Negative buffering days ! What does it mean?
Hi, please can someone explain to me what it means to have negative buffering days on your budget page? A couple of day ago i had 15 day showing on my age of money and now i see -13.9 buffering days. i don't understand what this mean and how it jumped for 15 days age of money to -13.9 days of buffering.
Thanks
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Days of Buffering is a Toolkit Extension feature. If you turn that off (and ensure the "Hide Age of Money" feature is off), you should be back to showing Age of Money. Not that I'd recommend that, but it would.
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dakinemaui thanks ! i will try that and see.
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Beige Chef I tried it and it worked. Age of money is back and buffering is off. Thanks a lot.
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Ha, but what does it mean...? Negative days of buffering.
I don’t use the toolkit, so can’t explain.
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Powder Blue Pony I wander!
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Powder Blue Pony A negative Age of Buffering means the sum of your on budget accounts is negative.
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I haven't figured out how Age of Money or Days of Buffering (from toolkit) are calculated, even though people have explained it many times. My best guess would be that you have spent more than you brought in. Is that possible?
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MsTJ not at all! i haven't even spent close to one third of what i brought in this month. Also i had some money left from January that was rolled over
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MsTJ Age of Money is a meaningless stat, so it doesn't really matter how its calculated. Days of Buffering is only slightly more useful.
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MsTJ Days of Buffering works how people think AOM should work. 😉 It looks at your on-budget Net Worth and calculates out (in theory) how long your money will last you based on your average spending. (I don't know what all goes into figuring out that "average spending" number.) If you have more debt than assets (e.g. negative net worth), DoB will be negative, because math.
I may not have the details exactly right because I'm on my phone and I don't have toolkit settings at my fingertips, but that's the gist of it.
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Vibrant is correct regarding Days of Buffering. Furthermore, the Toolkit has options for the lookback period in which to base the average daily spend amount on.
The issue with this of course is that unless you don't have large irregular expenses, those tend to skew your daily average spending. For example, let's say you buy a $20k car in cash. If it happened 9 months ago, it will affect your DOB based on lookback periods as follows:
1 month: $0/day
3 months $0/day
6 months: $0/day
1 year: $54.79/day
And for All Dates, it depends on how many days your budget has been around. Divide the amount by that number of days to determine the daily effect.
But if you buy a car in cash, there's a good chance you'll be keeping it for 10 years or more, so the real daily long-term effect would be about $5.48/day if you own it for 10 years.... but DOB won't see that until the 10 years have passed. And then you'll buy another car, and go through the same process all over again.Now, I just described buying a car. How many other categories are in the budget that would behave similarly over longer time periods? Think about it.
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Thank you Vibrant and nolesrule for once again attempting to help me understand Age of Money (AoM) and Days of Buffering (DoB from toolkit). I tried, many times, to understand them, and have basically given up. I find them entertaining, and work with them, in my way, but have accepted that I will never understand them, and that's okay with me. I don't try any longer because they make my head spin, like now.
Now to go lie down until the room stops spinning. 🤯. One day I will actually stop attempting to understand those numbers but today was not the day. I tried once again and ended up in the same place I always end up.🥴
Beige Chef Sorry, I didn't intend to hijack your question. Did Vibrant's or Nolesule's post help any? For me, I just accept what is given and work to increase it, by increasing the money in my budget. That has saved me lots of dizziness.
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I think I do understand both AOM and DOB now. But knowing were we are financially doesn’t stem from those numbers at all, and that’s allright. AOM money is just this insignificant entertaining number in the corner. Is has only been going up since I started YNAB. When is does go down one day I understand I spent all the money I had on budget the day I started YNAB. Luckily more came in after that.
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My issue is that my HELOC is an on budget account which totally skews the numbers.
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pksublime How so? If you're carrying a balance on your HELOC, that's debt that you don't have the cash to offset, right? So it would take you X days at your current rate of income and outflow to accrue enough cash to pay it off.
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Except that a HELOC is a 2nd mortgage. My main mortgage doesn't affect this number like that.
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pksublime Is there any benefit to having your HELOC account as a budget account vs a tracking account? Mine is setup as tracking account which seems to work well, but wasn't sure if I'm missing something.
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It means that you owe YNAB money. 😉
