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 Initially this thread was about the software YouNeedABudget, but has begun to somewhat encompass other software as well. You still need a loving budget. What is YNAB? YNAB or You Need a budget is a budgeting software that is commonly recommended on the forums. It's a forward-thinking, flexible software that will help you track your spending. Why should I use YNAB? YNAB is great for those who have various debts and are having trouble tracking money. It shows you where your money is going to go, most of all, it's not a set in stone plan. It's flexible, so if something happens and you need to change your budget, you can! I already use Mint/other software YNAB doesn't look at your past, it doesn't care about your past. (You can create a "second account" to track your past a lot more accurately). While Mint tells you were your money went, YNAB will tell you where your money is going. Other budgeting software tries to forecast your income and budget that, sometimes without flexibility. 100 HOGS AGREE posted:The main thing to get is YNAB isn't for forecasting and poo poo, you allocate the money you have to categories and that's it. YNAB tells you how you are doing right now. You can put in future income if you want, but it's not really how they recommend using it. As you use it, it also will let you see trends in your spending from month to month with lots of pretty graphs! Here's a sample budget:  This looks complicated, I don't know if I should Are you even remotely worried about how much money you have? Do you sometimes wonder why you don't have as much money as you think you do? Then you want to use YNAB. The first steps are easy. YNAB will walk you through setting up you basic accounts and getting a basic budget going. How much is this going to cost me? YNAB is $60 for a license. Cheaper than most software in general. It is an extremely useful tool. If you get into it and take their online classes, you have a chance at winning a free license. (I did not win a free license  )How do I get started? First, download the program and install it on whichever device you would like. YNAB will actually walk you through the basics of setting up your first budget. I recommend starting from today (or your last paycheck) and go from there. The tutorial is straightforward and will explain YNAB's basic principals. Once you get the program, you get to learn about YNAB's methodology, which separates it from other budgeting software. There's four basic rules: Rule 1: Give every dollar a job. Simple enough, you want to make sure your money is going somewhere. Food, gas, rent, emergency funds, all of your money will be going somewhere and that is a good thing. Rule 2: Embrace your expenses. This is where you start saving money for larger bills or bigger payments. Spread your money out, plan ahead some. A little bit into each category will go a long way in making sure you're not in the hole when large expenses come due. Rule 3: Roll with the punches.1 One of the biggest core tenants of YNAB is flexibility. You budget $300 each month for groceries, and everything is going good, but you decide to throw a huge party. Well, you didn't spend as much on gas that month because you stayed in. This means you can move money from your gas to your grocery budget, and not feel like a failure because you're still covered. Rule 4: Age your money. The goal of YNAB is to get it so you've got enough of a buffer to have all of your current month's bills paid, and are getting ready for next month's bills. This is the ultimate goal, knowing you are ahead now. Now you can start knocking out bills like your cars, and start saving up even more money. It's financial freedom and it's nice.  CREDIT CARDS CONFUSE ME HELP!!!Credit cards have a really odd way of working in nYNAB. I will find the write up buried in the thread somewhere and post it here. In about 3 years. How can I learn more Quick start guide Take a class! More support! For the old fuckers  who refuse to change, be overcharged, or got the software for $15, some tips for YNAB4: Things that may help you out! Q: I've been using YNAB for a while and it's gotten slow and dumb! A: 100 Hogs posted something that may help people with larger budgets! 100 HOGS AGREE posted:there's a secret keyboard shortcut that can compress down your YNAB budget folder and consolidate all the thousands of .diff files that's in there, that can help the budget load much faster on older budget files, and reduce the size of that folder. BUT I DON'T LIKE GETTING CHARGED MORE AND MORE AND WANT OTHER SOFTWAREShamelessly stealing from Dancing Peasant who shamelessly stole from Reddit: quote:Aspire - Free solution and works with Google Sheets but does not have automatic sync with your bank Gothmog1065 fucked around with this message at 20:57 on Feb 4, 2022 |
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Jan 1, 2014 22:34
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Time to make a steam account!
