You need a budget (YNAB) advice thread

Frogletina

greensalad wrote: »

No, I'm totally and utterly lost.

I had £70.04 in my holiday savings account when I added it to YNAB.

You had £70.04 in your savings account - so you should have budgeted that in Ynab to your holiday category.

I transferred £13.50 from my current account into the holiday pot. It's balance went up to £83.54.

Your savings account went up to £83.54 but you had nothing in your holiday category at that point, so the category only shows the £13.50

Now here's where I'm stuck. If I budget £13.50 in the "holiday savings" category then it's fine. But where did that original £70.04 go? My budget doesn't know it exists. I can't use it.

Your £70.04 is funding other categories.

Let's say tomorrow I decide to spend the lot. I have the cash in my holiday savings pot. But I don't have the cash in my budget, so I can't budget that money to be spent. And the whole thing falls apart.

I'm actually having this exact issue in real life now. I did a transfer from current acc to "home maintenance" pot of £50 so the balance on that pot was £50. I recorded £50 in the budget for it. Then I spent £27.98 on some home bits, so I transferred £27.98 out of savings back into current acc and then put down an Amazon transaction on the current acc. Now it says I'm down £12.99 on my budget.

Your category for home maintenance is still showing £50 so you have not yet recorded a transaction in the budget, or if you have, then you have not recorded it correctly. You say you transferred money into your current account but that is just changing the location of the money. How did you show the Amazon transaction? I assume that this was with a debit card as it was via Amazon - the category for the transaction should have been home maintenance, which would have reduced the category by £27.98.

Hope this helps

If you want to have sub accounts matching categories, then you have to ensure that they match every time. This means that if you transfer money into a savings account, you also have to increase the money in the category by moving it from a different category. Likewise, if you move money from a savings category to an account you wish to spend from, you need to also record the transaction against the same category to keep them at the same balance.

Ynab is easier to use if you don't have savings sub accounts, as the categories keep track of how much you are spending.

frogletina

hiddenshadow

Just to add that one of YNAB's philosophies is "simplicity", so ideally they want people to have one bank account (no risk of overdraft if all your true expenses are sitting waiting for their jobs in the same account) and one credit card. In reality, the world doesn't work that way , which is one of the (minor) issues I have with YNAB (both new and old) - it does require a fair bit of micro-management if you want to "optimise" your finances with extra bank accounts, bank accounts for a single purpose, etc.

If I were you I'd set the holiday account as a tracking one and ignore it, for the most part. The only trick there is that you'll either need to have some sort of holiday category to deal with transfers from your on-budget account to your holiday account (they need a "job" assigned to them as they're leaving the budget), or you'll need to ignore that money altogether (so if you transfer £13.50 from current account A into holiday account B, you'd lower whatever income transaction caused that £13.50 to come into current account A in the first place by £13.50, so that your budget never knows it exists).

Or...carry on with the spreadsheet. That's also a valid solution if it's easier/more flexible. It's certainly my current backup plan for YNAB4's eventual death.

andyfromotley

did you set up your savings account with a £70.04 starting balance? If not simply create a TRANSACTION in the Savings account showing £74.04 as an inflow. This will now appear as 'available to budget' on your budget, allocate it to your holiday catagory.

Was the £13.50 (or more) showing as available to budget when you put it in the holiday catagory? if not you need to steal that back from another catagory as you have allocated that money twice. Either way you need to make sure that your holiday catagory shows the same as the actual amount you have in your savings account for holidays.

hanb

Hi all,


Hoping you might be able to help me.. I seem to have lost my budget.. I'm not really sure what's happened so apologies if I make little sense.


Over the weekend I uploaded a large amount of photo's to my dropbox (it took 12 hours to sync!). Since doing this my YNAB app won't refresh on my phone or my ipad. When trying to get in to YNAB on my desktop it asked me for my activation code which I dug out and put in but it wouldn't let me in.


My desktop shows a budget last updated at the beginning of March whereas my phone was up to date as of Saturday. My mobile devices now say "the desktop signalled a change in the budget data that requires this device to re-sync to the cloud budget" but the cloud budget is out of date.


Does this mean I've lost my up to date budget and lost the last 6 weeks of YNABBING?


Apologies if that's not clear, or if I'm just being stupid but I'm not really sure what to do next..

hiddenshadow

Are you out of space on Dropbox? My first guess would be that Dropbox stopped syncing your budget in favour of the photos.

hanb

No, I thought that but there's definitely still space in there. (0.5 out of 2.2 whatever they are[!]).


Weird that it asked for my activation key again after originally putting it in back in Jan. Maybe putting that back in caused an issue.


I have emailed support but thought I'd try my luck here in the meantime

Pinkwhisk

Hello,

I did my free trail in Feb. I admit I didn't follow it at all, although I did try. however, my circumstances have changed again so I need to get a grip!

I'm willing to sign up for a year but I want to know if YNAB will work when one of us gets paid monthly, and the other weekly, along with benefits 4 weekly?

Thank you

hiddenshadow

YNAB will work with all sorts of pay schedules because the methodology for budgeting at income time is very basic.

What does this money I just got need to do before I get more money again?

Perhaps your setup is:
Weekly pay comes in on the 22nd:
- allocate to groceries/fuel for 22nd-28th
Monthly pay comes in on the 25th:
- allocate to all direct debits due next month
Weekly pay comes in on the 29th:
- allocate to groceries/fuel for the 29th-6th
Benefits come in on the 30th:
- allocate fun money, savings, etc.

At each point you only have to ask yourself when you'll get more money, and what commitments you have before that time that you'll deal with via money you just got.

Pinkwhisk

Thank you!

MoneyMission2015

Pinkwhisk wrote: »

Hello,

I did my free trail in Feb. I admit I didn't follow it at all, although I did try. however, my circumstances have changed again so I need to get a grip!

I'm willing to sign up for a year but I want to know if YNAB will work when one of us gets paid monthly, and the other weekly, along with benefits 4 weekly?

Thank you

It definitely does. I get paid monthly and my OH weekly, I just allocate all my salary as soon as I get paid, then every week when my OH's wages go in I update and allocate that money.