Oldest son now 18, with real money in his account, do I remove his account from my YNAB
So, I have PNC as our bank, and we have several Virtual Wallet and regular checking accounts with them. Two of the regular accounts are for my two sons. Oldest one is 18, and starting to get real money in his account from his odd jobs, etc. In the past, I've been fine with keeping his account as a budget account, because it makes it easy to work with in YNAB since it's just one more YNAB budged account. Now, he's 18, and his money skews our overall numbers at certain times of the month when he is flush and we have just paid big items out of our other accounts.
So, soliciting for advice. Should I establish him with YNAB on his own, and just look at transfers of money into (mostly) and out of (rarely) his accounts as black box events? For categories, I still include his transactions as part of ours. He still lives with us and likely will for a few more years, anyway. On the other hand, I don't want to see his small accumulated fortune as part of our aggregate, since we don't think of it that way and would not move money from his account to ours unless it was to cover something we paid for but was his responsibility to pay for.
Thoughts?
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Yes, I'd move him out to his own YNAB. We did this with our kid this month, and it's working great so far. Obviously it depends on how he feels about getting on board with YNAB, but even if he chooses to manage his money using a different method, it sounds like it's definitely time to split out his account.
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Hi gobuzzgo !
Are you able to move him completely out of your budget? If you don't want to include his income or transactions, you can set him up with his own budget in your YNAB account (you can have multiple budgets). You'd still be able to take a look at his budget if you wanted to monitor things, but he'd also have the freedom to set up his own categories and handle things on his own.
Creating a separate budget in your account would prevent you from having to pay for a separate YNAB subscription, but I'm going to leave a link for our Student Program (since student's receive their first year free). :)
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Faness On the surface, this sounds great. Does each budget have their own user/pass creds? If so, great! If not, well, I don't really think we'd want to share our family budget u/p creds with our son.
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gobuzzgo Currently, using separate credentials and passwords for a single account isn't an option. You can let our development team know you'd like to see that as an option by submitting a Feature Request!
The Student Account may be a better option if you want to keep your personal budget private.
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This is exactly what I'm wondering. Can I run two budgets, one for each person, and import accounts automatically yet assign those funds to only one budget? I'd like to do this for one of my younger kids. . . but I'm not sure how to make certain their account isn't seen as budgetable income on my budget.
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Stefani I would not put the same bank account in more than one budget; that's a recipe for mass confusion. But you can certainly have two people in the family using two separate budgets. My daughter, for example, shares my YNAB account, and she sees only her own checking and savings accounts and can budget all the money therein.
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mamster I wasn't clear - I was imagining two budgets and two separate bank accounts, on one YNAB account, with the two accounts flowing only into their budgets. I've just never tried it but it makes sense. Maybe I'll talk my child into this.
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Stefani Yes, that will work great!
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Are you using direct import with PNC? Are you experiencing double transactions being imported? My wife and I are switching banks (hopefully to PNC) and we have heard PNC has issues with direct import. Mind sharing your experience? Thanks
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Jonathan Copeland I don't have issues with PNC and double transactions. The two issues I have are:
1) Maybe a PNC issue: Every once in a while, some hiccup occurs, and YNAB cannot connect to PNC and simply needs to be re-authenticated to the accounts. That's fine, but it sometimes means there is a delay before I can begin pulling in the latest items (import) that typically lasts anywhere from an hour to less than one day. Just frustrating because I typically go into YNAB with the idea that I start by importing the latest from my PNC accounts. Worst case scenario is that I will manually enter the pending transactions from PNC so that YNAB has the latest/greatest info. Not a big deal, and doesn't happen very often. Also, I tend to do the manual entry a lot anyway just so I know I have the latest when I'm trying to manage a money thing. The PNC import (probably the same for other banks) seems to be once a day.
2) Not a PNC issue: I track my 401(k), and my automatic transactions from my direct deposit get entered into the account register as withdrawals rather than deposits. I think it's a matter of nomenclature and point of view. I see myself as depositing these regular amounts into the 401(k) account as a result of withdrawing that money from my paycheck. My solution is to change the line entry to a deposit on payday (x2, since one is my contribution and the other is the match).
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gobuzzgo And I should add that we have 7 PNC accounts. Three are the virtual wallet (Spend, Reserve, Growth) accounts and the rest are family checking accounts.
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gobuzzgo thank you for replying! Do you notice a difference between virtual wallet and the regular checking in how it functions with YNAB?
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Jonathan Copeland WRT to YNAB, no difference at all. YNAB treats all your budget checking/savings accounts the same. I try not to let the auto transfers happen between Reserve and Spend and Growth and Spend; I prefer to anticipate those needs and manually transfer money myself.
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