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?

@Happierwithouthim it was weird it just made my ynab balance the same as my bank account without any allowance for where i had allocated those funds to, so essentially I had double funds.

Just spent some time this morning entering my regular payments etc 😊 I'm finding I prefer doing it all manually as I have a better idea of what I am spending my money on.

Just started to fill up Junes regular expenses... smallest ones first 🤣🤣

Hope everyone has a good month!

So this was my first new month with YNAB, and I was surprised that budget assigned but not spent from April was added to May’s categories. This meant I had to manually adjust them all because I already assigned funds to May’s budget in April! I shan’t do that again!

@Countrylife2002 I expect if you go into each bank account page, you'll have a transaction called something like "automatic balance adjustment" - delete this transaction, and you should be back where you were before linking.

Have you been reconciling as you go?

Do you mainly use YNAB on the app or the website?

You can just click back into April, and empty any categories that have money left over if you like - this is quite good because you can then scrape them into savings etc.

for eg, if bank account is £100, it shows my ynab account balance as £100, whereas with all my allocated pots it should actually be 20?

Actually though - this doesn't make sense.

Your account balance should stay the same, do you mean that it's put £100 into ready to assign?

Would help to troubleshoot if you can say whether you're using web or mobile and if you reconcile regularly :)

Thanks. That’s a really useful tactic. Like the debit card rounding up your purchases into savings idea.

I think for the next few months I would like to get a clear picture of what I’m actually spending so for now I’ll just avoid assigning funds to the following month but I may well use your method once I’m a bit more au fait with where my money is going.

@Didsomeonesaydogs you can always start a ‘holding’ category—I have one that I sometimes dump money into for various reasons, as I don’t like assigning for future months - I call it Parked/Next Month.

As a general rule though, I tend to keep money in my categories to rollover into next month-GIFTS is a good example, as I didn’t have any birthdays this month.

Experiment and see what works best for you!

Thanks - that makes perfect sense @Chatonette. I can totally see how that is useful to have some categories accruing funds - gifts is a great example.

I’ve set up a “next month” category for any unallocated funds.

My carryover is gifts, holidays, dentist, optometrist, car (tax/insurance), etc etc

@BertieBotts thank you. I don’t know what happened. I use both on laptop and on phone app and reconcile daily. It’s back up and running but not linked to my bank account so it can remain a mystery!!

Yes I do mean it went into ready to assign. Basically what happened was that my ynab ready to assig was about -30 with all my pots allocated for the full month, and I linked to bank account, and it all went wrong! My ynab ready to assign was double the amount of my bank balance.

But I don’t mind not linking it, I add my transactions twice a day anyway, so it’s not a bother.

Yes fair enough. I couldn't link mine initially because when I started they only did linking in the US. It does get confused IME by UK/European style overdrafts. I have done something about this with a dummy account and somehow it works, even though it's linked.

For whether to roll over money in categories, I used to use emojis on the end of a category name to denote what would happen to the money. I still have them on a couple but most of the time I know what I'm doing with each.

🔒 = don't borrow/steal money from this category (used for personal categories, like pocket money)
💰 = let this build up over time, top up by the stated amount
🚧 = max amount to let this category build up to, don't keep topping up if it gets that high

You could also use ↩️ for categories to reset to 0 at the end of a month.

For fixed bills that come out on a specific date, I use spaces to line them up (the spaces don't work on MN) and then the date so something like

💡Electricity - 22nd

For yearly ones I do the month so stuff like

🌳YNAB - May

Then I rearrange them all in the master category so I can see what's coming up next.

One feature I wish YNAB had is the ability to add a column on the left where you could input a "payment due" date for each category, which would stay visible.

That feature would be fantastic!

That is exactly why I put it in the category name. I thought there was an option for this since they changed the targets to allow you to set a specific date though - obviously not

Ah I found what I was thinking of - if you go to the assign money screen on the app, it shows you all the due dates on that screen.

And I like this feature!

I do that too. My setup is a Direct Debits master category, with the subcategory format:

Day of month - Description - Amount

E.g. 1st - PetPlan old dog - £25

Then they all get put in date order.

The issue was I started partway through the month but allocated targets based on a whole month so it wasn’t really an accurate months representation of spending . I will probably carry over some categories but not others as @BertieBotts and @Chatonette suggested.

Mine are also in date order but I may add the date to the name of the category as @BertieBotts suggested.

Sorry @Lougle, I’ve just noticed you also have the date in your categories! (It was late when I replied last night and I was tired!) Love the way you’ve done it so it’s really easy to sort into order.

How's everyone getting on this month? I get paid next Friday which will cover all Junes outgoings and top up some savings pots 😊

I am going to buy myself an iPad later this week so I can do coursework. I have money already put aside for a new phone so I'll use that and build my phone fund back up.

I actually feel quite confident using my savings for stuff now as I know how to replace them and that I can afford to buy stuff if that makes sense.

Will be time for a new thread soon!

I am really enjoying YNAB and will definitely subscribe when my trial is up next week.

I’m gutted my net worth went down this month as I had to pay for my holiday, but I’m looking forward to building it back up again.

I ordered the book a few days ago, so that should arrive early next week, and I’ve been listening to the podcasts too. Immersing myself in all things YNAB.

Glad I have this thread as I can’t really talk to anyone irl about it without sounding like I’ve joined a cult!

I added my student loan in and my net worth dropped massively!

I'm doing ok, although I've developed a terrible habit of "borrowing" money from next month if I see something I really want and not recording the transaction until I get paid, because I now know I can cover it from money saved towards true expenses. I really need to stop doing it.

@Didsomeonesaydogs I know what you mean about the cult thing - I had to stop myself posting it as a suggestion on all of the recent threads about posters discovering that their DHs had got them into debt and worrying about how to pay it off.

I'm going to be moving from weekly pay to monthly pay & dm was warning me that it will be difficult, I said not really I've been using a budgeting app for years that's set up for being paid monthly and I know how to manage my money because of it. She was very sceptical. I never learnt anything about budgeting from her growing up and her sister is the complete opposite!