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Budgeting with YNAB or Monzo

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  • couth
    couth Posts: 60 Forumite
    10 Posts Photogenic Name Dropper
    YNAB can sort of help you plan ahead, but not completely. I do keep a separate spreadsheet for tracking our deposit savings, for example.
    More than happy to share aspects of my YNAB budget if you'd like to see, to get an understanding of what a mature budget looks like (I've used it for 3 years).
    Just curious - why do you need a separate sheet for that? You could use the "Tracking" type accounts in YNAB, which are off the main budget, right?
    I'd love to see some examples myself, I played with it for 2-3 months and I liked it but felt like I needed more mileage to truly 'get it'.
     thanks
  • greensalad
    greensalad Posts: 2,530 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 1,000 Posts Name Dropper Combo Breaker
    edited 1 December 2020 at 12:06AM
    couth said:
    YNAB can sort of help you plan ahead, but not completely. I do keep a separate spreadsheet for tracking our deposit savings, for example.
    More than happy to share aspects of my YNAB budget if you'd like to see, to get an understanding of what a mature budget looks like (I've used it for 3 years).
    Just curious - why do you need a separate sheet for that? You could use the "Tracking" type accounts in YNAB, which are off the main budget, right?
    I'd love to see some examples myself, I played with it for 2-3 months and I liked it but felt like I needed more mileage to truly 'get it'.
     thanks
    YNAB isn't very good at forecasting. I want to know how much I'll have saved by what date based on variable income and expenditure. 

    My separate forecasting sheet shows how much I spend across broad categories (e.g bills, credit card payments, holiday savings) which are subject to change (pay off CC in a few months so no more payments going to it, go on holiday so monthly saving no longer needed) and then redistributes those funds into a forecast of how much I'll be able to save per month. E.g, at the moment I save £1,000 per month but once I finish paying off my CC in January I'll be able to save £1,400 instead. YNAB can only really calculate with money you have right now, and give you a rough idea of how much you'll need to contribute each month to reach a goal. It's not really designed to forecast how changing income and expenditure in future months will affect tracking accounts. I do definitely keep the balances of savings in tracking accounts but they track what's there now, not what could be there in the future.

    Here are my broad categories. I have them set up so that things I most regularly interact with are at the top and things that only get looked at once a month (on payday) are at the bottom. On payday I start budgeting my cash bottom up. This means I can collapse the categories once done and largely forget about them: https://imgur.com/IDOqiTC

    A category that might be of interest is my Car Expenses. You can see I've divided the various expenses so that I can attach individual goals to them. Some have dates they are needed by (MOT), some are just set to have a regular amount paid in per month (Misc). In terms of parity with Monzo, the whole Car Expenses category on YNAB is a Monzo pot with £655.81 in it at present. https://imgur.com/TW6j3kd

    Another one that I expect everyone needs is bills. So these are all our household bills. Again, "Bills" is a Monzo pot with direct debits set to come out of it. https://imgur.com/7nUfvsd

    A subcategory I think might be interesting in this example is TV license. It's paid every 3 months, but I don't want to get surprised by a big bill one month and nothing the next two months. I set a goal on the TV license category to have £41 by X date and repeat every 3 months. I set aside £13.55 per month and the balance carries over. By the end of the 3 month period there is enough accrued to pay the bill. The same principle applies to a lot of annual payments too. Set aside every month so that I have enough to pay the bill, and the goal automatically repeats from zero once the bill is paid. https://imgur.com/2eOlrgJ

    Here's an example of savings for a holiday I'm going on next year. So I actually stole money out of this category this month because I had an unexpected bill and was being lazy about pulling it out of my Emergency Fund. So I stole it from my holiday category, which means I'm now behind. The trip isn't until October 2021 so I will have to save a little more per month to make up the desired balance, effectively spreading the cost of this month's deduction across the next year or so: https://imgur.com/8d5B3wv

    As for tracking wealth etc, I actually created a fresh budget this summer as my partner and I went joint finances and I decided to start afresh rather than trying to add him into my old budget. So this is the net worth change from 31st December 2018 when I decided to start using YNAB and this summer. You can see how my debt (red bar) went down and my assets (blue bar) went up. My salary hasn't changed. I became "worthless" this July, i.e I crossed over £0 in net worth. I ent from having a net worth of -£26k to +£18k between December 2018 and today. YNAB really helped me get to where I am now, which is coming to the end of my DFD (my personal credit card will be paid off in January, my partner's in June, and we're hoping to have enough for a house deposit next December): 






  • couth
    couth Posts: 60 Forumite
    10 Posts Photogenic Name Dropper
    edited 1 December 2020 at 12:36AM
    Wow that is impressive, you are so organized and congrats on the progress! Thanks so much for taking the time to do this, it's really making me reconsider my money management approach. I only really have a "Bills" tracker and a "long term savings" sheet and that's about it. I don't really track variable spending, although I do try to give myself a max budget each month. 
    Thanks again. 

