Today we discuss how to maintain balance between your bank account balance, and your budget balance. It’s a monthly thing you should look at!
(Yes, eventually we’ll make the software smart enough to kind of “watch out” for you.)
Today we discuss how to maintain balance between your bank account balance, and your budget balance. It’s a monthly thing you should look at!
(Yes, eventually we’ll make the software smart enough to kind of “watch out” for you.)
Great reminder, Jesse! I just balanced the bank and the budget and I found a $6 difference. I tracked the discrepancy to a single transaction back in May that was not categorized. In my case it was a single transaction, but you have a great point that it could be a number of transactions that may add up to the discrepancy amount. The trick is to make sure that ALL non-transfer transactions on the on-budget accounts have a category assigned to them.
Hi,
Really loving the program so far. Read a bunch of stuff already, most of the philosophy seems to be making sense.
But I don’t get how the bank balance relates to the budget at all here.
Some background:
I tend to keep a high balance in the checking account, much higher than a month’s budget.
So what I _thought_ I should do when starting budgeting is set my two paychecks from last month as “Income: Available This Month”.
What does the bank balance have to do with this?
Could you please point me to some more written information about this?
(I realize you explained it in the video, I guess I just don’t get it.)
Thanks.
ilxn,
I beleive the point of the system is that all of your income is tracked, including all of the excess in your account.
The system is designed to work on one month’s budget being availiable, and to help you build up to that if it is already there. Once that point is reached, extra funds in the account should still be accounted for in a category.
If you so choose, you can do something (if it does not already exist) along the lines of creating a ‘Emergency Funds’ category, and stick the rest of the entire balance into that. That way you are still able to track monthly income vs. spending, and ensure that you are not making any errors in entering transactions, whether due to unintentionally entering them incorrectly, or forgetting to assign a category on one.
That will be awesome once YNAB “watches for you.”
Earlier this year I finally took the time to make sure our total bank balances matched with our budget and it was close to $800 off! That was a little rough!
Now I make sure the budget and balances match every time I update the budget.
Hi Jesse, you mentioned there will be a functionality in Ynab where you’ll be able to make sure the balance in your bank account will equal what you see in Ynab. i was wondering what kind of ideas you’re thinking about to implement this?