Need to start budgeting

trailingspouse

Cheap, healthy and quick? Yes, it can be done.


I spend £80 a month on food (food only, but including the big weekly shop, takeaways, food out and alcohol). I can have a cheap healthy meal on the table within 20 minutes of walking through the door from work. I eat pasta dishes, home made soup, curries, salads, an occasional pizza, fish, a good old fashioned roast dinner once a week, occasional meat-free meals, sandwiches made with wholemeal bread and real butter. I'm truly shocked at how expensive foodprep and similar schemes are - they may be cheaper than going out for a meal, but they're a darned sight more expensive than shopping and cooking in the normal way.



BUT - it needs to be thought about and planned for. Thinking and planning are free.

BurnsieUK

Had a look at a 30 min tutorial for YNAB

Looks a little confusing to start with. I guess the information you get out is only as good as the data you put in.... However, as a current post graduate student, they have given me a free account for a year, so I guess I'll check it out.

One thing I obviously have to do is analyse my shopping receipts and manually breakdown if an item is grocery or toiletries.

Will have a play tomorrow

stripeyfox

BurnsieUK wrote: »

Had a look at a 30 min tutorial for YNAB

Looks a little confusing to start with. I guess the information you get out is only as good as the data you put in.... However, as a current post graduate student, they have given me a free account for a year, so I guess I'll check it out.

One thing I obviously have to do is analyse my shopping receipts and manually breakdown if an item is grocery or toiletries.

Will have a play tomorrow

I tried YNAB but it was too confusing for me, even though I could see what it is trying to do.

I recently switched to Monzo bank - or at least, partially switched. I might go "full" Monzo soon though because it has helped me budget in a way that traditional online banking hasn't. So I'm still having my salary paid in to my main bank and the bills come out from there. I then transfer "what's left" into my Monzo and I use that as my spends for the month. You get instant notifications of spending so you don't get this "lag" where you buy something in Tesco on Friday night and then forget about it when you check your balance only to discover it goes out the following Tuesday!

EDIT: Also, you can categorise each purchase and add notes so you can see how much you've spent in each category. It's not perfect because you can't split the categories, but it's close enough for me.

You can also set up "pots" for different things - fuel, savings, car repair etc and drop money in there (sort of like YNAB is trying to get you to do) and they are soon releasing "Salary Sorter" which will allow you to automatically split your pay up into the different pots - maybe one for bills, one for savings, one for "pocket money" etc - whatever works for you.

It also has the feature where it rounds up your card spending to the nearest pound and puts the "change" in a savings pot - I've saved £30 this way in a month, and I can also set it up to do the Save The Date challenge automatically - so for example today 25.09.19 it moves 25p+09p+19p automatically to my savings pot at 8am every morning and the same each day which adds up to £150 or so per year without me really noticing it!

BurnsieUK

Although my friend just showed me Money Dashboard.

Seems simpler and that's what I might need to start with

tempus_fugit

YNAB is not really that difficult (apart from how it handles credit cards, which can trip some people up). You enter your income and that goes into "To Be Budgeted". You then allocate ALL of that to your categories, so start with monthly bills, groceries et, then occasional spends (this helps get into the idea that there is not an unlimited amount that you can spend) and anything left over can go into savings or whatever.

As you spend you enter the transactions into the register and categorise them according to what it is you have bought, and as you do that the amount left in each category goes down. If a category runs out you either stop spending on that category, or grab extra from another category that may have some surplus left in it. All of this encourages you to work with what you have and not what you haven't got.

I use it manually, i.e. I enter transactions myself. It does have an automatic download option where it will log into your account(s) and get the transactions automatically, but I find it doesn't work very well with UK banks. It uses Yodlee and the logins often fail or (as happened recently with my Lloyds account) it registers as fraudulent attempts to log in (I got a letter from Lloyds saying they had locked the account until I changed the password etc).

Money Dashboard is similar, but even if you use the automatic connections to your bank you can still get login errors and you also still have to categorise the transactions (it can do this automatically but I find it fiddly to set up and it often gets it wrong). Overall, I just don't find the budgeting options with Money Dashboard, as with many other such apps, to be that helpful compared to YNAB, but of course if you are comfortable with it then go for it.

ianbar0

food planning becomes easier when you get used to it. we often have a pile of food prep pots in the fridge, i usually spend a bit of time one day week doing them. this way there is something ready everyday. a basic meal, pasta tuna sweetcorn with a bit of mayo, for example.