Age of Money 2019
Starting up the AoM challenge for the new year!
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1_4gVfeRXso4wIgASo7dPOGz5qY0H9tLOvSXQARPclHg/edit?usp=sharing
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AOM went down this month from 43 to 38. We spent some of our built up funds in vacation and household furniture categories so it was expected. My hubby and I splurged on matching recliners (we call them our Archie and Edith chairs) for our anniversary! Can't wait for them to be delivered :)
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July check in.
AoM: Up 14 from 211 in June.
DoB: down 22 from 337 in June.
I'm still recording some really big spending, all planned, and all from saved category balances. I spent $10,000 more in the first seven months of this year than I did in the same time frame in 2018 and 2017, with only two months in the last seven where my net worth actually went up by a modest amount. The biggest outflows have been for a dental implant. That is finally over (successfully) and all the insurance reimbursements received. The August to December stretch are usually my more liberal spending months in any given year, but I suspect that this year those months will look frugal in comparison with the first part of 2019.
I expect my AoM to climb steadily for the next couple of months regardless of spending because I've hit my December/18 buckets of inflows. I received a $10K gift from my father's estate in December as well as my usual income, so it will take a while to spend my way through the December buckets.
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Well, July took a hard hit for us. We were under contract to sell our old house and buy a new one. The buyer for our old house fell through a week before close. After much deliberation we decided to pull all of our available fund to be able to still purchase our new house. AOM was over 150 (which was my initial goal for the year) and now it is at 29 😭. Old house is back on the market and I cannot WAIT to get it sold to build back up all of our funds I had to WAM from.
My new goal is to be back over 100 by the end of the year. At this point, I’m hoping it’ll be sold and done in September which will give us somewhere in the 100 days range until the end of the year. It’s been a challenging couple of weeks sacrificing what we had planned on spending on new purchases, but we will make it!
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AOM already back to 53 after the huge plummet last month when we bought our house without selling the other one. Well, old house if still on the market. It feels good knowing we live well below our means, but we have two mortgage payments coming out today and the credit card gets paid this week also.... I have a feeling within the next 7 days our AOM will drop back down just a little.
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KStottle I feel you! I did the same, and my old house finally sold last week after 4 months on the market. My AOM took a huge hit (not sure I'll get to my goal for the year now, but living in a smaller, newer house that's not draining my budget is worth it), but I'm grateful that using YNAB means I took a hit on AOM instead of incurring debt. Hang in there, it'll sell!
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Joining this challenge after finishing the Debt Challenge last month. Starting at 3 days 😐
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July AoM 375 (+2), DoB 524 (+8)
Back from vacationing. Had a lot of fun, so totally worth it! 🙂
Next year I'll try spending less money. Shouldn't bee too hard ... 👍
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Just joining the team here! I was doing great at 63 days for AoM, but it's been a slow summer, and I'm down to 19 :( But i'm just starting a new job and I'd love to get back up to 60 by the end of the year.
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Joining up now.
Started YNAB in June this year. Was living pay to pay, and on credit. Since then I've got off the pay-to-pay cycle but my AoM still has a long way to go.\
Would like to get it up to 14 by the end of the year but even that may not be realistic given the amount of debt I'm carrying and trying to pay down.
Anyway, will see how I go :)
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spyral
Go you on getting off the pay to pay cycle, though, and in short order! Took me way more than 2 months to do so.
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Technicolor Cheetah Thanks!
I earn a pretty reasonable salary but it was a case of me just not paying any attention to what I was doing with my money and being profligate.
So getting off the pay-to-pay cycle for me was just a matter of thinking hard about what I should, as opposed to could, be doing with my money. In that respect, I guess I am pretty lucky.
YNAB helped, almost immediately, to change the way I thought about and prioritised my spending so that my first focus is on what I need to be spending money on and not what I want to spend it on. I'm still planning and putting aside money for the wants, but doing it in a much better way.
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Aged money to 9 this month from 4 last month. Baby steps. :)
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September 10
October 10
November 14
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December 18 days to end the year.
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I started YNAB in January. Age of money went from 138 in July to 113 in August.
Turns out spending large chunks of cash on home improvement and multiple car maintenance issues is bad for one's AOM. DOB is currently 150. Now that we've gone through more cash than we started YNAB in January with, it will be interesting to see how it waxes and possibly wanes. Now ugly reality raises its head, so I may need to decrease my target AOM by end of 2019 to 130, maybe less. We'll see!
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AoM 370 (-5), DoB 540 (+16)
AoM is still feeling the aftermath of my vacationing, I guess? Haven't really spent money on much else lately. 😄
My floating mortgage interest rate keeps increasing, but I don't worry yet. I keep an eye on how this develops.
