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In July 2011 I was 60k in debt and constantly stressed out about my finances and counting on promotions and raises and bonuses to bail me out. None of those windfalls ever came and I started using the software last year. Though I'd mostly fixed my finances by that point, YNAB has allowed my partner and I to combine our finances in a stress-free and incredibly productive way. With no small thanks to the program I now, 30 months later, have a net worth of about 50k rather than -60k with no increase in income and feel financially secure in a way that I never could have imagined a few years ago. Thanks YNAB!
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Jan 2, 2014 21:58
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| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 10:38 |
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It works best if you imagine it all as envelopes. It doesn't matter if you stuff your power bill envelope with credit card dollars or cash dollars or debit dollars, you only have as many dollars as you have. At the end of the month the only difference if you stuff with a CC is to repay the CC company for letting you use their money to pay for poo poo. Just like if you used cash and liked having $100 on hand but only have $60.
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Jan 3, 2014 00:45
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No, you just track the expenses in whatever account, categorize them, and when your bill is due transfer the balance to your credit card. You do not have a category for what you'll be transferring to your credit card, the categories are what you spend your credit card balances on. Edit: say I go to the grocery store and spend $100 from my credit card. I enter that as 100 in my groceries category on my CC. When the time comes, I transfer $100 from my bank account to my CC so that the balances reconcile correctly. That transfer is not categorized because it's not spending, the spending was from the CC when I bought the groceries. The money was gone from the budget at that point, the rest is just reconciliation. tuyop fucked around with this message at 01:37 on Jan 3, 2014 |
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Jan 3, 2014 01:35
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newtestleper posted:Does YNAB let you import QIF files or do you have to enter everything manually? Yes, QFX is ideal, they say. But it's not encouraged because there's value in consciously recording your spending as you do it. Importing leads to tracking, which is not what the program is designed for.
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Jan 3, 2014 03:20
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Spend away, guys! Your budget will never know, I'm buying an iPad!
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Jan 11, 2014 22:26
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LogisticEarth posted:Why wait until the end of the day? I usually just do it immediately after a purchase/expense, or if that's not convenient, when I get back to my car or office or whatever. It maybe takes 20 seconds. Because he didn't have a smartphone or the app before.
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Jan 12, 2014 23:47
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Consolidate the income and bills and divide the discretionary into his and her allowances.
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Jan 13, 2014 00:10
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Shadowhand00 posted:Yeah, I believe that's the case. When you set up an account with pre-ynab debt, that becomes a category I believe... You can just create or rename pre-YNAB debt as a category too and if you move the card off budget (you should do this with a CC with a balance), transfers to it count as expenses that you can categorize just like pre-YNAB debt.
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Jan 23, 2014 22:49
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Old Fart posted:Do you bother logging transactions made through paycheck deductions, or just do a balance adjustment every month or quarter? Well you could always take your income and add your automatic transfers from your paycheque and then split it as a transfer to your investments, and then adjust manually for returns every month or so.
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Jan 24, 2014 18:56
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SimpleCoax posted:I thought about this but if you base budgeting off the balance, then if you underspend like I always try to do, then your budget numbers would slowly fall and that is weird to me to wind up budgeting negative amounts for groceries, etc. I do have a car insurance category I let accumulate in the balance though, but anything under half yearly I feel like I want the rollovers to fall into money to budget next month to just push off into savings or emergency funds. I don't think I have the best grasp on YNAB yet. I used to just have a categorized budget I stuck to each month and as my checking account grew, I would periodically prune the checking extra to savings. In YNAB it feels like the numbers can start to runaway in each category and I just haven't cracked the code to how I want to use it yet, but I do really like it. I'm coming from Ace Budget where I've been typing my transactions immediately into my phone for years so YNAB feels fairly natural except for a few things like this. I think the main difference is previously my monthly budgets weren't linked to each other in any way. If you're consistently spending less than you budget in a category that does not have a large irregular expense, then you're not budgeting accurately. It makes no sense for me to plan to spend (read: budget) $600 on groceries when I know I only spend 300-350 every month. If it's just fifty bucks or something, the same is true, just plan to spend less on that line because you have some money left over for that and save the balance.
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Jan 29, 2014 23:02
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Check to see if your CC provider has automatic payments for your full statement balance. Set that up to draw from your main account and never think about it again.
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Feb 3, 2014 18:35
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Omne posted:I get that, and that's exactly how I use it for most spending. When I get gas, that goes on my CC, which has a negative balance until I transfer from checking to CC. It's just with my savings account, it gets weird because there's an added step. You could just get rid of the savings account. What's the point of transferring Spending money to a savings account before spending it?
