Anyone interested in a YNAB chat/support thread?

[OrangeBlossomsinthesun]

Hi,

I wondered if anyone was interested in a YNAb thread to chat about progress and help each other. I've just started the trial period a couple of weeks ago and, although it's quite a steep learning curve I'm really impressed with it.
I'm freelance so it's important for me to track money and be prepared for fallow periods. I had a thread here with some great advice. I'll add it as there are some good links www.mumsnet.com/Talk/legal_money_matters/4327812-YNAB-help-for-a-freelancer?watched=1&msgid=110514876#110514876

Anyone up for some YNAB chat/support?

I would treat those as an annual cost, I think. If you can look back at what all of your scouts expenditure was last year, including trips, then divide that by 12, you'll get a monthly cost that you can keep rolling, which means that you'll have the majority of any trip fees saved by the time they roll around.

Hi all!

I have some payments which are termly. For these I divided them by 12 and allocated that, topped up a bit for the next payments and it works OK now. I've got mine split out into group fees, equipment fees and lessons fees. They also have annual trips so we have a line item for those too.

One thing to watch for is changes in routine, when DS moved to 6th form in September, the £700 bus pass was a shocker. In retrospect I know he was going and could have saved for it but hadn't. Next years is a budget line item.

re clubs I have a "Kids Clubs" fund which I fund monthly.
I also have "School bits" for school expenses and trips etc.
And then if one of the kids gets a spot on a big trip I add a separate catagory for this as it paid over a period of time.

@MrsWombat its does take a few months to settle into (the YNAB videos etc are helpful), and I'd say it takes a few months to really start to feel the benefit - once you've done a full year cycle you get to the big expenses - car repairs, Christmas, Birthdays etc and the ££ is there waiting to be spent.

I've never got a month ahead on my essentials, but my Age of Money has been high for over a year now - mostly over 90 days. So that is effectivley a couple of months ahead

Thanks, everyone. 💐I think I'm going to have to wing it with the school/scout trips. One big residential has now been paid off (YNAB has helped me realise I hope I could pay it off.) I have 3 big instalments due over the next few months, so I'm going to set a target for them with their due dates (which is what I did for the scout subs) then prioritise filling up the pot for the one that is due first. I've been listening to the Budget Nerds podcast and I like the idea of moving the category to my generic school/scout trips category once it's paid off.

The first month seems to have gone ok. The money left after bills, expected expenses, the true expenses I've remembered so far, and regular spending like food, I've put in a category called "Buffer". When something I haven't remembered or planned has turned up I've taken money from there. It feels like cheating, but I'm hoping with time I can categorise things better.

I think I've mostly managed to work out assigning my bills due on the first and before we get paid on the 15th. However, my Ready-to-Assign in November is -£20 and when I unassign from something in November to cover it, it appears in Ready-to-Assign in October. And when I unassign from October nothing happens. I'm not sure what's gone wrong, but I'm hoping it makes sense on the 1st.

Nearly November!

I'm three and a half years into YNAB. For the first six months I had a category called "things I forgot to budget for" which I put a couple of hundred quid in. Then as things popped up I generated new categories and moved the money out of this budget line into the new real budget line.

I have separate categories for all things like subscriptions and club costs but they're in master categories, one is subscriptions, another is personal. The personal one has all stuff like DS' gym membership, DH's gaming fund, my social fund, my kindle fund, each child's pocket money etc.

If the category looks too bloated you can then just minimise it into the master category. For stuff like his school lunches which only runs in term time I just look at the calendar and fund this manually.

Mrswombat going into minus in November means that you've either allocated more than you have, or you have overspending somewhere. Are any of your bubbles red or orange? Have you looked at it on web? It's easier to see there than on mobile.

This post wasn't very helpful/might be confusing so I'm pretend deleting it with the edit function.

@MrsWombat It took me a while to figure out what's going on and I've managed to recreate it in a test budget. So I think what's happened is this:

You've maybe overspent in October somewhere.
You've gone into November and assigned money, but it's telling you that you have a negative figure to assign.
You've reduced your assignments in November, so it's now telling you that you everything is good in November, but in October, you have money available to assign to the category you've overspent in.

You'll probably find something, somewhere, that is £20 overspent in October. You have to assign that money in October, before going back to November's budget.

Another option is that perhaps a payment imported from the end of September that you haven't noticed? Go back into previous months if there are any and look for overspending everywhere.

I still don't know what the problem was but basically, I unassigned everything for November, then reassigned it back slowly, and that's solved the problem, for now. But I think I did this before when problem-solving, and then when I moved some money it happened again.

There are no red/orange bubbles. There is nothing in September. I have small amounts of money dripping into my account from royalties at the end of the month, as well as Prolific surveys, and the extra income doesn't solve the problem either. Frustrating. I'm going to see what happens in November as I'm sure I'll have a clearer idea when I'm only looking at one month.

