You need a budget (YNAB) advice thread

joedenise

MeandO wrote: »

I'm really trying to get my head round YNAB as I really want and NEED it to work for me.

BUT I don't know if I'm doing it wrong as I'm just not getting it.

For example, I'm paid usually around the 25th of the month and most of my bills are set to come out between the 25th and 1st of the following month. If I enter that income as, say income for May (ie. May's payday), then it doesn't allow me to access it in June. Do I just lie and tell it it's income for June? But then it won't be right when I try and reconcile from the 25th to the beginning of the next month and this confuses me!

Any tips as to getting round this please? I'm sure it's very simple and I'm missing it somehow!

x

I had the same thing when I started using the trial as DH gets paid on 24th of month and I got paid at end of the moonth. What I did was to put 1/4 of his take home pay as income for May and then 3/4 as income for June. As the months went on I was putting less to the month he was paid in and more into the following month. My money always went to the following month.

After about 5-6 months of using YNAB all his money goes into the following month.

Hope that helps.

Denise

SeduLOUs

MeandO wrote: »

For example, I'm paid usually around the 25th of the month and most of my bills are set to come out between the 25th and 1st of the following month. If I enter that income as, say income for May (ie. May's payday), then it doesn't allow me to access it in June. Do I just lie and tell it it's income for June? But then it won't be right when I try and reconcile from the 25th to the beginning of the next month and this confuses me!

You can access it in June. If you mark it all as 'income for May', then anything that you don't actually budget in May's columns will automatically 'rollover' and can be budgeted in June instead.

You can split the income over the two months if you prefer - I personally find it a bit messy but it's completely a personal preference thing and either way works.

The long term ideal for you is to start saving anything you can spare in a 'buffer' category and start building your monthly buffer. Once you get it built up you'll end up in the position that you would mark May's wages a 'income for June', and the money you get paid in May will be used to pay the bills that are due at the end of June and so on.

nyermen

Hi MeandO,

I get paid on the 26th - I put that money into the month received (eg. 26th May, it will be "Income for May". I then allocate the money between the categories (until the top of the screen says 0 available to budget). Anything not spent 26th May - 31st May is then carried across into June...

All bills up to 25th May are coming out of previously allocated money (Income for April). Any bills between June 1st and 25th June are also deducted from the running balances. 26th June is when I "top it up".

I tend to "clean up my budget" (reallocate anything unused to my savings category etc) on 25th of the month ready for the next pay day, but this is optional - it depends how hands on people wish to be.

I fear I may not have made it any clearer - perhaps try a test with 1 income on 26th, allocate it to 2 categories, and have 1 bill on 27th, and 1 bill on the 2nd of June, and see if it helps make it clearer?

I'd recommend giving it the effort, it took a couple of months to get myself going properly (I "started over" a couple of times). While my lightbulb moment was alongside buying YNAB, it made justifying it a lot easier, and seeing all those red numbers is a real driver!

Peter

nyermen

I should add - it will allow you access to it in June, if it's not, then a setting isn't right (category balances can be altered to carry over in different ways, for example - an advanced but useful feature if you wish to track some categories directly, but allow others to clear themselves automatically).

If you allocate income to the month it's received, then - in general - the total budget balance should always match the balance of all on budget accounts on the left hand side.

SeduLOUs

nyermen wrote: »

I should add - it will allow you access to it in June, if it's not, then a setting isn't right (category balances can be altered to carry over in different ways, for example - an advanced but useful feature if you wish to track some categories directly, but allow others to clear themselves automatically).

You can only choose options on how to handle category rollovers when the category is in the red (negative). Positive categories and money that is available to budget but hasn't been budgeted will always automatically rollover to the following month (above the header in the June column, you will see the amount described as "Not Budgeted in May").

e.g. Have a play about with it by entering a fake transaction of 'income this month' of £100 - you should see the available to budget headers for this month, next month and every month after it increase to £100 (assuming it was zero beforehand).

You can then budget that £100 however you wish - all of it now, £25 a month for the next 4 months, etc etc. It doesn't matter 'when' you budget it, the available to budget figure will eventually return to zero in the month that the last bit of the £100 has been budgeted.

MeandO

Thanks folks, I shall take a look at it tonight, I fear I may have been trying to over-complicate things!

SeduLOUs

MeandO wrote: »

Thanks folks, I shall take a look at it tonight, I fear I may have been trying to over-complicate things!

Best thing to do is just to stick a few nice round number fake transactions (£100, £1000 etc) in there and have a play around and see what happens. You can just delete the transactions when you are done playing.

YNAB tutorials direct certain ways of doing things, but like anything in life there's multiple ways of achieving the same thing and it all boils down to personal preference, so the best thing to do is just get stuck in and see what works for you.

After my first 6 months of YNAB I'd changed my personal preference so many times on how to treat different things. Once I was happy with 'my' system, I did a fresh start to tidy it up and then stuck at it.

I till change things regularly though when someone posts a different way of doing something and I realise it's a bit nicer than what I was doing - only yesterday I moved my remaining debt accounts 'on budget' and I'm not yet 100% certain whether I prefer them that way or not!

snowscreamer

MeandO, have a read of the YNAB method. Particularly look at rule 4 ie. live on last month's income, which is the ultimate aim of YNAB.

For me, our income lands 29th (me) and last working day of the month (OH) and I currently have it all as income for this month ie. I'm running on negative for most of the month until it arrives. Luckily we get by using credit cards (now all apart from one 0% are paid off monthly) and £1500 which is in our 'buffer' category. This is what we need for things which can't be paid by credit card ie. household bills etc. £1500 buffer is enough to cover those things and in reality we now have far more than that in the bank by the start of each month as a lot of it is money sitting around allocated monthly for future expenses eg. car repairs, car insurance renewal, Christmas etc.

Our next goal after we have paid back our debt (probably arriving sooner that we could ever have hoped thanks to the brilliance of YNAB) is to allocate money previously going onto debt (~£500-600/month) towards the buffer until the buffer hits £3000 which is our rough budget per month for categories other than debt. This should take 3 months at the current rate. At that point, the following month we will empty the buffer and live on that for that month and thereafter mark income as income for the next month. Voilà, thereafter abiding by rule 4 and completing the YNAB method. After this we will continue topping up the buffer until we have 3 months' expenditure covered to give us peace of mind should circumstances change.

Here's a practical guide to achieving rule 4: https://www.youneedabudget.com/support/article/rule-four-live-on-last-months-income

headachesrus

I watched handling credit cards last night, purely in the hope of winning a copy, as I don't have any credit cards. Didn't win at the end but woke up this morning to an email saying the winner already purchased so I was next! Result!!!

Frogletina

headachesrus wrote: »

I watched handling credit cards last night, purely in the hope of winning a copy, as I don't have any credit cards. Didn't win at the end but woke up this morning to an email saying the winner already purchased so I was next! Result!!!

What a lovely surprise. Enjoy.

frogletina