D, E: ???

What would you guys do?

# ¿ Oct 11, 2015 20:35

greazeball: Feb 4, 2003

Any support for multiple currencies or "private" YNAB categories (so my wife and I can keep transactions secret from each other)?

# ¿ Oct 29, 2015 00:33

greazeball: Feb 4, 2003

TheCenturion posted:

Does oldYNAB, or newYNAB, have any sort of transaction log for budgeting?
Like:
2017-01-01 9:00 AM - 1000 bux inflow
2017-01-01 9:30 AM - 500 unassigned bux allocated to Groceries
2017-01-01 9:30 AM - 200 unassigned bux allocated to Booze
2017-01-01 9:30 AM - 100 unassigned bux allocated to Cable and Internet
2017-01-01 9:30 AM - 200 unassigned bux allocated to Savings
2017-01-02 9:00 AM - 50 bux unallocated from Groceries
2017-01-02 9:00 AM - 50 unassigned bux allocated to Restaurants

YNAB shows you your spending, but I can think of times when it might be interesting to see how you're shuffling around your budget, you know?

I budget the same values each month and I make a note in the budget when I move stuff around in old ynab. It doesn't show up in reports but I can see pretty easily when values change and then track down what I did.

# ¿ Jan 20, 2017 06:23

greazeball: Feb 4, 2003

Dwight Eisenhower posted:

Doing a quick interest check, do people feel there's room for Yet Another Player in this space? I'm a YNAB4 holdout and have the shared general anxiety that some day it will stop working (lol, Flash). My perception of nYNAB is that it's targeted squarely at people who are having difficulty going paycheck to paycheck, and the auto-import is not valuable to me because there's no way I'd hand nYNAB/Mint my bank's credentials, ever. YNAB does everything I NEED, but not everything I WANT that people have managed to mix into nYNAB, e.g. lifespan of cash on hand. Also I don't use mobile YNAB4 because I don't Dropbox, but having a phone sync story seems like it could be valuable.

So I've been contemplating starting to build something in the space. Is it crowded enough that this seems stupid? Do you also wish there was something different in the space and would be interested in seeing a third player? Would you pony up cash for something good, and constructive criticism for something that isn't yet good enough?

If there's enough interest I'll start up a separate thread so we don't hijack this one.

As another YNAB4 holdout, I'm definitely interested in something new along those lines: proactive transaction entering, no link to bank accounts, phone app and sync between devices. It would also be nice to have some planning tools and not just reports (but it also needs reports). I have no way of answering your question about if there is space in the market for it, but I've been looking for the next thing after YNAB4 dies and there's nothing that really ticks all the boxes for me.

# ¿ May 9, 2017 14:41

greazeball: Feb 4, 2003

Xik posted:

Yeah, we noticed. He actually approached things in a pretty smart way to minimise dev time. Web app with local storage. Solved the sync and mobile device problems without sinking huge amounts of dev time. There is no real reason we couldn't just continue that project...

The cross device syncing would always be a pain point if you want to do it right and not just be lazy and throw a flat file or local db in Dropbox or something.

I really wouldn't put any faith in me. Its my day job, so when I do it in my free time I am an absolute prick about it andn dont take feature requests from users seriously unless I want it.

Eg, wife and I manually enter in all transactions, no auto import, no csv or other flat file import or any other garbage like that. We were sold on the original pitch that entering them in manually was a way to mentally check them off and verify them. It's also part of our "process" to verify others spend if we are unsure of something. So right there it's a feature lots of people care about that would never make it in.

Another one: notes everywhere. EVERYWHERE. I can already picture the absolute mess of a UI where every action has a note field. Or maybe something more elegant like an audit/history log, where we can attach notes to each action.

It's dumb stuff like that which we would probably waste time on which no one would use except us but we wouldn't care.

