Starting in November - how do I include my savings account?
In adding my accounts, I added our savings account. It is primarily an account I use to set aside money to make sure we have the funds to pay our property taxes when they come due twice a year. I'm not quite sure how to account for it in the budget. One of the tax bills is in November, so I budgeted that amount for the taxes, but the rest? I'm not sure the best way to label it so I don't allocate it to other categories.
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Hi Green Lathe ! This is a great question!
Savings accounts are purposefully included as a part of your budget, because we want you to give those dollars a job, too! It's a different way of thinking about savings, but it's really powerful.
What you need to do is assign the dollars in your savings account to savings categories. What are you saving for? Emergencies? Vacation? Or those taxes! Make specific categories for those things in your budget and assign the dollars there.
The nice thing about that is you'll be able to attach Goals to those categories, and that will focus your savings even more.
I hope this helps! :) -
this helps me too, but what happens when you allocate a transaction to leave your checking to go into the savings.? I have a category to allocate from checking, and the specific category within savings... but when do i adjust the amount budgeted to the specific savings category? so i had 450 in savings category. I budgeted 75 from checking this month. so i put the transaction in as savings from checking, and my savings account shows it but the budgeted for the savings category is still 450. where is that 75 currently at in my budget. (i have no idea if this makes sense, i am just confusing myself more trying to explain it. lol)
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Gray Drum (1d39fb44f280) I have both my savings and checking accounts on budget. When I transfer from my savings to checking, in YNAB I go to the savings account and do an outflow and select the checking account to tranfer to. You'll see the Transfer option in the Payees. That will then make it an inflow in the checking account. Just start with the account that has the outflow and select the account that the money is transferred to.
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Gray Drum (1d39fb44f280) In additions to Sky Blue Song (95ad9cb420aa) . Ynab doesn't care what account your money is in, so just transferring money from one account to another has zero affect on your budget. The money is still there just in a different account and note that transfering money does not expect a category for the transaction. I think the part that is missing here is that you can't just do the transfer between account and expect YNAB to put it in a savings category. You have to assign the dollars a job for that savings.
See https://docs.youneedabudget.com/article/202-budgeting-your-savings on how this works.
Another good read on managing savings is https://www.youneedabudget.com/a-tale-of-two-savings-strategies/
Accounts are a place to hold your money, but there should only be one budget for that money.
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