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Jan 1, 2014 23:08
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corkskroo posted:Is it a one time license fee and that's it? No recurring cost? Yes.
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Jan 1, 2014 23:26
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100 HOGS AGREE posted:The main thing to get is YNAB isn't for forecasting and poo poo, you allocate the money you have to categories and that's it. YNAB tells you how you are doing right now. You can put in future income if you want, but it's not really how they recommend using it. Going to steal this as this is what I was looking for as a comparison to other budget software
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Jan 2, 2014 00:34
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YNAB deals with credit cards in an interesting manner. They are on budget because you can use them to spend money. However, if you come into the program with pre existing debt, that is where the "pre ynab debt" comes from. Yes, the first month will have all your credit card's previous debt as an "outflow". However, once you have them in, the line items are the previous debt. if you're spending what you bring in on your paycheck, then its' all coming from your pool of current money. When you spend money on the credit card, it will NOT affect the "pre YNAB" debt category, because you should be budgeting that money. So it doesn't matter if you use your card, you're supposed to only be spending what you make at this point. I'll use my credit as an example. The example here is the card labelled "My CapOne". That's my capital one card. I used it in the beginning after I inserted in the pre YNAB debt. That's why in the budget window, there is a balance of 200.17, yet under the account information there is a balance of 262. The 200.17 is the old debt, teh 262 is the new debt, including what I added to the card. Since I budgeted the extra 62 dollars, it should be in my checking account (It wasn't as I went over budget). What happens is when you make the payment for 62, you're not affecting your budget since you've already given that money a job. You're simply moving it from your checking to the credit card. the 86.56 you see in the budget category is what I budgeted to pay off the OLD debt. the 62 I added to the card is below (namely in house maintenance and pets). The biggest thing I don't like how YNAB handles is the interest. I would suggest taking the class (link in OP) or watching the video here. that will kind of explain what I'm saying a bit better. It's about 30 minutes long. Gothmog1065 fucked around with this message at 01:51 on Jan 3, 2014 |
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Jan 3, 2014 00:41
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tuyop posted: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. Or you have the cash, but forgot it at home and you borrowed $40 bucks from a friend, then pay the friend back. you still spent the money on that video game, you just used a different source and had to pay it back.
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Jan 3, 2014 00:54
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Do you have a YNAB account right now? If so, how are you handling it? If not do what they say. Everything previous to your next paycheck is in the past. Put your paycheck in and budget what you pay. If the money already has purpose you won't be re budgeting it.
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Jan 8, 2014 22:58
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Well, I finally got a hang on credit cards in YNAB. I'm actually eating the interest as part of my budget, so I can reduce the amount I actually "spend" on the card, and it kind of lets me track how much interest I'm accruing (too much).
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Jan 23, 2014 21:56
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Huh, somehow I missed that as a category, is that only in accounts that you set up with a Pre YNAB debt initially?
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Jan 23, 2014 22:12
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Anyone know if there is a way to pull a scheduled payment ahead when you pay it, rather than wait for it to drop?
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Jan 30, 2014 19:39
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Omne posted:I am not spending to the account, I am spending to the budget. It just so happens that my savings account balance IS my spending budget overflow. I get paid, I budget out money for bills, buffer, short-term savings, etc., and some into the savings account, which is my spending budget. Say my balance in the budget is $500. I get paid and I budget $200 to spending money, transfer the funds from checking to savings. Now my savings account/spending budget is $700. I have $700 to spend, because my budget has $700 in it. This just so happens to be the same amount of the savings account. I think you're over complicating things here. If you're putting $200 into your savings and you're budgeting for that, and then you spend $300 on whatever, then you shouldn't be moving ANY money out unless it's an emergency or you overspent. The only reason you should be moving money out of your savings account is if you spend over your budget (and don't have a buffer in your checking). Then you move money out of savings, otherwise, ALL Money should be coming your checking. If all of these accounts are "on budget" it doesn't matter where you're moving money to. 500 = 500 (checking) + 0 Savings = 200 (checking) + 300 (savings). Moving 300 from checking to savings didn't touch your "total budget". It just changed what was available in each account.