We took nYNAB for a test run when we went on holiday earlier this year and budgeted the vacation "subbudget". It's was a good way to give it a run without abandoning our primary budget. It was serviceable, there was a few things still missing that were annoying, but that's the thing. It's a slightly worse product for significantly more $$.

This sounds like heaven

# ¿ Nov 15, 2017 20:47

greazeball: Feb 4, 2003

Just FYI, we had some sort of corruption happen to our ynab4 budget about a year ago where it didn't sync anymore and we had lost like 30 days worth of entries. They gave us really good email support, looking at our files and going back and forth for 7-8 days so they will still help you out if you or anybody else has serious issues.

# ¿ Mar 3, 2018 19:56

greazeball: Feb 4, 2003

Anybody try out budgetwise yet? It's finally in early access.

# ¿ Jul 27, 2018 13:02

greazeball: Feb 4, 2003

Ur Getting Fatter posted:

Any expats using YNAB?

Wondering how you deal with having transactions in different countries. Right now I have two different budgets, but it's making it hard to get that big-picture look at my spending.

Yeah it's a pain (I'm using YNAB 4). Do you have investments and regular transactions in USD plus whatever local currency? You'll probably have to cobble together some kind of spreadsheet to give you an overview but that sounds like a loving drag. I'm pretty settled in now so 99% of everything I do is in Swiss francs except for holidays and we just use converted values for the CC transactions and enter the ATM withdrawals as "Holiday cash" since it'll all get spent while we're out of the country anyway. On longer trips I'll cobble together a Google sheets thing on my phone to keep track of our spending.

# ¿ Nov 21, 2018 00:45

greazeball: Feb 4, 2003

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.

Also meh that Quicken became an even worse shitshow. At this point, I really want something to just track finances, with multiple levels of categories (not just master-subcategory) and some decent reporting, which also doesn't look like a cheap-rear end web app. --edit: Oh, and it needs the Income and Expense report sheet thingy. Barely anything else other than YNAB and Quicken seem to have that.

--edit: Hmm, Pocketsmith is finally working on roll-over budgets. Hope they finish and release that soon. That certainly sounds interesting, because they also have forecasting based on your scheduled bills and poo poo like that.

--edit: Dear god, they do more than two levels, and if the child category doesn't have anything assigned, it'll subtract from the parent. This is something I've wanted, that'd allow to pool budgeted money but split it into categories for reporting purposes! God, hurry up with the roll-over stuff.

I don't understand what you mean by roll-over budgets... does that mean you can't use the budget values from last month or that you can't let an account for work expenses carry a negative balance from month to month?

# ¿ Feb 15, 2019 14:02

greazeball: Feb 4, 2003

Sockser posted:

For a long time I was having a hard time with YNAB because �aaaaaaaa I cant keep building this buffer so I have next month money� and quitting every few months

And then I just shifted my savings over to work as that month buffer (which totally sucked, seeing my savings �disappear�) and everything has been good and fine for the past five years

same, it felt like we were taking a big risk because the savings account went down by a month's salary but it really did change everything and make the whole thing just work.

# ¿ May 8, 2019 22:20

greazeball: Feb 4, 2003

My YNAB Classic app is banjaxed on my phone, anybody got any ideas? I keep getting the notification Local budget inconsistent with cloud Full import required, budget is read-only for now. This started happening about 10 days ago.

Phone

Samsung Galaxy S8
Android Version 9 with latest updates
YNAB Classic App

Desktop

Windows 10
YNAB4
Dropbox Basic

What I've done

Re-import the budget (done this 10-20 times now)
Restarted the phone
Installed the Android system update
Un- and re-installed the app, re-imported the budget
Installed Dropbox on the phone, made it one of the connected devices in my Dropbox basic account
Re-named the budget in Budget properties in the Desktop client
Confirmed cloud sync was on for the budget

My wife also uses YNAB 4 on her phone and laptop, she's not been having any trouble during this time. She loaded the renamed version of the budget and I've just gotten a Dropbox notification on my desktop that she's made changes in the budget.