Ah, if you've moved money, I wonder if you encountered the stealing from the future issue? That's where you have e.g. £10 in October, £10 in November in the same category so November shows £20 available.

While playing around in November you move more than £10 out of the category and then you spend money in October in the category, causing the November category to go negative because you've now moved out more than was in there.

Or some variation of that basically.

Happy new month day everybody!

I made a mistake this month and assigned money on payday (Friday last week) into November (and December) and then got shouted at by YNAB a few times as I spent a bit that I had already assigned forwards. Won’t make that mistake again.

I started in July, totally paycheque to paycheque with zero in my account at the end of the month, now at the end of October I had nearly 3k at the end of the month and still felt (YNAB) broke! It’s amazing. So liberating.

I have booked to go Christmas shopping with my mum and I am so excited about it - because this year I have saved for it and can really enjoy spending the budget without guilt or worry 🤩

I have been awol here lately as financial woes have been taking up a lot of my brain space. Some of you here might have seen my thread about loans and credit cards.
Anyway, with a loan in place and a salaried job starting this month I am hoping to slowly climb out of the financial mess I´ve been in for the last three years or so. YNAB is great but can´t help you if you don´t basically earn enough to cover your bills.

But to my question. I have stopped being self employed and so want to remove the category for my social security payments. it´s says I have to reassign the activity to another category, does it matter which category I assign it to? Will it skew the category I add it to?

Probably best to just hide the category. That way the previous history is accessible and won't need to be reassigned but it won't be visible in your categories either.

Definitely just hide it. Otherwise you have to move every transaction you made in that category out of it before you can delete it. It's ok, but unnecessary.

OK, great! Thanks. I will just hide it then.

Age of money is currently 21 days. I'm not sure it will keep going up any further with a Christmas that has not been budgeted for on the Horizon. 😳I'm determined that next year's will be budgeted, and sending a pray to the WAM gods for this year.

Today is the day that the YNAB fee has been taken out of my account so I now have a referral code for any lurkers out there on the fence. 😅You will get the first 34 days free and then your 3rd month free when you use my code.

Ok, this is going to sound crazy but my new favourite thing is budgeting with YNAB and you have to try it! It completely changed the way I think about money, and the way I spend money, and for the first time in—ever?—I'm not stressed. I have a plan. You will thank me later—don't pass Go, don't collect $200, just sign-up for YNAB!

^ynab.com/referral/?ref=PgHZ8CBEMdsHtWxk^

I think the age of money must work better with a US type 14-day pay period, because with monthly pay, I found that it just cycled every month from about 3 days up to 21ish days and back again. I made a spreadsheet to track it for a while and take an average, which I did see slowly increase but then I got bored :D

If you use the desktop site on Chrome, you can get the YNAB toolkit add on which shows days of buffering instead which is a bit better IMO.

@BertieBotts mine is the same - I have never got beyond 21 days.

I’m now working on getting a mo th ahead (which is kind of 2 months ahead I think - at the moment all my pay for, say October, funds us till the end of November. But I want to find the next month also to get a ‘true’ month ahead. Maybe then my money will age over 31 days?

That's not how age of money works, days of buffering works like that.

Age of money imagines that every £1 you have is in a massive dispenser. Every time you get £1 you put it in the top of the dispenser and every time you spend £1 you take the coins out of the bottom.

Age of money is how long it takes a single coin to travel through the dispenser.

So actually I just checked mine, having not really bothered to look at it for ages and it's at 43. Mouse over and it's showing 25/09 which means we're still living on DH's paycheck from September (yay? Haha)

I am still not funding a month ahead! I have never managed to get even close to that. This is probably a combination of the fact we have been saving to pay a deposit on our new car and because we moved the younger DC to a new kindergarten and are currently paying twice we had a fund specifically for that, and that my dad sent us some money at the end of Aug.

Days of Buffering is 36 and suggests we'd run out of money on 13th Dec if we had no more income from now until then.

My age of money is about one day.

Hoping to finally start getting on track now that I will have a steady income for the first time in years.

Thanks @BertieBotts . My Days of buffering is 43 too!

Payday today. We've also reached the part of the cycle when the (every 4 weeks) child benefit money comes in a day or two before the monthly payday. So bank account rich 🤑YNAB poor 😱.

Age of Money is currently 29 days and the Toolkit Days of Buffering is 24. No big expenses for the kids to pay out for this month but there is Christmas and the Dentist to budget for.

Sounds good @MrsWombat . I have been feeling YNAB poor for over a week and it is still 13 days till payday and 15 days till rollover day 😱😆. I honestly feel poorer than I have for months while I am actually better off than I have been for years. This month I have had several unexpected expenses ( lots of school shoes and uniform, a school trip for £100) and have had to roll with the punches all over the place. My budget feels rather bruised!
on the plus, I have completely paid off my credit card and overdraft and have no debt now. Woohoo!
Hope the next few days goes ok. Solidarity with the clinging on!