Getting a grip!

nicp60

Hi Welshlassie and thanks for that. It's been a bit weird getting him on board because I've been so used to doing it myself for so long! I'm still loving YNAB and have actually done what's suggested - close down all the little accounts and just use categories instead - that's scary!!
It's really good to hear from someone else who's used ynab.

nicp60

Argh!!! Why is my baby not here yet?!

Anywayyyyyy, I've done it - I applied for a new current account and was accepted, I honestly didn't think that would happen with my credit file!!

I then marched straight into Barclays and closed all my little accounts and put everything into my current account, ready for the switch.

OH has been sooooo supportive and on board this week! It's quite sweet really, he has absolutely no interest in budgeting, but he knows how much it means to me so he's willing to learn. I've shown him how I inputted transactions after we've been shopping and basically how I've divided up the income this month.
I'm letting the surplus roll over, so in a way we're already living on last month's income (ynab rule 4), as we have enough in the account to cover about 2 months' expenses.

Already our income has increased through using ynab together - OH sold a guitar amp this week and the cash is going into the soon-to-be joint account. Yes, it will just pay for his car tax this month, but that's an expense I had already budgeted for.

OH has paid the $ cheque into his overdrawn account, and we will clear the balance with savings when it clears (about 6 weeks).

He now needs to apply for a 0% card before we add him to the new Halifax account to hopefully make his borrowing cheaper.
I'll look at dealing with those credit cards later.

nicp60

Argh!!! ynab is doing my head in!!

Although I LOVE having categories for spending that OH and I can use to record spending and stay within our categories, the monthly thing is really really annoying me.

I get paid on the 25th of the month, and all the bills are scheduled with this date in mind. Half come out 25/26th, and half come out at the start of the next month. Because the budget resets at the start of each calendar month, it's an absolute nightmare to budget a whole month at once. I have to budget some bills when I get paid, and some when the new calendar month rolls round, otherwise I have this huge excess.
Yes, I could leave it, but the whole point for me is to be able to budget that month's money from 25-25th, buffer and all. I don't want to budget on the first of each month. I want to budget when I get paid!! :mad:

Not to mention I'm completely unable to work out if I actually have a bl00dy buffer because it's completely ridiculous how the dates work out, and I can't even assign October's pay (on 25th Oct, therefore technically to pay December's bills) to December until 1st November. Are you kidding me?!

AAArrrrrrrrggggggghhhhhhhhh! :mad:

Welshlassie

I feel your pain, I went through this as well as I get paid on 20th. I just budgeted everything until my next pay date and let the excess roll over into the next month. I haven't got our buffer saved yet, but getting there slower. Just work out how much you will need to spend before you are next paid and allocate that amount to the category, this amount will them be available in the next month to. It made my incomings look a bit wierd for the first couple of months, but we've got there now. almost 4 months in.

I found reading the YNAB forums helpful for getting my head around mid month pay dates.

Are you using the smartphone apps as well? This is how I got DH bought into the process. He can see exactly how much money he has in a certain category until we are next paid and can budget across the month much better. Until these apps, he used to leave it all to me and at the end of each month I'd have to tell him how much he had over spent on the grocery budget and I hated it.

nicp60

Hiya,
I've just done that, and budgeted until next payday, it's just frustrating. The hardest bit was when I went over by a bit in several categories last month. When I got paid (so technically still in the same month), I couldn't add to those categories without it eating into the new month's budget.

I didn't want to do that; the negative balance had come from my overdraft, so I wanted to just reduce the entire budget for the next month by the total I'd gone over, but I couldn't do that until 1 week after I got paid. That meant that I couldn't really do any budgeting until the start of the next month!! It actually kept me up for a night!

The app is the biggest thing for getting OH on board. Without it, I don't think he'd have the discipline to [STRIKE]track spending[/STRIKE] budget as much.

Although the month thing is a pain, it's the actual budgeting that counts I suppose. I just keep reassuring myself that as long as we spend (and hopefully under spend) according to our category balances, then the rest should take care of itself (or I can at least ignore it!!!).

abba1772

nicp60 wrote: »

Hi Abba,
Another 10 days! I took my mat leave at 37 weeks and I'm 38+4 today.
So ready for this to be over!!
How are you doing???

