YNAB You Need A Budget

[archbish99]

I know one of the YNAB tenets is that there is no "normal" month, so every month's budget is going to be a little different. I like that -- in Quicken, we usually get to the end of the month and have to pull up calc to total what we have left in various categories to know what we have left to get through the month. This way, we're freer to adjust the category budgets themselves.

In our case, my income is very regular while my wife's is extremely variable. We have a set budget for my money that doesn't change much month-to-month, and the money she makes fills in any gaps. I'd love to be able to start a month with our "usual" budget for my money filled in, and her earnings "Available to Budget" so we can allocate them.

Instead, we apparently have to either start from scratch or carry forward last month's allocations of her budget. Quick budget copies what was done last month, which by definition was changed in response to things that happened last month. I know there's a common workaround, Quick Budgeting the "normal" ahead a month before you make your first change to this month's budget. However, that's a fragile process -- forget it once, and you've lost it. Also, it makes YNAB complain about "over-budgeting" since you've now got a budget in a month with no income.

I'd love to see a "starting budget" or "par budget" option in the Quick Budget menu. Just give me the option to snapshot the current month, and the option to apply that snapshot in any future month. (Editing the snapshot would be nice, too, but that's a lower priority since I can apply, edit, and take a new snapshot.)

[Joel]

I always quick-budget my "par values" into next month... that way it is always there. You can adjust as necessary too.

[Turf_Hacker]

I handle it in a manner similar to Joel. I know the red numbers in future months don't mean anything, so I don't worry about them. Instead of one month ahead, I keep my target budget in the next two months.

In April, I have my target budget stored in May and June. The budget in May is "open" for me to make adjustments to the numbers as April goes on, and the budget in June keeps the target budget. Before setting the May budget, I'll quick budget June into July to keep the target budget intact. I then repeat this basic process every month.

[JcMas]

This is one of the most frustrating, IMHO, lacks of YNAB. While you can schedule any transaction, you can't build a budgeted monthly expense.
For exemple, if I have to pay a rent with the same exactly amount every month, it should be great to be able to create a recurring budget entry wich will fill every month with the same expense's amount.
Any workaround is painfull and a shame for that extraordinary piece of software.

TIA.

[blackdiamond]

JcMas,

I do agree that it would be slick to be able to have budget category automatically generated for a monthly bill, but I'm not sure that I consider manually creating a budget category and entering the same amount each month to be a difficult work around. I can fill in every category in the budget column in less than a 30 seconds that have the same amount each month. The quick budget will copy the previous months amounts and allow you to simply adust the ones that are not standard.

I suspect that the reason that one isn't automatically generated is that it would create another layer of complexity for both the programmer and user. For example, the easiest way to auto generate it would be to create a one to one relationship between recurring transactions and a budget category, but this would require a set structure for these master and subcategories that would limit the programs flexibility. The code would somehow have to link the user chosen category for any recurring transaction after the fact and then populate the budget from there. This would be difficult and is really only useful for forcasting since it's sort of already covered by the quick budget feature.

[Malisa]

Two options:

1) If they're scheduled transactions, one of the quick budget options is to budget scheduled transactions. You can either do that for the whole budget column using the Quick Budget button at the top of the budgeted column OR you can do it by individual cells.

2) You can (which may be earlier in the thread, I didn't read) forward your target or par budget on to a future month. Then, each month you'd just forward it to the one after that. Example: Let's say it's May first and you've budgeted for the month 'just the way you like it' (this is assuming you're operating on last month's income and have all the money to fund the month before the first). Before you do any changes to May's budgeted numbers, use the Quick Budget button at the top of the budgeted column for June and choose the option of using last month's budgeted numbers. It does a copy and paste of that column, basically. You WILL show as overbudgeted in June, but it's not June, so it doesn't really matter. That way, if you make any adjustments during May, you've got your target safely out in the following month.

I, personally, take it one step further because I don't like seeing the red numbers next month. I push the target budget to the month after next. So right now, my target budget is sitting in July. I then zero out (Quick budget button again, budget to zero) the middle month (June in this example). I like to thoughtfully fill it in when the time comes, rather than just taking the static budget. I probably have about 30 categories and it's no biggie to just type them all in. I have my target on the right and my last historical month on the right. Then, if I don't want to see the red, I can change my window size to only show two months. That still makes it wide enough to be workable.