YNAB You Need A Budget

[Anita]

For various reasons I original had my mortgage in different chunks (different fixed periods etc) - now they're all floating so I'm taking the opportunity to mush them all together and refix (saving 0.94% - woohoo ). To add to the complexity I'm also changing the nature and balance of my "normal" account while I do this, and the new mortgage won't be for exactly the same amount as my old ones totalled (they rounded up to give room for accrued interest). I'm also taking the opportunity to increase my repayments (I was already well above minimum, this is just raising it a little more) and get a better deal on house and contents insurance.

I'm a bit worried about how to record all the changes without making a huge mess, or screwing up my net worth calculation.

I can handle the small number of changes to my budget (repayments, insurance), it's the accounts that freak me out - particularly the off-balance ones which work just fine now, but I've never played enough with to properly understand.

I can't work out if I should just create new account for everything and do transfers to them and then hide the old ones, or whether it makes more sense to pick one of my mortgage accounts and do debt transfers into it from my other mortgage accounts then hide them once they're zero balance.

Does anyone have any experience or advice about how to make this simple?

[Joel]

I would create a new account, and transfer all the old ones into the new account. That way they match reality.

[blackdiamond]

If they are off budget, as I would expect, I would simply start a new account for the consolidated mortgage and close the others. Because off budget accounts don't effect the budget and don't really do much beyond tracking it really doesn't matter. You can simply adjust the budgeted amount in your on budget account where the payments come from.

This is exactly why I don't have any off budget accounts to track things that are more easily tracked on the paper statements. All that matters for your monthly budget is how much your payment is.