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I have jumped to 64 for my AOM and 93 for DOB. However some health issues have kept me busy and distracted and I have done no entries since the middle/end of July. So much so that I just did a restart.
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The AOM keeps going up, even after buying the new furniture. DOB took a hit, but it's almost back up where it was at the end of June.
July:
August:
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My DoB is super inflated due to me borrowing $30,000 on a new line of credit (0% promotional introductory rate with no fees for 90 days) and putting it in my high-interest savings account (at the same bank). My AoM is beginning to climb because I hit my December/18 pots of income, and I received a $10K payment from my dad's estate in that month in addition to my income, so it will take me a few months to use up those pots. I expect my AoM to keep climbing.
JULY
AUGUST
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AoM for August ended with 29 days, however overspent by approx. $600 on the credit card due to paying for an upcoming vacation, unanticipated school expenses etc. So that might not be entirely accurate. Still trying to get a feel for how AoM is calculated. Still feels like we're on the paycheck to paycheck cycle even though we are still putting a mighty chunk away into various saving groups... We'll see how this month turns out!
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AOM in the last week has gone from 138 in July, to 113 in August, back to 138 in September. It undoubtedly going to roller coaster again, we spent a lot on budgeted purchases in the previous credit card cycle that we paid off in September. DOB is 163, up from 150. I suspect it's going to yo yo as we tend to spend more in big boluses (start of school, Christmas, vacations, house projects, etc).
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6 months (and a couple of weeks) in and this is where I am at. I think I am on target for 280 by year's end.
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With our house selling challenges the last few months, AOM hasn't moved much. Setting my new goal to be back over 90 for the end of the year. I think it's obtainable if we strap in our spending, but a few big expenditures are still coming up... so it'll be tough.
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A new high score for me, just passed 400.
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hello! just wondering where to find the 'Days of Buffering' metric on nYNAB? Am I being completely oblivious?
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TooClumsy It's a third party Chrome/Firefox addon. It doesn't show up in the app.
Google toolkit for ynab
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Moohouse OMG, that's life changing 🤣 Thanks!
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TooClumsy
Isn't it great? One suggestion is to only change a couple things at a time on Toolbox because I once checked all the boxes I thought I wanted, put them into effect, hated something, then spent half an hour trying to figure out which one was the one I didn't like...
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Technicolor Cheetah Thanks for that! yes, my instinct was to go a bit nuts switching everything on, but on second thoughts I only switched on my 'curated' selection 😂
Being able to hide/change the inspector panel is life changing, as I look at my budget a lot when I'm at work (cheekily) so i'm always conscious of salary/income showing :)
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October's AOM is 155, up from September's 138. I realized it's because May was a 5 Friday month, so 3 paychecks 5 months ago. Days of Buffering was 173, up from 163 in September.
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I dont understand, i had 226 but then nov hit and i dropped to 220. Why did i lose 6 days? I dont think I did anything different.....
I want my days back :(
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RIP_MSMoney They go up and down. I wouldn't worry about it too much. Here are my last 4 months:
325 321 311 327 I have done quite a bit of spending lately though. The whole thing is rather bogus to me. I'm going to stop tracking after this year.
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RIP_MSMoney did you have bills that got paid on the 1st? AOM changes based on cash spending (Any non-credit card). It averages the age of money of your last 10 cash-based transactions. Without more information, the most logical answer would be that mortgage/rent & other bills got paid on the first and caused the average to drop.
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RIP_MSMoney
It just means you've completely used up the money that arrived 226 days ago and are now spending money that arrived 220 days ago. Don't sweat it.
I'm paid once a month, and at roughly the same time as when all my bits of interest deposit in accounts, so when I use up a pot of money...........whoosh...............I generally drop by 30. It's inevitable really.
If you spend less than you make as a pattern of your life, your AoM will increase month-end over month-end, until you spend some savings you've been building up for something big: car, vacation, house, etc
I'm planning on doing a fresh start on January 1, so I'll be starting 2020 with an AoM of 0 even though there will be 6-9 months of income in my categories on that day.
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RIP_MSMoney It all depends on how much money you "earned" 226 days ago. It seems to me that's when you started with your current budget? In that case, it just means you ran out of your initial savings. Going forward, as HappyDance writes, AoM will keep increasing over time if you keep amassing money. If not, it will gradually or rapidly drop depending on what happens in your budget. Don't mind it too much, really. 🙂
My AOM peaked at 333 before buying my current apartment, fell to 99 over the next few months, and grew back to 300 over the next two years. Just passed 400 last month.
