YNAB You Need A Budget

[Holmes245]

A goal tracker seems to be something quite a few people want, me included. Would love to see this. I would personally like it if there was a Debt Snowball or debt elimination plan/report as well, whether it was included in the goal tracker or not. I know Jesse used to include this as a spreadsheet with YNAB Pro. Seems it would only be fitting to incorporate it into YNAB as well. Just my thoughts.

Joel

[tallison]

But once you are done with the debt snowball -- which is a temporary condition -- you will never need this again.
This is best in a spreadsheet because it's only for a year or two.

I would rather see items that will be used for 5 years and beyond rather then the quick fix utilities.

Even with Quicken I have used spreadsheets for all my major snowball projects.

[Holmes245]

Actually tallison, that's a good point regarding the debt snowball. I'm still for the goal tracker though. Would definitely be motivating and be useful five years from now and beyond.

[Joel]

My goal tracker would be used for various savings goals and not as a debt reduction tool

[barnabycourt]

I could easily see a goal tracker as another principal tab (accounts/budget/reports/goal tracker). Debt snowball, individual savings goals etc., would all logically fall under the same heading. Goal tracker has a menu to "add a goal". First question for the "add a goal" wizard is what type of goal (savings, get out of debt, etc.). List of goals could be presented with major goals and sub goals so the master goal might be "eliminate credit card debt" with a sub goal for each credit card. Not sure how you would link things to the accounts/budget and that really is the most difficult part of the whole equation. You could do something like linking a goal tracker entry to a budget category and linking a debt snowball category to a credit card account. As long as people were ok with having everything on budget it could be tracked pretty easily. Only problem is that for credit cards people would have to add the entries for interest charged each month and that could be problematic for many people.

Something that would look like the following
Goal Tracker
-- Debt Snowball ($1,000 of $4,000 or 25% completed)
-- -- Mastercard ($500 of $500, 100% completed)
-- -- Visa ($500 of $4,500, 11% completed)

-- Savings for New Car ($1,000 of $10,000, %10 completed)

[letseatpaste]

The more I think about it, I'm not sure how it'd work for tracking debt, since you're not really tracking a category balance but an account balance. I had it more in mind for keeping track of various savings goals. I don't think I'd want it automatically filling in budget amounts for me, though.

I think it'd be good for annual or semi-annual expenses, right now there's not really a good way (beyond making notes) for YNAB to reflect that you might be saving for your $321.12 car insurance premium due in October. It keeps track as you save, but after a few months you might forget exactly how much you will owe, especially if you have several similar bills. It'd be nice to have that instant view to see where you're at without digging up old invoices and bills.

[Holmes245]

Yes, I like barnabycourt's idea of having the Goal Tracker as a separate tab. I think this would help encourage people to continue to work towards their savings goals.

[PoundSterling]

I think a Goal Tracker feature could work along the lines of this:
-What are you saving for? (text field)
-How much do you want to save?
-When do you want to reach your goal? (numeric field, alongside a days/months/weeks/years pick-list)
-How much have you got already?
-Savings Requirement = (numeric field alongside a "per day/month/week/year" indicator)

If you leave just one field blank (usually the last one) the tracker would calculate the missing variable. So far so good. But the cherry on the cake would then be an optional button to "add to budget". This would create a master category of "Savings Goals" and a sub-category of whatever you typed in the text field (e.g "new car"). Finally, a message should pop up to confirm that a new savings category has been created with a starting balance of <"how much have you got already?" response goes here>. In theory, if you maintain a zero-based budget throughout the month and entered a positive number in the starting balance this will immediately put you over-budget by that amount. The message therefore should therefore also remind you to review the budget to account for the starting balance (re-assign from another category or categories).

MS Money had a similar "savings wizard", which also included an APR variable (%) in the above list of questions. I usually entered zero for this so that I had a raw goal calculation (I considered any interest as a bonus that might or might not let me reach my goal sooner). I did however, use the wizard many times to do APR calculations for me!

Another feature of the MS savings wizard was an option to adjust for inflation: you'd enter the inflation rate then the wizard would account for this in the goal (displaying both the raw and adjusted savings amounts).

I don't envisage this being used as a debt reduction tool in the sense that it would calculate amortization schedules but technically it could be used to set a debt reduction goal in the sense of "I want to pay off 5000 by N weeks/months/years". You could use the "inflation" variable to account for the load interest or even ask starting question about whether the savings goal is for savings or debt reduction, then use the response to drive how the APR variable is applied to the calculation.

I currently calculate my savings goals outside of YNAB using the above method and then paste the calculation into the category memo.

[ZyronEnder]

I think the idea of a goal tracker is an excellent idea! Add my name to the list of folks who would find this very useful.

[TF2]

The two things I would want to use it for:

Savings Goals: Am I on track to save so much in some category by some date? what do I need to save per month to get there?

Spending Goals: Am I (on average) keeping my spending to the goals I set for myself?

Currently the spending reports will show my per month spending but not my per month savings in my categories...

[monkeyknifefight]

New to YNAB (started Jan 2011), so please forgive me if this has been address already, but this is the one major lacking feature of the application! In every other way YNAB is awesome. I have already begun to evangelize it to others...but alas we really NEED this feature.

We already have our buffer and, as of last month, have zero retail debt. Some sort of "Goal" tracking functionality is what is sorely needed. I'm finding myself trying to figure out ways to work around this glaring issue by using a spreadsheet, but this adds unnecessary redundancy and extra work keeping it updated. It's definitely not an elegant solution.

I have a master category titled "Projects/Planning" and a sub-item category underneath titled "New Car - Wife". We have determined once that category balance reaches a certain amount (25% of the total price of the new car), we will begin car shopping. I really like PoundSterling's suggested approach. It would be great to be able to not only track the percentage "to goal", but to also be able to input a goal date and total amount of vehicle cost. These variables affect each other. For instance: Let's say we want to be at 25% by June 2011, we estimate the car will cost $35,000. YNAB would show how much would need to be budgeted each month to reach that goal by that date. Come May 2011, we get some actual "out the door" figures (upgrades, taxes, licensing, etc) and the total amount becomes $41,300. It would be nice to go into YNAB, adjust the total amount with the new figure, and then see how much more percentage wise needs to be budgeted.

This would also open up the door to some really nice reports. The ability to see how close you are to goals, or the completion of them, would be a huge psychological boost.

Perhaps Jesse can chime in on this?

[monkeyknifefight]

Bump.

It's been over a year, so I want to keep this alive

[rlogue06]

Me too

[monkeyknifefight]

I'm going to keep bumping this until I'm either banned or given a response (a thread of hope)

Is this in v4?

[Joel]

It's not in version 4.