I've followed the steps on this page but maybe I've overlooked something. I've also posted on the YNAB forums. I'd really appreciate any ideas on how I can get this working again!

# ¿ Jun 8, 2019 14:04

greazeball: Feb 4, 2003

Anyone using any other apps? I've been looking at budgetwise and financier for a little while and they seem kind of stuck. I've heard of EveryDollar, Personal Capital and Spendee, anyone use them? I also feel like at one point I had found a system that took your budget and projected it into the future where you could then see the effect of taking an $8000 holiday next year on your retirement goals but I can't find it or remember anything about that one.

# ¿ Jun 8, 2019 20:04

greazeball: Feb 4, 2003

greazeball posted:

My YNAB Classic app is banjaxed on my phone, anybody got any ideas? I keep getting the notification Local budget inconsistent with cloud Full import required, budget is read-only for now. This started happening about 10 days ago.

Phone
Samsung Galaxy S8

Android Version 9 with latest updates

YNAB Classic App

Desktop
Windows 10

YNAB4

Dropbox Basic

What I've done
Re-import the budget (done this 10-20 times now)

Restarted the phone

Installed the Android system update

Un- and re-installed the app, re-imported the budget

Installed Dropbox on the phone, made it one of the connected devices in my Dropbox basic account

Re-named the budget in Budget properties in the Desktop client

Confirmed cloud sync was on for the budget

My wife also uses YNAB 4 on her phone and laptop, she's not been having any trouble during this time. She loaded the renamed version of the budget and I've just gotten a Dropbox notification on my desktop that she's made changes in the budget.

I've followed the steps on this page but maybe I've overlooked something. I've also posted on the YNAB forums. I'd really appreciate any ideas on how I can get this working again!

Something about the sequence of the steps seemed to be the key. I got feedback on the forum and through the help email and it seems to have fixed things (for now): https://support.youneedabudget.com/t/180ga9

# ¿ Jun 10, 2019 21:19

greazeball: Feb 4, 2003

I'm going on holiday next week and I usually track spending in a spreadsheet when it's in a different currency. Which of financier or budgetwise is worth checking out for a 2 week trial? Do they work offline or do they need to be online to work? I'll be the only one entering anything so sync won't really be an issue.

# ¿ Jun 27, 2019 15:06

greazeball: Feb 4, 2003

sparkmaster posted:

I dread the day YNAB4 doesn't work on PCs. YNAB was the best I ever spent, and I'll be very sad when it stops working.

# ¿ Sep 12, 2019 11:18

greazeball: Feb 4, 2003

Everybody has a wild coke binge sometimes man, $225 would probably get bwm thread approval for its comparative frugality.

# ¿ Sep 12, 2019 20:11

greazeball: Feb 4, 2003

Is there a way to just quickly copy all the budget values from last month into the next one? There was that little lightning bolt in ynab4 that had the option to do that for your whole budget and it seems like I'm supposed to check each category individually every month now? I did a fresh start and I want to be more granular but not if I have to fuss with it all the time

edit: durr... you can select more than one category and then select budget value from last month

I'm gonna have lines for every kind of food I buy, I want to know how much I spend on cherry tomatoes as opposed to the regular kind

greazeball fucked around with this message at 21:40 on Oct 6, 2019

# ¿ Oct 6, 2019 21:37

greazeball: Feb 4, 2003

No they're morally opposed to rolling over a balance month to month in nYNAB.

What I'm doing in my fresh start is making a category called "expenses float" which will be the cash we use to cover my wife's expenses until she gets paid back, then I'll budget $0 to it each month and just use that to cover the balance and route the expense payments there. It's more accurate I guess but it does seem like a pain when I've been on rule 4 for years and it would be weird if like all of our catastrophic categories, including our emergency buffer, needed to be emptied out while she's got $348 in expenses outstanding but I guess we'll now be covered in that scenario.

