Why isn't my "To Be Budgeted" amount changing?
I had all my March paychecks budgeted to spend April, so TBB was zero (yay!). Then I received a $2k travel refund from cancelled trip I wasn't expecting, and assigned that money as TBB; however, my TBB (the green text bubble at the top of the page) still says zero.
Then I decided to take some money budgeted for my mortgage payment and use it elsewhere. I was keeping a two month cushion in that category for no real reason. So I deleted $1400 from the "budgeted column," and once again, the TBB green text bubble still says zero.
Why don't I have $3400 in TBB? What I am doing wrong, or am confused about???
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Do you have money budgeted in May? If so, then YNAB is using that money to fund May
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Oh boy, what a mess! I do have May filled out.
So if I do any future planning, I won't be able to see an accurate picture of my current month? I feel like that can't be right.
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What type of account received the refund?
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My usual checking acct.
I went through and deleted everything I had budgeted in May, and the money is now showing up in the green TBB text bubble.
It is frustrating that if I plan for May, I can't see what is happening with April's money unless I go look at May. I don't get that.
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Turquoise Commander
YNAB is an allocation / envelope budget. If you don't have money in YNAB, you can't budget money, so if there wasn't money for May, you can't budget May. If you want to plan, you can use the goals feature to show how much you'll need (although many of us find goals more trouble than they're worth.)
When you budget May with money you don't have, you are telling YNAB "this is where the next money I get needs to go." So it automatically puts it there. It's definitely not the best design that it doesn't show you this has happened in the current month, but that is in fact exactly what should happen in a cash-based budget. Your plan for May was short by at least $3400, so YNAB looked at the new $3400 and said, "I'm applying it to Turquoise's plan the way they asked me to." -
WordTenor Ok I see the logic in that - although it would be nice if it didn't look like the money "disappeared" in April's budget. I thought I was losing it trying to find the discrepancy.
But here's where it leaves me. I have a six month plus emergency fund. I also have money in sinking funds for various savings goals that I set up. And retirement funding, yada yada. I guess I'm saying I don't really have a problem with spending money I don't have, which it seems like YNAB is great for dealing with.
I tried this free trial because I want to be more deliberate with planning where each dollar goes. I think we can do way better with how much we save each month, cut back on eating out and frivolous spending. So I think its natural to want to see those projections for the coming months and set spending/savings goals?
How can I do this with this app, other than one month at a time, especially if my husband is expecting consulting income beyond his normal salary for the next two months? I did watch the tutorial videos, but I think I'm missing part of how this works.
Thanks for the help!
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Turquoise Commander You can do a "fresh start" to play around with projections (drop down menu in the top left). You're still going to be limited to the money in your accounts right now (otherwise the "to be budgeted" (TBB) goes negative), but if you want to do contingency planning, making a new budget to play around in has worked for me.
I've mostly used it for seeing how far my current savings will stretch by not putting money into my savings categories in my "test" budget, but if you're okay with seeing the TBB be negative, you can do it that way too.
To get back to your original budget from the fresh start, you go to the same menu and select "open budget". Your original budget will be there with a note that it was "archived", but you can open it and continue using it for your day-to-day budgeting with the dollars you actually have.
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Turquoise Commander You can also rename the budgets so that your main budget doesn't say "archived on [date]" and you can change your projection budget to be called "projection budget" "test budget" "sandbox" etc.
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