
Outgrown YNAB?
I have used YNAB for several years now, and it has changed everything about my life. I manage finances for my household and I really don't understand what I was doing before YNAB. THANKS YNAB!
Now that we have paid our debts, prepared for retirement, and sent our student to college, I am getting the feeling that I've outgrown it. Does anyone else feel like there's a point when you have too much money to worry about spending $150 on dining out rather than $100?
Or maybe I've just strayed too far from the YNAB path? I just felt like it was easier to justify when I could see real changes. I've been contemplating the idea of just picking a minimum checking account balance at the end of the month, and sending the rest to investments.
Anyone have thoughts about any of that rambling?
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When I was doing the Dave Ramsey plan using YNAB I found budgeting to be pretty stressful because my budget was so tight, so eventually I switched up his plan and made up my own. Now my budget is a lot less strict and tight and it's a lot less stressful. Maybe you need to just increase your dining out to $150?
I actually discovered YNAB in 2011 and got myself out of debt, but then I got lazy and quit. Believe me, if I had been using YNAB continuously that entire time I would be in a much better financial state today so I would urge caution because you really don't want to feel the regret I feel right now. Actually, I'm in a lot better shape than a lot of people because I kept investing a lot and avoiding debt until my divorce last year, but I was on the credit card float with no emergency fund, so really I was one month behind instead of having the money to pay my cc right on hand when I make a charge and having a 3-6 month emergency fund, my goal. If you get off YNAB, just be very careful not to let it all go by the wayside. The way YNAB allows me to use credit cards responsibly and never get into the credit card float situation (except under an emergency situation) to me makes the little bit of effort it takes to keep up with my budget worth it. All I really do is reconcile my accounts and budget once a month (I'm paid monthly so I don't even need a buffer to do this) and then enter my transactions on the go, checking my budget before making a purchase.
Ok, wait, I lied, sometimes I just stare at my budget and admire it. And sometimes I think about how to tweak it because that's fun for me. What can I say, I'm a nerd!
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I’m where you’re at but I still find value. You could probably do what you describe but I still find that YNAB maximizes my savings and allows me to know exactly where my money is going. I still like that feeling of control and knowledge.
As for your dining out example, I don’t worry about that any more either. But I like knowing in general how much I spend in that category each month.
Another thing I’d miss is knowing exactly how much I have set aside for everything. I like knowing how my savings is divvied up. Like how much is set aside for property taxes, home maintenance, car replacement, vacation, etc. rather than just having one giant pot of savings.
If you do stop using the software, keep us posted on your results. My YNAB usage has definitely changed over the years. Rolling with the punches is done very easily these days with no guilt whatsoever.
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Maybe a starting point could be to create larger categories to simplify tracking, e.g. monthly bills grouped together, core for groceries/gas/household/etc., and fun stuff to include dining out/entertainment/travel/etc. It would make it easier to continue, and still help you identify if you start to drift away from the four rules
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I've actually started a bit with some of these ideas. Maybe I'll just take them to the next level. I've already moved savings to Ally because I like having it off budget, and their buckets function like YNAB categories.
I could take a few of my credit cards off budget, that way I don't have to track so many categories and transactions; it's like YNAB Lite.
I'll report back with the brilliant insights that I am sure to have in this process. 😁
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Well, that didn't take very long. 🤣
In the planning stage of removing a few cards out of the budget I made a few realizations: 1. I want to keep tracking them, which is 98% of the effort and then 2. my reward would be to put myself on the float.
So, I'm going to lean more into Alemap suggestion and reduce categories rather than transactions. I think it's probably all the detail work that's causing the angst.
I think I would like YNAB to be more of a one stop shop, but really it's designed for one specific task and there's only heartache to be gained by trying to use it for more (Investment tracking, retirement planning, etc.)
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Last night I narrowed my spending categories down from 26 to 14. I have also removed all of my non-spending accounts. So I'm at 6 credit cards and my checking account.
I'm on the fence about putting my savings account on budget. I put longer term savings there for the extra interest. I know it's not a life changing difference, but a free lunch is a free lunch. The fungible aspect of dollars can make it a little tricky when you start spending big chunks of money in YNAB. When all your cash is in checking it's fantastic, but when you forget that a $12,000 credit card payment is being drawn today and the cash is in the wrong account....that's not fantastic; so I've gotten in the habit of making the bank transfer on the day I make the purchase. I know that's not really a shortcoming of YNAB, but my own habits and thought processes. Maybe I should make a note to be more responsible and record upcoming credit card payments.
(On a side note, it's funny how two days ago I thought I was a responsible adult, and now I write that paragraph of ridiculous behavior. I'm just going to grow up and put the savings account on budget.)
nolesrule I have been using Personal Capital for about 6 months. I like most of what it does, but when I removed my investments from their service, they removed the historical values for those accounts; so I tried YNAB reports. Now I'm going to take your advice and try some spreadsheets. The only one I want right this second is net worth, which is easy enough to build. An asset allocation might be nice, but sounds trickier.
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Okay, I think I'm back on track. Over the last two days I have greatly reduced the number of categories I have, brought savings back into the budget, and added tracking accounts. This should lower the amount of budget adjustments, give me a better view of my total picture, and consolidate my monthly net worth data.