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Feb 4, 2014 19:16
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I'm having a brainfart. I'm still using my credit cards. I make a single payment to them (Minimum + Purchases). Is there a way to make them show up in my budget as coming out properly, or just leave it at a transfer and let the Budgeted column reduce the balance and just not have it show up in outflows?
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Mar 4, 2014 02:37
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Old Fart posted:Interest would, but purchase are outflows for assigned budget categories. This is correct. The only thing that should show up in my outflows are the minimum payments and interest LogisticEarth posted:Outflows for the credit cards should be what you actually pay when the bill comes due. If you're slowly paying off the balance with minimum payments plus current purchases, then any overrun should be forwarded to the category next month. Continue until the debt is done. You don't need to budget anything aside from the minimum payment. All other current purchases should have already been accounted for. If you're paying it off there should be a positive flow into the card balance over time. That's the thing though. The CC's are on budget, but I can't find a reasonable way to get the payment to show up in the "outflow" category. One transaction is my transfer to pay off the purchases, another is the actual minim payment, but neither (as they should) show up in the outflow. However, my overall amount actually matches my budgeted amount.
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Mar 4, 2014 03:18
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SiGmA_X posted:I think I get what you mean. Okay, That's how I was doing it, just wasn't sure if there should have been an outflow there (Just a negative outflow for interest).
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Mar 4, 2014 04:27
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I think people handle it different. You could do a "jar" account and transfer the money as you put in, or I believe I saw one goon who rounded all cash purchases up to the nearest dollar for tracking purposes, then put the change in the jar and have a nice surprise however long it takes to fill it up.
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Mar 5, 2014 15:16
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If you're going to pay it off and never use it again, I wouldn't even put the card itself into a budget line. Just budget the purchase itself, pay it off and don't use it again.
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May 13, 2014 02:43
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Dantu posted:So basically, the categories are like little virtual accounts, right? I've been getting really hung up on where the money physically is, for example I'd transfer to a savings account and it wouldn't let me assign it to a category unless I moved the savings account off budget, and I'd get frustrated. You should be able to "transfer" between on budget accounts. Because you already budgeted the money in the budget section under it's own "savings" budget, it's not going to affect anything.
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Jun 2, 2014 18:27
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Knyteguy posted:"I'm literally the worst with money" but hey "I can afford it". You sound just like I did before I quit. I'm not going to keep bugging you because I don't really care, but that poo poo is loving stupid even if you don't want to admit it. You've spent almost 10% of ALL OF YOUR SAVED MONEY on drugs. You should notate it "Got the good stuff." I was a pack a day smoker back in the day. In between jobs all the time. Never had any money, except to buy cigarettes. It's amazing how you find the money for that poo poo.
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Oct 9, 2014 05:22
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I would subtract it from the category balance, it'll ride over and next month will even it out.
