YNAB You Need A Budget

[CrewPens]

I am using an older version of YNAB and I have been keeping track of all my expenses and credits and putting any extra money into a buffer each month. I only have one bank account and my buffer is currently about 3x that of my actual bank account. Is this possible? I'm not financially savvy so initially I had a hard time wrapping my head around the buffer concept and now that it's bigger than my actual bank account I am thoroughly confused at how this is possible.

thanks

[malisab]

No, if you only have one account, it's not possible. Have you categorized EVERYTHING? Categories are what makes money leave the budget. It sounds like you didn't categorize somethings.

[bookman413]

Unless the extra cash is sitting in a cookie jar in your house, then you probably have some uncategorized transactions (expenditures). If you have left any uncategorized then the software doesn't know to subtract them from your budget and that would be the cause of your falsely inflated buffer category.

To make a larger point beyond just the buffer category, if you add up all of your current categories' available balances, the total you get should be equal to the money you actually possess in bank accounts or cookie jars full of cash. If it doesn't then something is off.

[sweetums]

Sounds like you missed some categories. Just go back over your current categories and see what you missed.

[TheGooch]

Your buffer is partly determined by income available in all of your "on budget" accounts. If you only have a single on-budget account, then its balance should "true-up" with the money in all of your category balance plus whatever "buffer" you have. I like keeping the periodic expense items + the buffer in a single account, and long term, non-periodic (e.g. don't spend it unless I want to , as opposed to monthly food expenses, that I need to live ) in higher-interest accounts.