The little man is 6 weeks now its flown in xx

nicp60

Awwww congrats again.

I'm due on Sat and will be having a sweep on Thursday if there's nothing by then.

Feeling pretty achy and crampy though, so I'm hoping this is it...

nicp60

Right, time to dust off the old diary!!

On 18th October I (finally!) gave birth (well, emergency c-section, if that counts as giving birth) to a gorgeous baby girl who unfortunately looked like she'd been thumped repeatedly in the face, around the head and then bashed about a bit more for good measure, and really wasn't happy about it! Fortunately she healed very well and is beautiful. I know all parents say that. But she really is. Haha!
We're very lucky that she's a great baby, very very happy all the time. Except for the time she wouldn't stop screaming. For. Nine. Whole. Weeks. She was also born with a dislocated hip, which wasn't found until she was 4 months old, so she's spent the last 8 weeks in a Pavlik harness which looks like a medieval torture device but has thankfully resolved the issue and we've started weaning her off of it.

Financially things are going quite well. This is thanks in part to so many generous gifts of baby clothes and other baby stuff and also to my dad who gave us £1000 when she was born. This has really helped out with making ends meet. I'm also stunned at how much I've saved by not going to work!
I've done a lot of keeping in touch days, which has been brilliant because they're full pay and I've been on Stat Mat pay since Xmas, which doesn't even pay the rent.
DH has had some decorating work and has a lot more lined up in the coming weeks which will really help out.
The singular most important thing in keeping afloat on (almost) no income has been our joint use of the ynab software and app, which has this month saved us £1000. Incredible. In large part that's down to Andy K pulling his weight with tracking and logging his expenditure. I think it's made him more mindful of frivolous purchases and it's also given him the confidence he needed in terms of taking joint responsibility for the joint finances. I think he finally gets it - I do not give a hoot whether I earn all the money or he earns all the money or whatever; but we are a family, and we need to budget together. I LOVE having a joint account (seriously I never thought I would say that 6 years ago!!!); being accountable to someone as well as being in it together is simultaneously empowering and comforting.

On a slightly more depressing note, I'm back to work in 4 weeks. 3 months ago I would gladly have gone back, but now Mini-Me has started doing stuff and she's no longer crap and boring, but fun and amazingly funny (to her parents obviously!). She said hello yesterday - we nearly cried!!!
I'm going back full time - I could do a 0.8 or even a 0.6 contract, but I would literally end up with the same amount of work, same number of classes, same enormous responsibility, same stresses and issues for 80% or 60% of the wage. Totally not worth it.

We looked at a nursery last week. It was a real wake-up call to both of us. We'll be leaving her with strangers a couple of times a week for a long time!! I'm trying not to think about it too much to be honest. As a specialist (but by no means expert!) in linguistics, education and learning, I know that nothing brings on a child like socialisation away from parents. The Mummmmeeeeeeeeeeee in me is screaming that it's not right. Urgh. Well, it's a reality and one way or another having her on a playmat in my office Mon-Fri will simply not work!

It's very MSE, but I'm lucky that I work next door to a vocational college which has a nursery. I can literally see the nursery from my office window. It has no advertising for some reason and no-one really knows it's there. I have 2 colleagues who send their children there, and although it's a bit rough and ready (it is in one of the most deprived LAs in the country) I was really happy with what I saw.
It's also half the cost of the nursery at the end of our road, offers me very easy (and super-close) access and has been recommended by other parents. I want to see a couple of other places, but to be honest I think we'll just be seeing shinier toys, more colourful folders and more of the same.

Our next major goals are as follows:

• Pay off the £2000 that I had to borrow from my Father in Law to buy a new(er) car (the old one started leaking diesel and was unsafe)
• Pay off the credit cards (about £1600) in total
• Save a house deposit. I really really want to buy the house we're in now. It needs gutting, a lot of TLC, but I love it.

Bring it on!!!

AlexLK

Glad to hear everything is going well.

nicp60

Thanks Alex!