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Oct 24, 2014 20:32
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PurpleButterfly posted:This is kind of the same question I have, but I'd like to expand on it. When I started using YNAB, I had: If you have an account that has a "job" then you want it as an on account. Car loans are NOT an on budget account, since you're just paying into it. I have all of my installment loans (Cars, house, misc installments) as off accounts, as the money goes into it and that's it. Credit cards can be either off or on accounts. If you are not going to use them AT ALL, they can be off budget accounts (treat them as installments). Realistically, however, they're going to be on budget, as you can assign any spending on them a "job" which should be paid back at each statement. This will create some fun times as your "pre-ynab debt" (the red number in the budget) is not the same number as the current balance of your credit card if you have used it. If you have NOT used it, they should be the same, however, you have to keep adding interest and whatnot as a "pre-ynab" category. For instance, you have a credit card. You start off with 5,000 as the initial Pre-YNAB balance. Each month, you make a payment of $100. The red amount in the budgeting section would go down by $100, as well as the amount in the Budget section. This is all well and good, until you have interest. I always categorize them as Pre-YNAB debt, because that's the interest on it. So each month, the budget screen and the accounts screen on the left will reflect a $50 decrease. When you use the credit card, you have to add up all of your spending, AND the minimum amount (which will include your interest) and pay that off each month. If you don't add up your current spending, your numbers will get very off and things will start to get wonky. Savings accounts, for me, are on budget. Mine was an emergency account (and sadly I'm having to use the poo poo out of it). Just remember, if you are doing it correctly, it doesn't matter where the money is in your "On Budget" accounts, it can all be used. Any movement between those accounts doesn't affect your budget (Which is why they made a Pre-YNAB category for your credit cards -- So you can use them as "on budget" accounts and move money from checking to the Credit Card AS WELL as making your Pre-YNAB debt payments to clear that off (Which is technically off budget)). Now that I've completely confused you, watch this. This will explain CC's in YNAB more clearly than I. e: I added the video for the credit cards to the OP. Let me know if anyone thinks anything else needs to be added. I keep up with this thread. Gothmog1065 fucked around with this message at 23:03 on Nov 16, 2014 |
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Nov 16, 2014 23:01
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ilkhan posted:Interest should have its own category, it shouldn't be added to pre-YNAB debt (as its not pre-YNAB debt, its a current transaction). Anything you are going to make purchases on should be on-budget. I was told to do that. Doesn't matter much in my case right now anyways.
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Nov 17, 2014 05:51
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EL BROMANCE posted:Just a heads up, if you buy YNAB before Monday it's only $30 not $60. (Think this works when you buy a email or physical gift card from the store only, as the normal price still appears for me when you go to purchase a copy for yourself). Took the plunge as I've been intrigued for a while, and hoping it'll make the money back nice and quickly! Where do you have to go for this? I have a few people interested in buying.
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Nov 28, 2014 19:12
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EL BROMANCE posted:Hm, maybe it's expired... I bought it myself then posted pretty much straight away, but now I'm only seeing it at $60 even with a fresh browser. Last years blog indicated it went on until the Monday, but maybe they shortened it this year? That's a shame if so. Well that sucks. I'll keep an eye on steam then.
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Nov 28, 2014 19:46
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thegreatcodfish posted:https://secure.youneedabudget.com/c...source=internal Great, thanks! I had to use the second link, first was expired.
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Nov 28, 2014 23:12
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Easychair Bootson posted:edit: working through the videos and it seems that my question is answered by asking myself "What does this money need to do before I get paid next" as well as the idea of budgeting only what you have available by prioritizing: immediate needs, bills, then rainy day funds Pretty much this. I look at the month and try to budget what I can for everything. First you work on budgeting in the items you have to pay THAT MONTH. Once you have all of those budget items taken care of, I would look at putting the money back for the car insurance (no surprises!), and applying all of the leftover to the credit cards. The leftover being AFTER you've already budgeted in the Principal payment, all of the transfers (Which you should already have budgeted into groceries, gas, whatever already). THEN you add the extra, and just slap that onto the existing amount. The thing is, I would consider your $80 (400/5) for insurance as part of your monthly budget. Just because you're not paying it now doesn't mean you're not going to pay for it. It's a known expense, and it shouldn't be a "Rainy Day" fund for emergencies or unexpected things. It should be a monthly budget that gets paid out every 6 months.
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Nov 30, 2014 20:49
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HonorableTB posted:I have a question about credit cards: You shouldn't be putting a line item in for your credit card payment. The money has (should have been) already budgeted into whatever spent it on. Since the CC is on budget, it's simply part of your larger pool of money to budget. So if you spent $68.96 on Zimas, you already have a line item for girly alcohol drinks. The transfer doesn't affect your overall pool of money to budget, it's just moving it from bucket A to bucket B. The only time you should be creating a budget line item is when there is money moving to outside your "on budget" accounts. So paychecks and actual purchases (Or moving money to off budget accounts) get inserted into your budget. Not moving money to another on budget account.
