You need a budget (YNAB) advice thread

hiddenshadow · 6 August 2017 at 8:16AM

Your money will age, I think the measurement is something like the age (in days) of the oldest pile(s) of money you have split over your most recent transactions. So if you had income a month ago of £1k and your 10 recent transactions totalled £900, your AOM would be 30 days. If your 10 transactions totalled £3k then it would figure out how old your next recent pile(s) of money were and average them out (and you'd end up with 22 or something). The idea is that over time, as you set money aside in True Expenses / other savings, that naturally "ages" your money because you're not spending all your money at the same rate, so some gets to sit.

I don't find it useful personally, because I have much different budgeting/financial goals than to age my money. Some people find it helpful to prevent those "oh, well, clearly I can treat myself to X today, it's only £y" decisions that could (should?) be avoided if you spent more than a few seconds thinking about them. YMMV.

PollyWollyDoodle · 18 September 2017 at 11:23AM

Just thought this might help someone else; I posted a while back about problems getting the phone app to link to YNAB, it wasn't updating. I found it very frustrating as one of the benefits for me is the ability to look at the budget while I'm out somewhere and decide whether a purchase is affordable. I also used to update as soon as I'd bought something, making reconciliation even faster.

I decided to try and tackle it yesterday- deleted the app from my phone, deleted Dropbox, reinstalled them both, no luck. I went into settings on my computer... and suddenly realised that the Dropbox account was showing a different email address, one I only use for specific purposes. Apparently I have two different Dropbox accounts with different email addresses and I wasn't even aware of it! :embarasse So, problem solved and everything is up to date. If anyone else is having problems, check your settings.

nkkingston · 18 September 2017 at 12:26PM

Apparently YNAB have released a new update, with some nifty features like identifying spends against categories automatically(so it can map that Costa, Pret and Nero's all go against "take away lunch" without having to do it manually). it also now syncs with gadgets like apple watches, if it hasn't managed to persuade anyone from wasting their money on one in the first place!

I have to admit, I'm tempted, but I don't think I have the discipline to update it with every transaction. Does anyone here bath upload bank statements? I can get mine in a QIF or a CSV, but YNAB says it doesn't play nicely with CSVs. I think I'd be much more likely to stay on top of it with a monthly reconciliation than a daily update - all it'd take is my phone running out of juice one day and the habit would be broken (if my experience with calorie counting apps is anything to go by).

tempus_fugit · 18 September 2017 at 2:10PM

The best files to use are QIF or OFX. All the banks I use provide one or other of these file types. I tend to add transactions manually but I do download the files as well and load them in to make sure I have not missed anything. I do this once a week.

maryb · 25 September 2017 at 2:00PM

I posted this query in one of the YNAB threads but I think I put it in an old thread by mistake because I've been looking at all the YNAB threads so apologies for posting twice.

I think I've got my head around how it is supposed to work but there was something mentioned that was of particular interest to me when someone mentioned that you can't do much forecasting with the latest version

I know that YNAB is intended to make you focus on the money you have right now and how you are going to allocate it but my situation is a bit different. I took early retirement and most of my pensions don't kick in for another two years so I am supplementing my current income with a savings pot which has to last. So in YNAB terms that would mean it's available to budget but the budget has to cover an extended period.

At the moment I use MS Money which works fine in Windows 10, together with an Excel spreadsheet to forecast. But I'm finding it tricky trying to reconcile the two so I was looking for something that could help me. My laptop is also rather elderly and if I were to switch to a Mac I wouldn't be able to use MSMoney

Do you think YNAB would be able to deal with what I want? From reading all your really helpful posts I get the impression there's a bit of a learning curve so even though there's a free trial it might be a lot of effort only to find that it won't do what I need

SeduLOUs · 25 September 2017 at 5:43PM

maryb wrote: »

I posted this query in one of the YNAB threads but I think I put it in an old thread by mistake because I've been looking at all the YNAB threads so apologies for posting twice.

I think I've got my head around how it is supposed to work but there was something mentioned that was of particular interest to me when someone mentioned that you can't do much forecasting with the latest version

I know that YNAB is intended to make you focus on the money you have right now and how you are going to allocate it but my situation is a bit different. I took early retirement and most of my pensions don't kick in for another two years so I am supplementing my current income with a savings pot which has to last. So in YNAB terms that would mean it's available to budget but the budget has to cover an extended period.