Also this should make it relatively easy to keep track of her finance dept, if the budgeted amount isn't square every few months we'll know something's up.

# ¿ Oct 7, 2019 00:14

greazeball: Feb 4, 2003

So as someone who's moving from YNAB4 to nYNAB, I've been pretty happy so far.

PROS: Apparently, they got reports in 2016 so the thing I thought was missing was actually there. Yeah, they're not as granular (I think in old YNAB you could select individual payees, for example), but the export function is right there if you want to really get into it. The speed is really good, undo is nice to have, and the interface change doesn't bother me too much except that you now only see one month at a time in the budget instead of the 4 month view. It's nice that I can uninstall Dropbox on a few more devices now too.

CONS: I'm still getting used to the app, I always used to choose the category first before adding a new transaction and now when you tap a category you set the monthly allotted funds. I wish there was a "new transaction" widget I could put on my phone's desktop. Making split transactions is much easier in the new app. I don't like that you can only make one note per category instead of the monthly notes in the column (I used to move funds around a lot and I liked to keep track of it with notes). I'm trying to do the credit cards the way they want but I don't really like it--I pay my poo poo off in full and the credit card payment category always kind of throws me off. We'll see what reconciliation is like in a few weeks.

Overall I'm pretty happy with it and I know I got a ton of value for the $50 or whatever it was I spent back in 2013 so I'm OK with paying for it. I can't imagine going back to life without it and I don't ever want to be in a place where I've got a broken budget and can't fix it on my own schedule so what choice do I really have? I think it's pretty good though.

# ¿ Oct 12, 2019 23:18

greazeball: Feb 4, 2003

We had a category with the money budgeted to it and then when my wife quit her job to go back to school, we moved money out of the category so the budget would balance. Cash was mostly in the savings account until the current account balance got too low.

We've built it back up now and it's just sitting there in a hidden category.

# ¿ Nov 21, 2019 18:27

greazeball: Feb 4, 2003

Henrik Zetterberg posted:

The yearly fee is well worth never having to worry about when Dropbox will change their sync API and break everything in 4. Also never having the "your desktop has triggered a re-sync and you will lose all your poo poo you entered for the past 3 weeks."

Yeah I definitely got my money's worth out of YNAB4 and the upgrade has been good, especially once I set my autopaid credit cards to a normal account. gently caress dropbox, good riddance, thank you YNAB for making a product that works well, here take my money.

# ¿ Dec 6, 2019 01:17

greazeball: Feb 4, 2003

Admiral Joeslop posted:

I get paid commission so my weekly paycheck is different every time. Right now I'm just putting in an amount that's slightly lower than average to take extra slow weeks into account. Is there a better way to this? Also, is there no way to edit budgets on the classic mobile app?

Do what storm drain said and put in exact amounts and budget those. Ideally, you have a savings account that you can use to budget this month and then you just add your paychecks as income for next month.

The mobile app for classic ynab is pretty limited, no budget editing possible.

# ¿ Dec 29, 2019 17:25

greazeball: Feb 4, 2003

The savings category is for things like an emergency fund. I've got 3 months expenses in the on-budget savings account in a hidden category. We have other savings categories for our tax deductible pension contributions that we add to each month and then move to the off-budget pension accounts in December.

# ¿ Jan 1, 2020 00:31

greazeball: Feb 4, 2003

Agreed that mint is more for knowing what you did (I've never used it, that's just what I've heard) while ynab is for making plans with what you've got. "Give every dollar a job" is rule 1 in their little budgeting philosophy and what it comes down to is that I can be on a tight budget but still confidently know that I can blow a few bucks on something at the end of the month because the money is still in the pretend envelope for it. With budgets before, I just had a general sense of anxiety and dread. I felt like I should be depriving myself all the time to stay under budget, but had no way of knowing where I was. Now I know how much I can spend today, instead of waiting for the bills to come to see if I didn't screw up last month.