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Dec 19, 2014 19:34
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I would personally put that into January's since it's not near the end anymore. If you're already rule 4, it's not really going to affect you all that much either way. You can run stuff over into February.
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Dec 25, 2014 22:48
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Yeah, sounds like you're already step 4 material. I'd just start by putting in your current bank balance, then going to the budget section and adding in your bills for the next month and seeing what your surplus is, then probably create a emergency fund based off of that (if you don't already have money set aside), then pretty much go straight to rule 4 with any additional income. 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.
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Jan 8, 2015 22:28
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baby puzzle posted:Well maybe I should just not consider the checking and savings accounts to be separate accounts, and instead just budget it all together. But then I have a huge amount of money and what is the point of budgeting anything? Most savings accounts have higher interest rates, but you can't easily spend out of them. Most of the time you want the money that is earmarked as "savings" in a different account pretty much for that purpose. Also, you should be spending your income. You should be getting a check every x time period, put that in, then budget money out until you have 0 dollars budgetable from that. for example, if that 6 month expense is $600, you would break that down into $100 monthly chunks. If you get paid weekly, and can't fully budget that in one paycheck, you might break it down further into $25 per paycheck. The whole point of a budget is to have a huge amount of money. You want a few months of income as "emergency savings" and to also help incase there large unexpected expense (Which should be budgeted for anyways). The point of these large amounts of money is so that if something happens you're not scrambling or hosed. If you really hate seeing that much extra money, then get to Rule #4 (budgeting a month in advance) and throw the extra in an IRA or something (though you should really have that emergency cash on hand first).
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Jan 16, 2015 12:11
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knob posted:4) Initially when setting up budgets, I threw my rent in there, not really realizing that it was unnecessary since I had already paid my rent this month. When I realized my mistake, I deleted it. So at that point, I had ~$750 left to budget. As I had no major bills yet unbudgeted for January and I saw that the $750 was showing as rolling over into February, I figured I'd just throw in my rent (along with other bills like electric/internet that I've already paid this month) into the Feb column to start things off. So it updated my $750 for February to reflect that, but it was still showing I had $750 left to budget for January. Is this just because the starting balance was categorized as income for January? I ended up splitting the starting balance so about half of it went to February to fix it. After watching more videos, I feel like I'm supposed to just budget out the starting income for just January (maybe dumping the excess into emergency funds or towards credit cards) and start with the February rent when February arrives. I would budget the 750 in Jan, and if you don't need it, don't budget it in Feb. HOWEVER, if you want to get a jump start on Rule 4, you can keep it budgeted and already have that $750 a month ahead.
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Jan 16, 2015 16:24
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KariOhki posted:Question since I just started (trying again) using the program: since its mid month, should I just write the January budget numbers for the last half of the month, or put it in full and retroactively add in my things from the start of January? The most common response is "Start from today", but I see no actual reason to not go to the beginning of the month. I know I did when I started.
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Jan 16, 2015 18:33
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Easychair Bootson posted:Sorry, I left out a detail: a chunk of the balance ($2570 as of the current statement) is from a previous transfer that's at 0% interest. So my goal is to pay for all purchases plus put $750 towards the preexisting debt. Do I just need to wait until January 31 and make a payment based on the balance at the time? I've heard that some CC's will put your interest accruing debt at the end of your payments, so you're paying off the 0% balance first, then the interest accruing last. I could be mistaken in how that works, I would call your CC company to verify why you got charged interest. Either that or as long as there is anything that can have interest accrued will unless the statement balance is 0. However, that doesn't change what ilkhan said. At the time you're going to pay, you pay <current purchases> + <any interest> + <paydown amount>. What is your interest? (Let's see if it's a super low 6%)..
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Jan 19, 2015 04:44
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Easychair Bootson posted:This may cause me to shift my YNAB strategy a bit. I guess I could start putting everything on another card that I'd pay in full, and just pay my $750/mo towards the $2570. That's going to be your easiest option until you pay it down.
