YNABJ - Everyone needs one! - The Something Awful Forums

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

Cuddlebottom: Feb 17, 2004; Butt dance.

Hed posted:

For you married / cohabitant goons how do you handle joint and separate expenses? Basically the wife and I use spreadsheets but I have personal accounting and joint stuff for bills. I skimmed through their guides but didn't see anything on this. How would I set it up?

I set up two budget files. There's mine, which has a master category named Shared (split into Rent, Utilities and Other). I log my monthly transfer into the joint checking account as an expenditure split across those 3 categories. Then there's the shared budget file, which treats our transfers as income, and divides everything up between different bills, groceries, eating out, etc. If one of us pays for a shared expense with personal money it can get a little messy, but that's generally not a problem.

# ¿ Jan 13, 2014 00:30

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 01:51

Cuddlebottom: Feb 17, 2004; Butt dance.

I've got a similar approach to londonmoose. I track cash in an on-budget account. I only track paper bills, essentially - everything is rounded up to whole dollar amounts ($1.01 -> $2.00), but anything I spent with loose change is ignored. That makes it really easy to spend 30 seconds counting the bills in my wallet when things are out of sync.

I find it helpful because cash tends to disappear from my wallet and this keeps me honest. I doesn't take to long to log the $1 I spent on a snack or whatever. The only problem I had was almost overdrawing an account, since I was looking at my total YNAB balance, instead of my checking balance.

# ¿ Feb 13, 2014 15:19

Cuddlebottom: Feb 17, 2004; Butt dance.

For every day expenses, you can go as specific as it helps you plan. For example, if you ate out for lunch at work, it would make sense to budget that separately as a predictable expense. Does incidentals also cover fun money, outside of hobbies? I've got a "spending money" category that covers any small things I want like a book or whatever.

A few more you might be missing, if they're applicable, besides what LogisticEarth said: car insurance, saving for moving/deposit, laundromat money, haircuts.

# ¿ Feb 17, 2014 18:44

Cuddlebottom: Feb 17, 2004; Butt dance.

Henrik Zetterberg posted:

If I remove the category as it suggests, I don't get the -$200 in my Outflow for my MM Savings category and it doesn't look like I transferred the money. How should I deal with this?

There are two ways to deal with this:

If your savings account is money you're not going to touch any time soon, like retirement savings, move that account off-budget. That way, a transfer to that account is "spent" money and the transfer can be categorized.
If that account is money you might spend, like an emergency account, just budget money towards it and let the budgeted balance accrue. Don't worry about it not showing up as an expense, because you've already accounted for it by budgeting it. As long as you don't go over the rest of your budget, of course

# ¿ Mar 4, 2014 00:38

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