Round and round the overdraft....soon to be no more

louby40 wrote: »

Speky that would be really good if I could ask you questions about it.

Is it a good idea to start it around payday/ start of month? Or could I start now? I get paid the last Wednesday of every month so it's 2 weeks away. All my bills are paid. My account is in credit....for now?

Louby

You can start it now, in fact you’re probably best as you’ve paid your “Immediate Obligations”.

So lets say you have for talking sake £800 in your account right now to last you until pay day. Input that as your current balance and then budget your £800. You may anticipate to spend £200 on groceries, £100 on petrol, £40 on new clothes, £20 for the dentist appointment, £30 for lunches etc etc. YNAB forces you to forecast ahead, to look at your diary and see what you’ve got planned. Any appointments or events need to be budgeted. I still put quite a large chunk into “Stuff I Forgot to Budget For” and I would recommend you do too at the early stage, then you can maybe see a pattern of things you always allocate to there, maybe car parking or you put the lottery on (again I’m just making something up).

If you can’t wait until Friday for your webinar, they have all their webinars on YouTube. The only downside is you can’t interact, obviously.

When I started, I read through their handbook while at work on my lunch and I also downloaded their podcasts in which they give handy tips too.

Lastly, they are very big on being very specific with their individual help. Meaning, if you’ve got a question or problem and you can’t get your head round it, you can email them (bottom left of the YNAB screen) and they can look at your budget and see what you’re doing wrong and give recommendations.

They’re not shy in giving help and there’s tons of resources to get your round the most difficult bit – the beginning,

Hope that helped.

Ah, a concept I’m just getting to grips with is cash on YNAB. It was a subject in which I had to email them and they were super helpful. Below is their reply;

"Cash transactions differ from your other spending, because they do not create a record the way debit or credit transactions do. You can’t simply import a batch of transactions and know that you are up to date. Also, your cash isn’t sitting in a traditional account–it’s in your pocket or wallet or purse.

We cover how to handle cash spending in our User Handbook. You have two options:

1. Set up a cash account and track your spending there

2. Treat cash as a category and record it as spent as soon as it is withdrawn from another account.

Spending from a cash account allows you to track every dollar of your spending. The more cash spending you do, the more important it is for you to use this method–otherwise your budget won’t reflect significant portions of your spending. Entering transactions at the point of sale is easy on our iPhone/iPad app and Android app.

Treating cash as a category treats cash withdrawals as immediately spent from your budget. This allows you not to track cash spending if you have difficulty maintaining that level of detail. Whenever you withdraw cash from one of your other accounts, you can either use a category that reflects it (ex. vacation) or use a category for that type of spending (ex. fun money).

Let me know if you have any other questions about this or anything else!

Best,
Alicia"

I hope that helps...?