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Jan 19, 2015 14:47
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Captain Magic posted:As a related question--are you guys including money set aside for savings and spending money when you pay from last month's income (i.e. you've got enough for that in your buffer), or is just the mandatory stuff like rent/groceries etc? I would say no as they serve different purposes. However, if it makes doing your poo poo easier, then by all means include it in the "buffer". To me a "buffer" or Rule 4 is paying all of next month's bills / things that are going to be paid out (6 month insurance, saving for certain items like vacations), while "emergency funds" and their ilk aren't included because that's what you're going to be using to pay for bills when poo poo hits the fan.
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Jan 29, 2015 20:12
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Lblitzer posted:I just started using YNAB so please bare with me if I'm overly complicating things! Then you're going to be shorting yourself $50 on your budget since you've got an outflow of $100 and you're only putting $50 into it. The whole point of YNAB is to track all of everything. I always deposit all of my cash, especially when it comes to something like that. In the end, it's $50 and if you don't care that that money isn't actually being accounted for, then don't mark it. Your budget will just reflect that you paid $100 for the bill and that's the end of it. My wife is terrible about this poo poo at work. Her coworkers pay her cash for their food, and she orders for everyone, then never gives me the freaking cash so basically we just spent $40 at Taco Bell. "But I use it for food later" and off we go with the excuses and mental gymnastics. Gothmog1065 fucked around with this message at 18:06 on Jan 30, 2015 |
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Jan 30, 2015 18:03
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beedeebee posted:EDIT: Or I should open a credit card account and put the expenses there and then just transfer each month... This. You should have a credit card account (Because you have a credit card!) on budget and the purchases go there. When you pay off the credit card, it's a transfer (not budgeted since you already did that with the purchases).
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Feb 18, 2015 21:35
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KariOhki posted:Credit cards still somewhat confuse me, especially because my statements run from around the 20th of each month to the next. Stuff on them has never balanced right and I never can find where it falls off. Is it worth it to see if I can change the statement dates to end on the 1st of every month or something, or is another way recommended? My non-credit accounts balances just fine, of course. Yeah I've watched the video, and it still confuses me. If you aren't paying off the full balance, look for the interest line on your statement. None of my CC's will show the interest on the website, you actually have to pull the statement and find the interest (and any fees (i really need to stop paying late )), and make sure you're adding that in too.
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Feb 21, 2015 18:21
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Why would you not put in a payee? If you don't want to see who you're paying, do something more general like "Gas" or "restaurants" or something like that.
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Mar 4, 2015 13:17
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Okay, I'm cleaning up some credit cards. Basically I took out a loan with the bank to wipe 4 of my credit cards (500 a month to 250 a month), interest is lower, etc etc. My question is this: I'm putting the budgeted amount into the budget screen under Pre-YNAB debt. When I put in the payment amount, I still have a remainder. Should I just hide the categories after this and ignore the remainder, or do I need to fix it somehow?
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Apr 8, 2015 01:44
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ilkhan posted:What trader said. Those accounts are closed (RIGHT!?), so kill them. Transfer x amount from the new account to the old account to zero them out, and any fees involved go in as a transaction on the new account. You should end up with just one negative balance account representing the loan. I closed (IE, made the payment then closed the account) 2 of the 4 cards, and closed them in YNAB too. I have one card left, my wife has a card, there is one other card that we use for gas and kept paid off anyways. I still have some money left over. There's going to be a pretty big gap in pay coming up soon, that's why I'm not throwing it all on this card right now. So I created an off budget Loan account, and added 10k to my checking account (where it went), made the payments, then added the payment amounts in the budget screen to reflect the money going out of the budget, and simply hid those Pre-YNAB credit card categories as I'll never use them again, even though they were a bit off. Honestly, it's probably about time to reset YNAB and archive the past year either way.
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Apr 8, 2015 02:30
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