# ¿ Jan 10, 2020 03:40

greazeball: Feb 4, 2003

And they'll still be 2-3 days behind because banks don't give a poo poo about human time scales

# ¿ Jan 17, 2020 17:09

greazeball: Feb 4, 2003

StormDrain posted:

Agreed! I used to spent maybe 30 minutes a week on mine and I was shocked how little effort it took to change my behavior enough to save thousands of dollars.

Oh and the feeling of spending a large sum knowing you've got the cash for it, and it was specifically for that is awesome.

One of the first times it really struck me how much ynab had changed me I was paying for my annual national rail pass. It was $3500, which was a lot for me then, and my credit card got declined and I was just like NUH-UH, RUN IT AGAIN and it went through. I would never have been able to do that before, I just would have gone home with my tail tucked between my legs.

# ¿ Jan 17, 2020 23:46

greazeball: Feb 4, 2003

HatJudge posted:

I don't have the option to use ynab in any other way than manually logging, but that poo poo has changed so much about both my financial situation and my mindset about my money.

Some background:
I'm a recovering addict and, compared to the median income in my scandinavian socialist hellhole of a country, I'm poor. I'm disabled due to both mental and physical problems and my main income is government support. This year I was approved a government subsidised loan to buy my own apartment. As a result, my costs of living more than doubled to almost 60% of my monthly income. And unless I can shake my chronic diseases and get back to work it's gonna stay that way for the rest of my life. So yeah, money's tight. But I'm lucky, because I don't drink or do drugs, don't own a car and only the shittiest fast food places deliver to the part of town where I could afford a place. Also free healthcare means I'm not hosed if poo poo should take a turn for the worse.

I used to cordon off my monthly expenses (rent, electricity, medicine etc) on a separate account and follow my gut for the rest. I was living within my means, but with no buffer or savings. If there was money in the bank I could afford it.

Then I got ynab on a Steam sale some years ago. Getting down and dirty with every crown (£$€¥) gives me the opportunity to choose what I spend before I'm at the store. And it makes it easier to make informed choices. Especially about all the small, dumb things and the instant gratifications.
If I want a soda on the train, I'll take a detour to a grocery store on my way to the station instead of paying twice as much at the convenience store before boarding. I cook at home instead of grabbing something fast on my way. I drink my coffee at home or at NA meetings. I go to the library. I don't buy records just because they're limited edition or video games I might want to play at some point in the future just because they're on sale. I shop around. Wait a couple of months for the price to drop. I don't feel like I'm depriving myself of any luxuries. I'm just more conscious about my wants and needs, and I'm better at prioritizing.

As a result I can splurge on the good toilet paper, or even a fancy cut of steak now and again, and know that I can afford it.
I know that if my fridge breaks down or my electrical bill should skyrocket I got the buffer to fix it no sweat.
I've paid off most of my old debt.
And I'm finally able to set aside money for the future. Not much, but it's growing every month. So come August I can install a new shower in my bathroom. A good quality one, and not the flimsy bare minimum. And by March next year I'll finally be able to buy that set of speakers I've been eyeing for years.

TL;DR Logging manually is a good thing for me because I used to be a financial dum dum but now I'm not as much of an idiot. And I'll get some sweet new speakers in a year or so.

That's a great story man and I like what you said about the shower. Someone said to me recently, "I'm not rich enough to afford cheap stuff" and that's the kind of poo poo YNAB really helped me with. Instead of having to go for the absolute cheapest solution to my problem every time, I was able to get a quality fix for more things, that lasted longer and let me save more money instead of having to pay for quick fixes again and again.

# ¿ Jan 19, 2020 17:19

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# ¿ May 22, 2024 01:33

greazeball: Feb 4, 2003

I have a payee called cash hole and it comes out of the buffer. I'm usually off by $300-400 but as much as $600 a year. I feel like an idiot but welp, poo poo happens.

# ¿ Jan 25, 2020 00:20

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

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