New to YNAB - I categorized my Emergency Savings, and realized that I need more!

Now I have goals for:

• Future Car Down Payment
• Car Maintenance
• Six Month's Rent/Parking (already met)
• Six Months Groceries
• Six Months Car/Renter Insurance
• Six Months Car Payment
• Six Months Utilities

Any extra green at the end of the month will be going to either next month's buffer or one of those.

Paid an extra 150 on my student loans by moving extra $$ left over from my other budgeted line items from April

I found a new trainer for my fitness workouts. I have not freed up a great deal of money but I am getting better value for money.

Original trainer was $45 for 30 minutes plus $17/wk for a gym membership - total $62/wk. I was only going once a week due to a huge fear of gyms ( long story, but with a trainer, I felt better).

Now I have found a new trainer who works out of her garage at $20 for 45 mins. I have booked in for two sessions a week which lowers the price to $30 for both sessions. 

I had a training session today and I worked harder and felt better than I have in ages. Maybe I will regret saying that tomorrow!

Win for the budget $32/wk. Win for my health, immense!

I called my bank to question an unexpected fee and they reversed it.  It's net neutral for the budget but without YNAB I probably wouldn't have noticed it and I certainly wouldn't have had the nerve to call and question it, because I wouldn't have known *for sure* that I didn't actually owe it. 

I plugged extra money into my wife's "Back to College" fund by (a) moving all of the money we budgeted but didn't spend last month into that category, and (b) rounding down every spending category to the nearest dollar and moving the change into that fund. Every little bit counts! 

Yesterday we made our final payment on our  $54,705.21 debt snowball!  Paid off over a 12 month period using ynab.   We LOVE YNAB and we just can’t seem to shut up about it.  We’ve already converted several of our friends!

I actually entered information into the budget.

Finalised my application for a new rental house that will save me £375 per month.

We've done lots of stuff the last two days!

Yesterday, we refinanced my wife's car, and went from 7.24% to 3.05% at the same term - If we pay minimums, it'll save us $3,245 over the next 59 months.  Today we mailed in the title, so everything can get finalized properly.

Today, DW called CapitalOne to get her name corrected on her cards - I know, a bit late, but it hasn't really mattered terribly.  She then followed up with asking if she could merge her two cards, which it sounds like she can, but has to do online, and she the older/higher credit limit/no rewards/annual fee one to a rewards/no annual fee one.  Once her payments clear, she's going to try to get them merged, and then she'll be down from two annual fees to none.

After that call, I called and got my rewards card changed to one with no annual fee too!

I slipped up and overspent a bit at the end of last week, but I'm turning that around now by bringing my budget up to date straight away instead of avoiding. 

I've done some WAMing to cover the overspend and am doing two no spend days this weekend.  I've run out of a couple of grocery items so it's a pain, but I'm improvising to cover that without going to the shop.  

Apart from that, I decided to make the no-spend weekend a benefit rather than a penance so I'm doing some quality of life things that don't cost anything.  Went for a walk with a friend, chatting on the phone, doing some drawing and trying out a new recipe.

Doubled my payment on one of my student loans this week. First time that bill has been under 20k in a long time. Can’t wait to celebrate the next milestone of being under 15k

Got my first Venmo incoming payment (from my brother for his share of Mother's Day flowers), and it popped into my bank account the next day. Seems faster than paypal... though I would caution that one needs to go to settings to make sure the default for the "social-ness"/public/private aspect of each transaction is "share publicly" - so you'd want to make sure you set it to private for each transaction you don't want to share publicly, or change the default. Personally, since I am paying my therapist via Venmo now, I don't need that recorded in the realm of social... :)

I set up a standing order to save money to an account that is very inconvenient to get to.

Last night I went to the supermarket at exactly the time when the end of day bargains (fresh food with that day as the sell-by date) were getting a final discount.  I picked up  celery, rocket, peppers, blueberries, lettuce, cucumber, spinach, mushrooms and tomatoes, mostly organic, all for £1.61 in total.  

I've already made a pasta salad and a blueberry smoothie, and chopped and frozen some of the fresh tomatoes.  Today I'm going to make a lentil and vegetable stew and some soup.  Then I can enjoy a healthy Bank Holiday weekend!

Was one click away from buying a beautiful area rug on Wayfair. First I told myself I’d sleep on it. Then I remembered that I’d dug heavily into my savings this month to cover other goals.  Then I said I’d put it on credit and pay it off by July 1. Then I realized I didn’t want to WAM a $300 purchase with money I don’t have.

I’m about to make a YNAB goal category for the rug. Win! 

Newbie here - Just set up my budget last week and feeling depressed and overwhelmed by my staggering debt but when I went to look at a new pickleball racket -instead of buying it with a credit card, I found out the price and put it on my budget to save for!

Got to see ynab in action today as my car battery died when I tried to start my car. Fortunately I do have AAA, so help was on site quickly and a new battery installed. Since I only had to pay for the battery today, and I have been putting small amounts in my "auto maintenance" fund each month, I had enough to cover the battery with a small amount left over. It was not stressful at all thanks to AAA, super nice repair guy, and ynab. Feeling grateful and putting this in the "ynab wins" category.

I've been categorizing my groceries to get a handle on where all the money goes and found we had been overcharged by $47!!  CREDIT ME BACK, lovely coop whose cashier transposed two numbers on a bulk purchase!  We do not eat expensive gluten-free pasta!  

Inspired by this post by Wendy , I contacted Discover and was also able to secure a temporary lower interest rate on my existing balance!! Only for 6 months, but for that time my interest rate will be only 9.99% rather than 18%, which will save me around $400 total! And by that time, hopefully I'll have my other balances low enough that I can start getting some 0% balance transfers going.

Absolutely thrilled, thanks SO much gwenasaurus (love your name, BTW!) :)

Hi! I am from Germany and new to this. I love the system! Today I paid a visit to my bank and switched a high interest credit to a low interest credit. And I combed through my transactions  in my checking account and cancelled a lot of subscribtions... It is such a great feeling!

I had a huge victory today -I’m super proud of myself and know I couldn’t have done it without this program. Friends have friends visiting and wanted us to join them for dinner. We just got hit with a $500 quad repair bill (what we drive for transportation here in Baja Sur Mexico)...anyway I sooo wanted to go but I also sooo didn’t want to spend the money on a meal. After thinking about it for a bit I invited them all over after dinner for dessert, drinks and star-gazing with my hubby who taught celestial navigation in the Air Force. It was a perfect solution. I made us dinner and a chocolatey-peanut thing for dessert. 

I am just in my first week or so with YNAB and have a massive amount of debt. I’ve been obsessed with tweaking my budget every day sometimes several times a day which I think really is helping me focus on it and keeping me present.  I sure do hope this becomes a habit quickly!

Thanks for the support. 

I have a zillion bank/savings accounts. Some I use to accumulate funds for future bills, i.e. True Expenses so I decided to do some consolidating and see if I could truly budget with YNAB to fund those needs. I closed my holiday savings account and set it up on YNAB as a True Expense with a monthly funding amount so I'll see if that actually works for me and if so I'll close out my annual lease savings account too. I also closed a savings account that had a  low required minimum balance and used those funds to fund my True Expenses that I haven't been able to put a penny too. So I'm feeling like I'm moving in the right direction, even if it is in inches!

I filed the on-line claim for physiotherapy services right after my appointment.  No more letting the invoices pile up and then forgetting to file them.  Only took a couple of minutes and the money will be back in my account in a couple of days!