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Feb 3, 2014 18:51
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Warmachine posted:How well does YNAB reconcile? I'm trying to track down a one dollar disparity between my YNAB register and my Bank register, but doing it by hand isn't working so hot. In fact it doesn't look like there is any disparities anywhere. It's made harder by the fact that my bank dates transactions at different times from when I enter them (at point of sale). So I'll have a transaction entered a day or more before it is dated on my bank account. Just click the reconcile button and have YNAB enter an item for it. It subtracts/adds the reconciliation amount from/to your income so you can just get on with your life. You can always take a buck or two from one of your categories to make up the difference if you like.
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Feb 3, 2014 20:57
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Suspicious Lump posted:Right! That makes sense. How does YNAB actually handle the discrepancy? I remember doing reconciliation once and it threw my budget out of wack and it made things confusing. Well you either find the missing transaction and add it, or it automatically enters an adjustment transaction that adds/subtracts from your income. You can then just reduce/add the money budgeted to one of your categories to make up the difference.
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Feb 14, 2014 01:32
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Henrik Zetterberg posted:When do you guys use each of these options? Right now, I have the bottom one selected for anything that runs over-budget. Only use the over arrow for reimbursables, and be careful that those can be borne by your checking buffer or efund balance. That is the path to consumer debt. A better option is to just offset the overage using the balance from a large rainy day fund like tires or vacation savings and put a note in that borrowed-from category to refund the redistribution. I also use it for over budget balances sometimes just before a payday because I don't feel like redistributing a category on the 30th and then back on the 1st. This is less of a problem after you go rule 4.
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Mar 21, 2014 16:55
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If you can't afford to try a piece of software for five weeks for free then you need something else other than a budget.
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Apr 6, 2014 20:47
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GAYS FOR DAYS posted:Maybe this is something I should just keep on a note off of YNAB, but I'm managing our work softball team this year, and fronted the money for the whole team for registration (they would only accept one check per team). It was $450, $30 a person. Is there some kind of easy way to put this into YNAB, or should I just keep it written on a piece of paper somewhere and make a mental note that my actual checking account balance is going to be $420 (subtracting the $30 for my registration) than what YNAB is saying it is until I collect all the money? I would just make a specific category for it or shoehorn it into another category exactly as the transaction happened. Just carry the balance forward (make the arrow go right) until you get paid back.
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Apr 17, 2014 14:34
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Bloody Queef posted:Look for transposition errors the easy way! What the gently caress? I believe you because you sound very credible, but can you explain why this is true? I don't have an example handy to try it out for myself. It's like seeing the rule of 72 for the first time. 
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May 4, 2014 21:04
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Man, I've got a balance in one of my dozens of hidden categories. Is there any way to find which category it is without unhiding them all?
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May 12, 2014 19:39
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Old Fart posted:How would y'all handle a one-off store credit card that is going to be paid off immediately and then likely never used again? I think we'd put that in our cash account. It holds all sorts of weird stuff.
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May 13, 2014 05:05
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GAYS FOR DAYS posted:Once you get to rule four and start living on last months income, budgeting becomes so much easier. Our rule 4ing sucks, I'm going to start splitting pays into income for this month and income for next month. No more huge buffer category tricking us into overspending! *buys $40 worth of fruit bushes, not properly budgeted*
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Jun 1, 2014 23:51
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Tamba posted:No, because you can add transactions that you know about, but that haven't cleared yet. That reduces the category balance, and the "Working Balance" YNAB displays, while the physical account balance hasn't updated yet. As soon as a transaction gets added to an account, it subtracts from account balance and category balance. Clearing is just for reconciliation. Unless you're using a setting that I'm not. The total of my category balances have always equaled my account balances, so Dantu posted:So, the balances of all your categories should equal the balance of your physical accounts at any given time, correct? Correct, as far as I know.
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Jun 2, 2014 16:43
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Started splitting income between this and next month, feels good man. It's way better than feeling flush with a big buffer category. I think this is a better rule 4 method, I'll keep you guys posted.
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Jun 13, 2014 16:42
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Old Fart posted:Tuyop, could you elaborate? I don't understand a "big buffer category". Are you not using the "next month's budget" option when entering income? No, we would budget a "buffer" line in month one, empty it in month 2 and distribute it among categories, and then refill the buffer on paydays in month 2. The problem is that we have a buffer every month of 2-3k that can be borrowed from if we're weak.
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Jun 13, 2014 20:02
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Old Fart posted:That sounds overly complex and less easy to track. And as you said, the money "sitting there" is too tempting. That's the plan, we had a family thing that kind of emptied the coffers but it'll just be a lean month and July will be totally funded. Living within your means is basically the best thing ever.
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Jun 13, 2014 20:50
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/\/\ yeah I think this'll be much better. Just imagine there was no option to count income for the next month. Instead you could fill a category every month and unfund it the next month to distribute the money to all your other categories. Then you get paid and refill the category. That's how we used our buffer.