I think the mistake I was previously making with the tracking accounts is that I was linking them, causing all kinds of havoc when transactions occurred. Now I can just adjust their balances once a month.
Thanks to everyone for your insights; they really reminded my why I started using YNAB in the first place.
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goose61282 said:
I'm on the fence about putting my savings account on budget. I put longer term savings there for the extra interest. I know it's not a life changing difference, but a free lunch is a free lunch. The fungible aspect of dollars can make it a little tricky when you start spending big chunks of money in YNAB.I'm glad you came to your senses and put your savings in your budget. 😉Because what you said there has nothing to do with having your savings in your budget. This is exactly what most of us do. We maximize our interest in long term savings and use scheduled transactions and running balance to make sure we have enough in checking at all times.
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goose61282 said:
I think the mistake I was previously making with the tracking accounts is that I was linking them, causing all kinds of havoc when transactions occurred. Now I can just adjust their balances once a month.Yes, that's exactly how most of us handle our net worth reports and YNAB handles that excellently. I have my full net worth going back to 2012.
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Hi all, I have a question of a similar line of thought. I have been using YNAB for years and it has truly changed how I see/use money and has given me some financial freedom. I am trying out a YNAB-lite practice since I recently got married and my spouse and I have combined funds.
We are both equally frugal, but my spouse sees entering transactions and all the budget categories as unnecessary and a hassle. We both earn decent wages and the goal of YNAB at this point is joint savings goals, and using the end-of-the-month money towards paying off student loans/maximizing investments.My YNAB-lite idea is to just have 3 main spending categories. (Monthly expenses, my fun money, his fun money).
Since I've used YNAB for years, I have the YNAB reports, so I have a good idea of what our monthly expenditures are multiplied by two (gas, food, student loans, rent, etc). The plan is to only enter in transactions for our fun money and just do Reconciliations to figure out the true expenses for the month.
The area I'm troubleshooting
-There are always pending transactions, like checks for rent, credit card balances, etc that make account reconciling more tedious. Anyone tried this before? Any suggestions on how to streamline?
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@noles Maybe I didn't explain my plan well. For example, our average expenses every month are $4500 (including student loan payments). With incoming paychecks this month, I use those funds to accommodate that $4500. Then the overflow fills out $200 fun money buckets. The overflow from that gives us extra student loan payments to pay down the balance more quickly.
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Great thread, I missed it when I was on forum hiatus last year. All I can say is, OMG I can't imagine ever outgrowing YNAB!!
In all my ups and downs it would have never occurred to me. Everyone in my household knows I hang onto our budget for dear life. To me, more money means more responsibility to make wise decisions. When things are tight, yes YNAB gets you out of the mess, but it's basically spend as little as possible, especially on non-essentials. With more money it's all about spending wisely, perhaps on larger expenses. Might be a fine line, but for me it's a huge deal.
Maybe the only difference for me is I don't do a ton of checking categories before I spend if I know in my mind it's there, or I easily have the reserves to cover it. Since we replaced a bunch of major appliances last year I had to restructure that True Expense category, seeding it 50% and then setting a monthly savings goal. Well, whoopsie, it's already all gone because we just decided to replace our 12 year old mattress. I remembered how old our mattress is because I bought it around when I started YNAB in 2009, making small monthly payments (cheap mattress, too). This more expensive one we bought with cash no problem.
I use YNAB for spending tracking and planning only. I look at my YNAB net worth as representative of my cash management progress. All major investments I track separately in a finance program. Everyone has their own personal situation and life stage, but I've found YNAB to help guide me through all of them and I expect the same in the future.
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Pink Pegasus I thought I might chime in since I started this thread a while back and have since tried a few things out for some extended periods.
We use credit cards exclusively for our household spending, so some of this may not be helpful if you don't. The two biggest friction points for me when we started were reconciling endless transactions and trying to categorize everything appropriately.
First, I tried what you were mentioning and only having a few categories. This actually made things more difficult because we would get lazy and then miss entering the bulk of transactions, and it's also much more difficult to monitor spending. We are all using YNAB for a reason after all.
The first thing we did was dedicate one specific credit card for utilities and recurring bills. I just entered the credit card payment for that card as Utilities. This allows us to remove about 6 transactions per month, but still keep an eye on it since the payment is very consistent. It doesn't seem like it's that difficult to enter those transactions as repeating and so on, but as you mentioned, clearing and reconciling these things does add to the load.
In a similar strategy, I removed the spending categories for my wife and I. Instead we both have our own debit cards and checking accounts that I transfer the set amount to each month. For us, this was huge. We use this money for all of the small things that we each want without consulting each other, so this can be as many as 50 transactions some months. Now I don't have to enter a transaction every time I buy a soda at 7-11, or hit up the snack machine.
Finally, as you saw above, I removed half of our categories. Anything recurring goes in one section that I can auto-budget with goals at the beginning of the month, and then that leaves 6 spending categories and 2 savings categories that I budget manually. For your particular situation, I would even recommend that you just pick an affordable amount to pay to the loans and set that payment. There will be very little difference between paying an extra $35 a month, or $400 at the end of the year. This is also how I invest our extra; when I feel like it, I'll just take a lump sum and put it away, the rest of the time it sits causing no stress at all.