At the moment I use MS Money which works fine in Windows 10, together with an Excel spreadsheet to forecast. But I'm finding it tricky trying to reconcile the two so I was looking for something that could help me. My laptop is also rather elderly and if I were to switch to a Mac I wouldn't be able to use MSMoney

Do you think YNAB would be able to deal with what I want? From reading all your really helpful posts I get the impression there's a bit of a learning curve so even though there's a free trial it might be a lot of effort only to find that it won't do what I need

You could protect your savings by allocating them all to a category, and then releasing a set amount from that pot each month to actually budget the every day spending with, much like you would do with a monthly wage.

You could even split the savings pot up into seperate categories for different date ranges, i.e. allocate how much you want to last for September to March in one category, and the 6 months after that into another category. You could even split it into different categories for the individual months ahead that you intend to use it for - how much or how little detail you want would be entirely up to you.

maryb · 25 September 2017 at 6:11PM

That would work, wouldn't it. In effect I already do this in my Excel spreadsheet where I forecast what I should have left at the end of each month, just take the difference from month to month as the amount I need to release

Thank you, that has given me something to think about. It will be hard to give up good old MS Money, and I might well carry on downloading statements into it while my Windows laptop lasts just so I have the historic data to see what my spending patterns are

hiddenshadow · 25 September 2017 at 6:23PM

YNAB will let you budget into future months, so you could potentially forecast in detail what expenses you plan to have in any given month (e.g. December will be extra spending for Christmas, summer you have lower utility bills, etc.) In the new version it can get tricky juggling all the months, but money is available to any month you like (the tricky bit is that because it's available to any month, if you overbudget in a given month it may not alert you about it in an obvious way).

I'd probably go with the category options, just as a safeguard, since you know you won't have extra income until 2 years out (so no real chance of fudging any numbers to make things last until next payday). You can still budget future months if you want to see what December 2017's budget will look like if you allocate £1,000 to it, for example, but that gives you the option to set aside 2018's income into its own category that you don't touch until 2018 rolls around.

JustAboutManaging · 30 September 2017 at 5:13PM

Hi, can anybody help me please - bear with me while I try and explain what I mean!

I have just begun a trial of the new version of YNAB as it seems like it should do everything I need but I'm struggling with variable income dates!

I'm paid monthly on 28th and the majority of my bills come out on the 1st of the month - I have entered all future transactions In and Out and everything from tomorrow is greyed out - does that mean those grey payments are not YET reflected on the Budget page?

i then try and rely on my four weekly payments of Tax Credits and Child Benefit as my weekly spending money for food, fuel etc and a few annoying bills that could either fall on payday, or sometimes before! - at the moment I am not entering figures for those Outgoings until the 'Infllow' is cleared - am I doing this right as I have a red figure for October, and I can't work out why - pen and paper tells me that I have money to budget, but not YNAB?

Any help with how to deal with this would be really appreciated! x

hiddenshadow · 30 September 2017 at 6:30PM

Anything in the future is not counted in new YNAB. Your budget categories will not reflect anything that has a date beyond today. (This is one of the major reasons I haven't switched versions - in the old version you could say "please count these 10 direct debit payments as definite transactions even though they won't happen for 2 weeks", which I find vital for managing our budget amounts.)

Anyway....back to your question...

- start by entering any money you have right now (I assume you have already done this)
- with that amount, budget any categories that need to be dealt with until your next weekly payment of TC/CB...presumably this is based on your salary, so would cover the majority of your expenses/DDs/etc as they go out on the 1st
- whenever you get paid the extra bits, then top up your budget categories to reflect the extra income

YNAB only cares about what money/obligations you have right now, and doesn't care about anything else until you have extra money to budget. (Or extra unexpected expenses crop up, but that has to be dealt with by tweaking your budget numbers, as you don't have any extra money.)

Some people find it useful to organise out their budget based on priorities matching their pay cycle. e.g.

Week 1
Mortgage/Rent
Weekly groceries
Weekly fuel
Utilities
..other DD payments...

Week 2
Weekly groceries
Weekly fuel
Weekly fun money
bill due on the 10th of the month

Week 3
Weekly groceries
Weekly fuel
Weekly fun money
Extra expense that only occurs this week every month

Week 4
Weekly groceries
Weekly fuel
Weekly fun money
Savings goal 1
Savings goal 2
etc.

Then you know that you just have to fill down the budget until you run out of money, and you can see what categories remain un-allocated and have a sense of when you need more money coming in.

Hope that makes sense.

You need a budget (YNAB) advice thread

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