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Jun 13, 2014 21:50
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Crossposting from general BFC thread: You guys knew it was coming:  YNAB for $15 on Steam.And yeah, you can just download the standalone version from the YNAB website and plug in your product key. There is no need to run the program through Steam.
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Jun 26, 2014 18:07
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You can also buy it in a browser and get the key later from the proper computer if you just don't want to install steam on the computer you're using right now.
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Jun 26, 2014 21:27
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Yeah it was only eight hours. 
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Jun 27, 2014 03:11
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Pinball posted:I bought YNAB in the Steam flash sale, but I'm having a little bit of trouble setting it up. Most of the money I'm living on is a lump sum from a fund for my graduate school my parents cashed out, but I also have a part time job that brings in about 800 a month, so my income isn't really consistent. How can I set up YNAB to take those factors into consideration? Also, is there a way to connect it electronically to my debit card and credit card so I don't have to download transaction reports, or are those the only way to not have to manually enter in every transaction? I recommend the webinars. They're excellent, particularly the ones for existing debt and irregular income, since those are by far the strangest parts of YNAB. But Veskit is right, what you'd want to do is set up a buffer category so you can give all your dollars a job each month without spending all of your cash.
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Jun 27, 2014 04:18
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100 HOGS AGREE posted:Why log in? just track the things as you do them in the mobile app it takes like 20 seconds. This except use mint if you don't want to log in and just want to double check your transactions. If mint is unavailable for you 
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Jul 4, 2014 01:16
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inferis posted:I live with my partner and our bills all come out of my account and my partner pays the rent out of her account. I pay my rent to her minus half the bills. How would I indicate this in YNAB? At the moment I just reduce the rent budget and put a note indicating which bills I've taken out already. Is there an easier way to do this? Should I do an off budget partner account or somehow use a budget entry with a negative number? Merge accounts.
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Jul 5, 2014 03:41
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And I'm finally a month ahead! Woo, rule 4. The method that has you partition your income out between this month and next month seems to be the way to go versus filling a "buffer". The next step is automatically sending money off to investment accounts.
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Jul 31, 2014 14:02
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Zteuer posted:Congratulations, this is huge! Yeah, it's been kind of like that for a few years now. I don't really want anything new with the vast majority of my income, and now debt's gone so there isn't a graph to make crawl toward zero. Just a mundane detail of life that has to be managed, like really complicated flossing.
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Jul 31, 2014 16:47
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Rexim posted:I put a buffer in July and a negative buffer in August to budget for August's bills, which is how I think I'm supposed to use this software. And now that it's August, the negative balance is still there...is that how it's supposed to work? I just started using this software like four days ago. That's the method I found ineffective. Another way is to just split the income from July as partially available in July and partially available in August.
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Aug 2, 2014 14:53
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Suspicious Lump posted:I'm starting to dislike YNABs monthly centric approach to budgeting. I get paid every 2 weeks, I've tried forecasting my budget but that seems like a bad idea but I keep switching back. Currently I have reoccurring income but they are not exactly evenly distributed throughout the month. When the money comes in I allocate it where needed but I'd prefer to simply setup a budget and not touch it for a while. Yeah, treat YNAB categories like a series of envelopes full of cash you can carry with you. I find that keeps me from getting frustrated with it. If you don't need to min/max your finances like that and keep yourself on an envelope system forever, then YNAB may not be the best thing for you. For forecasting just start a google spreadsheet and use the values you get from it to inform your YNAB categories.
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Aug 5, 2014 03:35
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Hawkgirl posted:I get paid the same way and for me it feels like I'm not really a month ahead. I can't get paid on the 28th of this month and select "Income for October," it's income for August or September or bust. Am I really a month ahead if I'm more like two days ahead? I guess I don't really need months to start on the 28th as much as I want YNAB to let me allocate money more than one month ahead. Sounds like the "buffer method" is the way to go then. Zteuer posted:My solution for this is to create an off-budget account called Delayed income and deposit the payment there. This payment will not be entered into the budget. Next I make a transfer from this off-budget account to the actual account (on-budget) the payment was physically deposited into at a later date, for example sept. 1st. You will then get a message that you have a transaction that needs a budget and you can set it to income for october. Try it and see if it fits your needs. This is cool because of the automatic transaction setup.
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Aug 6, 2014 10:49
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I love the App Store. 
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Aug 25, 2014 18:37
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Bread Set Jettison posted:My Ynab app stopped syncing? Same thing with my fiances... Whats the deal? Yeah it's a bit hosed up. It seems to catch up if you drag down to sync a few times.
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Sep 22, 2014 13:30
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| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 10:38 |
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My main CC switched its formatting for statement data so that all the transactions read as income rather than expenses in YNAB. Is there any software that can easily fix this? I'm considering downloading the csv and doing it myself but that may be a headache to import.
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Oct 25, 2014 18:24
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