    PS. I like the Goals feature, although I have to say I didn't use it on YNAB when I trialled it. 
  • greensalad
    greensalad Posts: 2,530 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 1,000 Posts Name Dropper Combo Breaker
    Goals is hugely useful! In fact I'd say it's the defining feature between YNAB and Monzo, Monzo just doesn't have anything that can do the same. 

    I would say YNAB is very involved. A lot of people complain about that, they want it done for them, they want something easy. Budgeting IMO isn't that easy. I like having something I have to keep on top of as it helps control spending. I tend to reconcile and review transactions once a day (but then we spend regularly, as we tend to often go to the shop for extra food and stuff in the week). 
  • ccdorset
    ccdorset Posts: 303 Forumite
    Tenth Anniversary 100 Posts Name Dropper Combo Breaker
    couth said:
    YNAB can sort of help you plan ahead, but not completely. I do keep a separate spreadsheet for tracking our deposit savings, for example.
    More than happy to share aspects of my YNAB budget if you'd like to see, to get an understanding of what a mature budget looks like (I've used it for 3 years).
    Just curious - why do you need a separate sheet for that? You could use the "Tracking" type accounts in YNAB, which are off the main budget, right?
    I'd love to see some examples myself, I played with it for 2-3 months and I liked it but felt like I needed more mileage to truly 'get it'.
     thanks
    YNAB isn't very good at forecasting. I want to know how much I'll have saved by what date based on variable income and expenditure. 

    My separate forecasting sheet shows how much I spend across broad categories (e.g bills, credit card payments, holiday savings) which are subject to change (pay off CC in a few months so no more payments going to it, go on holiday so monthly saving no longer needed) and then redistributes those funds into a forecast of how much I'll be able to save per month. E.g, at the moment I save £1,000 per month but once I finish paying off my CC in January I'll be able to save £1,400 instead. YNAB can only really calculate with money you have right now, and give you a rough idea of how much you'll need to contribute each month to reach a goal. It's not really designed to forecast how changing income and expenditure in future months will affect tracking accounts. I do definitely keep the balances of savings in tracking accounts but they track what's there now, not what could be there in the future.

    Here are my broad categories. I have them set up so that things I most regularly interact with are at the top and things that only get looked at once a month (on payday) are at the bottom. On payday I start budgeting my cash bottom up. This means I can collapse the categories once done and largely forget about them: https://imgur.com/IDOqiTC

    A category that might be of interest is my Car Expenses. You can see I've divided the various expenses so that I can attach individual goals to them. Some have dates they are needed by (MOT), some are just set to have a regular amount paid in per month (Misc). In terms of parity with Monzo, the whole Car Expenses category on YNAB is a Monzo pot with £655.81 in it at present. https://imgur.com/TW6j3kd

    Another one that I expect everyone needs is bills. So these are all our household bills. Again, "Bills" is a Monzo pot with direct debits set to come out of it. https://imgur.com/7nUfvsd

    A subcategory I think might be interesting in this example is TV license. It's paid every 3 months, but I don't want to get surprised by a big bill one month and nothing the next two months. I set a goal on the TV license category to have £41 by X date and repeat every 3 months. I set aside £13.55 per month and the balance carries over. By the end of the 3 month period there is enough accrued to pay the bill. The same principle applies to a lot of annual payments too. Set aside every month so that I have enough to pay the bill, and the goal automatically repeats from zero once the bill is paid. https://imgur.com/2eOlrgJ

    Here's an example of savings for a holiday I'm going on next year. So I actually stole money out of this category this month because I had an unexpected bill and was being lazy about pulling it out of my Emergency Fund. So I stole it from my holiday category, which means I'm now behind. The trip isn't until October 2021 so I will have to save a little more per month to make up the desired balance, effectively spreading the cost of this month's deduction across the next year or so: https://imgur.com/8d5B3wv

    As for tracking wealth etc, I actually created a fresh budget this summer as my partner and I went joint finances and I decided to start afresh rather than trying to add him into my old budget. So this is the net worth change from 31st December 2018 when I decided to start using YNAB and this summer. You can see how my debt (red bar) went down and my assets (blue bar) went up. My salary hasn't changed. I became "worthless" this July, i.e I crossed over £0 in net worth. I ent from having a net worth of -£26k to +£18k between December 2018 and today. YNAB really helped me get to where I am now, which is coming to the end of my DFD (my personal credit card will be paid off in January, my partner's in June, and we're hoping to have enough for a house deposit next December): 






    Sorry for my delay in reply, haven't been on the forums for a few days so am playing catch up.

    Thanks so much for taking the time to put all of this together, it is really useful. I have been using YNAB for the past week or so and am really liking it. Creating categories for annual expenses, setting goals and seeing how much I need to save every month has been quite an eye opener for me.

    I feel it is already helping me be much more conscious about my spending decisions. I found the credit card concepts quite difficult to grasp, partly because I had a couple of refunds to enter for items I purchased prior to using YNAB, though I think I've got my head around that now.
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