Resistant Punch Roller Yeah, exactly.  I feel so aware of all my goals and my decisions right now, and I have to remind myself that even if I stay solid with YNAB,  in 2-3 months I will *not* be spending hours a day reworking my budget and thinking all this through, and the chances of me forgetting what I chose and why I chose it are astronomically high.  The me of tomorrow often wonders what the me of today was thinking, actually.  :-)

Beige Hail 

"One thing that helps me somewhat is using the Chrome toolkit extension, which creates an extra column that shows the budgeted amount" 

I use the Chrome toolkit extension but I can't find this particular feature. I know I've seen it but can't find it now. Any thoughts?

Thanks

Powder Blue Mainframe (c2889e00798a) 

Open up the Settings, then choose Budget Screen from the menu on the left. 

1) To get the he U, M, etc., turn on the second option,  "Add Goals Indication." 

2) To display the Goal Amount as a separate column, go down to the option called "Warn When Target Balance is Not Reached."  I do not turn this goal on, but I do use one of the sub-items (you might think that those are unavailable if you don't turn on the main goal, but they are actually separate).  There is a drop-down menu that says "Display Target Goal Amount And Overbudget Warning."  I choose to display target goal and have the overbudget warning be green (the other option is red, but that seems silly to me because red implies a lack of money, not a surplus).  From my experience, the goal amount turns green once you've hit your goal, not when you're over budget).

Resistant Punch Roller Fair enough and understandable.

I've only been using YNAB since November so I'm no expert but I did initially set lots of goals and for the same reason I removed most of them because everything was permanently orange. In fact many of my categories are permanently orange such a rent because of an upcoming transaction on the 28th but it is funded from wages paid on the same day.

So I've resigned myself to them being orange for a long time until I have enough money to be a month ahead with my finance - so like you said in your first post, I pay less attention to the orange categories which probably isn't ideal.

Good luck with your journey anyway, I've come on leaps and bounds in just 4 months with YNAB. Nothing dramatic, just not getting into further debt for the first 2 months was a massive achievement for me.

Resistant Punch Roller When I was making more money than I am now, I had a category like that, and it basically made WAMs painless; I pulled from there without thinking about it, and I think it caused me to spend irresponsibly. Now that I'm not making quite as much as I want to be, I have to actually WAM from specific categories, and it's made me rethink my spending in a much more concrete way. I don't recommend pulling from a MISC category to cover your punches. It makes it too easy to lie to yourself.

Resistant Punch Roller I try to be very honest with myself about the "Stuff I Forgot to Budget For" category. This category is not for the time I decided to stop by Taco Bell on the way home instead of cooking, for instance, or the coffee maker that was on super-amazing markdown and I've been needing a coffeemaker. Those things have budgets, Eating Out and Home Goods/Tech Replacement, respectively.  If I need to WAM to make my purchase choice fit into those categories, I do not take money from SIFtBF for these sorts of things.  To me, SIFtBF is for things I didn't realize needed a line in the budget.  For instance, my web domain just renewed, and I suddenly had an $80 charge that I totally forgot needed to be budgeted for. (And that charge showed me that I actually needed a Professional Fees category to lump various items for my on-hold business.)  As part of keeping myself honest with this category, I don't let anything stay there once I've paid for it -- the forgotten item has to get worked into an existing category, or get a category of its own.

I suppose that's not the main question being discussed here, which is "should you have a buffer that you easily WAM from, or does that create a vagueness that is counterproductive (for a significant number of us)?"  It seems to me that part of the beauty of the YNAB system is that it keeps us in touch with the choices we're making and the priorities we're setting. If we assign every single dollar a job, then when we decide that we want those jobs to change, we're creating accountability to ourselves and our goals.  And we're creating feedback for future soul-searching sessions. If we decide one month that going out to eat with a good friend who's visiting town trumps saving for retirement and we take from the extra payment we'd planned to send, we are weighing specific values and goals (future security and quality of life, not being a burden on our kids, etc. vs. self-care, tending social ties, etc.) and deciding that in this single instance, it's worth it to tip the scales in a direction that takes us out of alignment with the values and goals we embodied when we set our budget.  If we find ourselves repeatedly vetoing the original set of goals with new ones, that requires us to ask some useful questions:  Was I wrong when I set those goals? Did I underfund something out of ignorance or denial? Perhaps I put too much weight in one direction and overlooked or tried to minimize something that also matters. How do I bring these into balance within my actual income (or how do I grow my income to fulfill these myriad priorities)?  If I am constantly using one category to fund my WAMs, maybe that category isn't actually something I value. If I am constantly pulling from any and all categories to fund one or two perpetually underfunded categories, perhaps those categories need to be more fully funded, even if they don't align with my vision of who I am (or who I should be/how I should behave); and if the restricted budget line actually is in line with your values, then this gives you a chance to reflect on what you might need to do differently in your life to have your values and your actions align (or, as with my Eating Out budget, you might decide that you want to give yourself a bit of a break while you work on getting your shit together, and budget more for now but with some intentions to transform that over time). 

Given this, I have to wonder if having a pot of Miscellaneous WAM Money is maybe a deferral of some aspect or aspects of that value and goal reflection process?  Now, I want to emphasize that I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing, or that anyone with a slush fund for WAMing is Doing It YNAB Wrong.  As with my Eating Out budget example above, I think it can be really important to give yourself a break. Especially if money and budgeting causes or exacerbates anxiety (...which is probably true for most of us?), I think it's important to be kind to ourselves and figure out which workarounds and supports help us move forward.  (And, it's also useful and important to check in on those supports regularly and see if they've changed from something that boosts us up into something that drags us down.) 

In fact, as I chew on this, I think it could make a lot of sense to make a "Peace of Mind" category that has a set amount available for miscalculations and surprise or spur-of-the-moment priority shifts. This in itself seems to me to be naming a priority -- creating a buffered mental/emotional space where not everything has to be weighed and considered.  By identifying a larger value and goal that ties to the specific job that this buffer is doing ,  you can make some internal inquiries based on how you're using it. (If it's constantly inadequate, do you need to make changes to the budget that will give you some peace of mind? If there a specific type of spending that you're finding this category covering, can you make changes to your budget or your life so that you move further away from the anxiety space? Maybe you're able to stop WAMing and only draw from this category, and it gives you peace of mind so you continue it. Maybe you have some amount left over each month, and you tinker with goals that let you put that overage into a happy budget line. Or, maybe you find the buffer works beautifully for you, and you pat yourself on the back for including a budget line that keeps you in touch with your budget and keeps you on an even keel.)

Whoops, sorry, that got a bit long...

Resistant Punch Roller I think where I ended up in that long examination is that I think it's fine and dandy to have a buffered space to draw from, but that I think it's worth identifying what value-based job that buffer is doing for you, and putting it under the same microscope as everything else, periodically.  (And that I think this should be separate from Things I Forgot to Budget For, which really should be about managing the surprises that hit us over time as we realize another True Expense that hadn't occurred to us.)

Beige Hail (I see you actually addressed Things I Forgot To Budget not being a slush fund last month, so I must have misunderstood that part of your comment, sorry!)