You Need A Budget

Raquela

How I would do it is, first, do a category for your holiday balance. Do another one for your new housing deposit (if you don't know how much it is yet, you can make a rough guess depending on how much rent you are looking to pay - deposits are usually around 1.5 times rent). Your bills and rent should be predictable, so you don't really need to forecast those as such?

When you've created those categories, you know how much you need to save for those things, budget the amount of money to that category that you need. E.g. If you need to pay off £200 of your holiday by August, I'd allot £100 in June, and another £100 in July. That money is going to sit there until you pay that bill.

Same goes for the deposit.

If you're really worried that you're going to overspend I would additionally do this - budget the bare minimum to your essentials for the next couple of months and live frugally; budget everything that's leftover into a catchall savings category 'new house/life with fella' whatever each month. When you're all settled in and find you didn't need all that money after all, you can reallocate as you need to! (That's really simple by the way - if you have money budgeted from a previous month into a budget category and you want to move it somewhere else, simply enter a minus figure in your budget.

Eg here you have £500 in your category balance:

Budget Column 1 / Spends / Category Balance
[blank] / [blank] / £500.00

To reallocate that money for spending, simply:

-£500.00 / [blank] / £0.00

Your money available to budget will magically have increased by £500 and you can allocate that money as you wish.

Raquela

lemanie wrote: »

I watched a couple of video tutorials and cleared up a couple of queries in the forum because I was too impatient to wait for the next webinar that was on at a convenient time. I got a free copy because I am a part time student. The emails have been helpful in an ongoing way but I had no trouble at all with the set up.

I haven't actually done the webinars either, but the amount of people I know who have and got the free software as a result is ridiculous, hence my mentioning it! The only reason I haven't done the webinars is because, like you, I had got all set up without them, and didn't feel I needed them. All those I know who have done webinars said they got a lot out of it - I have to admit, I wish I had known about them when I was trying to get it all set up - I used YNAB 3 previously, and I just couldn't get my head around it. Don't know why I find 4 works better for me, maybe it's just the immediate syncing with dropbox! I have done the tutorial videos though, in fact I'm about to go and sit through the credit card one again because my brain is getting all confused!

Little_Muvva

I purchased my full copy today - I'm loving this software! I used to keep a spreadsheet but would only update it when I could be bothered to log in to my computer. This meant I got behind and never knew how much money I really had.

With the YNAB app on my phone, I can pop in transactions while I'm having a coffee or even straight after I make a purchase while I'm out.

I used a code from here: http://debtcamel.co.uk/ynab-review/ which meant I got it for just over £29 (you have to click the link at the end of the blog post and use the code camelsave). You can get it from steam for £29 too but you also have to download steam and I didn't want to do that.

Here's also a referral link if anyone wants it for $6 off http://ynab.refr.cc/3RKKQ3Z
Happy budgeting!