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Moohouse Yeah, I started around April. Being that we were already doing budgeting prior to switching, we had a fair amount in our accounts prior to starting. So the only way for AoM to increase is for your account balances to grow? What if we take all overages and throw towards paying off the house. Does that mean our AoM would not increase? Just curious.
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RIP_MSMoney Basically - yes. If over time your account balances keep growing then so will your AoM.
Paying off the mortgage will as far as I'm aware decrease your AoM now (spending large amounts of money generally does), but with no more interest to pay AoM should build back up over time (given that you don't spend the saved mortgage expenses on something else).
If your house is tracked in YNAB along with the mortgage and you pay down the entire mortgage then net worth will not move. If you don't track the house or the mortgage in YNAB then your net worth will probably plummet by a huge expense like paying down a large mortgage.
Usually if you keep paying down a debt aggressively then AoM will usually stay very low. As your AoM now is pretty high already I would assume it would start declining - possibly rapidly. At what rate I couldn't say, depends on a lot of things.
Now, you shouldn't make financial decisions like this based on what makes a graph or AoM number bigger or prettier, but rather what will suit your long term financial goals. So paying down the house faster may indeed be the right move for you - but that's not for me or YNAB to say. 🙂
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I just received an invoice notification for something I ordered (and I was sure I paid for) back in July. After some fruitless searching I'm now sure I never paid at all, and I can't even recall getting any invoice. If I had recorded the purchase in YNAB when ordering, I would have notice not receiving any invoice in due time. I didn't, so shame on me! 😥
One notification every few years is OK by me, this is my second* since starting YNAB in 2013.
* Not counting the late fees from my library, as I don't track the due dates in YNAB. I should put them in my calendar, but I tend to forget ... 😄
Just paid my next vacation with credit (as usual), so this may in fact nudge my AOM for December.
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Technicolor Cheetah said:
October's AOM is 155, up from September's 138. I realized it's because May was a 5 Friday month, so 3 paychecks 5 months ago. Days of Buffering was 173, up from 163 in September.November's AOM is 137, down from October's 155. I moved a large amount of money from an off-budget account to an on-budget account, then added that to my kids' college funds. The bolus of money in and out caused my AOM to go from 158 to 139 with one transaction.
Once again, I'm reminded that AOM doesn't mean a lot in terms of financial stability or security. AOM will change quickly if one has large outlays of money, of which I am expecting many next year, so next year's AOM will likely be a roller coaster. All planned and budgeted expenses, all over $4000 each, so each one will be a big hit to the AOM. The number that does mean more is Days of Buffering which is currently at 183 courtesy of a 3 paycheck month. I expect DOB will be a lot smaller in 12 months, again due to planned spending. Our current plans for 2021 are a lot less expensive than 2021's. ; )
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I am still in my trial, but I like the AoM idea. I joined in on the fun and will update next year, as well. It will be fun to see how using YNAB for a year increases the amount of cash we are able to stash. If you would like any assistance adding metrics to the Google sheet, let me know. I would be happy to add formulas to calculate whatever you want to know regarding metrics.
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November's AoM 404 (+3), DoB 553 (+13 since September, didn't record last month)
Readjusted my 2019 AoM goal as the coming (planned) huge expenses will happen some time next year.
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There is no way I will make my number this year. I think I have reached our saturation point. Every expense I have lowers my number. I was increasing 30 days a month but between NOV-DEC I only went 5 (big drop with gradual return). And since Dec 1st I went down 28 lol.
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RIP_MSMoney Yeah, I'm not hitting my arbitrary goal either. Started January at 334. Inched up to 336 by March and then took a rollercoaster ride all the way down to 300 and then up and down and back up to a new high of 342 in November. I'm finishing out December and then I'm done with the AOM metric. It tells me nothing at this point in my budgeting journey. I will probably turn it off with the toolkit to start 2020. Hey, it's cool to write 2020. Yes, 2020!
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Superbone and RIP_MSMoney
Same. My projection at the start of 2019 was that I would hit 365 by end of December. I eventually reduced that forecast to 300. I didn't anticipate the effect of $7K in dental expenses, and running some reimbursable conference organizing expenses through my personal credit card account. I'm currently at 280 and climbing with every new day, but I'm not sure I'm going to make it to the end of December without exhausting one more paycheque, which may mean I don't coast into 2020 with a 300. Meh.
It's been a very expensive year for me, all big-ticket items that I saved up for in advance of purchase. I'm so grateful for the clarity that YNAB provides. It kept me calm while paying bills with a comma in them and buying things with a comma in them.
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