YNAB You Need A Budget

[roakleyca]

Not sure if a thread like this has already been started (search isn't all that useful on this forum)

But I would love to see how everyone has their categories organized.

I'm working on my setup tonight. I'm thinking of going with the weekly schedule cause I'm still in pre-buffer mode.

Once I get my buffer, I'm sure I'll change my categories again.

And any personal category "best practices" you wish to share would be great as well!

[rodeoclown]

Check out the training videos here: http://www.youneedabudget.com/support/t ... -education
(You'll need to scroll down below the class list).

The first video in the "Budget" section is called "Creative category organisation", and it's well worth watching.
I switched to using a different method of organising my categories this year, and it makes it much easier to figure out what categories NEED to be funded vs just what would be nice.

[Budget_Ninja]

Net Worth
--Loan
--Mortgage Principle
--Mortgage Extra Payment
--Emergency Fund
--Choice Fund
--Retirement
--HBP Payback
Food
--Groceries
--Restaurants
Residential
--Property Tax
--Mortgage Interest
--Home Insurance
--Household supplies
--Furniture
--Repairs and Maintenance
--Landscaping
--Appliances
Bills & Utilities
--Mobile Phone
--Water
--Gas
--Storm Water
--Home Phone
--Internet
--Electricity
Transportation
--Maintenance
--Fuel
--Insurance
--Regulatory
--Tolls and Parking
--Replacement
--Repairs
Personal
--Tuition & Education
--Taxes Payable
--Her Spending
--Her Clothing
--His Spending
--His Clothing
--Random Entertainment
--Personal Care Services
--Toiletries
--Postage
--Rx & Medicine
--Misc Fess & Interest
--Professional Services
--Cash Over & Short
--Pet supplies & Services
--Life Insurance
Giving and Holiday
--Birthday
--Christmas
--Holiday & Other
--Charitable Giving
Vacation
--Transportation
--Lodging
--Food
--Entertainment
Employment
--Business Travel
--Business Expense


I like a lot of detail, there are a few categories I could combine above and at least one I could get rid of or rename.
I think its important to have a set of categories that will add to your net worth. I have a minimum amount I put to net worth but strive to put more when I 'save' money by spending less.

Also check out the link: the-rules-f1/how-you-organize-and-sort-yur-categories-t13455.html

[Malisa]

I just told someone in a class this past weekend that there are often these types of threads floating around but that there hadn't been one for a while. Thanks for starting it.

My categories are roughly based on the one in the video rodeoclown mentioned that's called Rainy Day focused (or something like that).

My masters are:
Everyday
Bills
Rule 2-Non-Negotiable
Rule 2-Maint and Repair
X (I don't like the name so I'm not going to type it here, but it's where I budget if I've got funds and don't if I don't...and often have to find money to move into here)
School and Business
Things We Want
Travel (usually hidden or at least collapsed unless we're traveling)

What I have below them isn't as important to share, IMO, because it'd vary so greatly. I will say that a good exercise I did was take every major area of my life and think about if it needed a category in each of those.

Example: Pets

Everyday: Pet Food/Litter
Rule 2-Non-Negotiable: Pet Meds Regular (one dog on thyroid meds, plus Frontline for all)
Rule 2-Non-Negotiable: Pet Grooming (I've tried to say it's discretionary, but with two, big, long-haired dogs...it's mandatory...and expensive)
Rule 2-Maint and Repair: Vet and Irregular Meds
X: Pet Supplies

[marzydj]

Here are mine, with some of the more interesting sub cats in brackets! Beginning to think I may have too many!
Bank Costs
Christmas
Charity
Children (Activities, Birthday, Clothes, Haircut, Music lesson, Pocket Money,School Travel)
Computer
Food
Garden
Gifts
Holiday
Mobile Phone
Personal (Clothes, Doctor, Dentist, Optician, Gym, Haircut, Life insurance, Legal fees, Unexpected expense)
Recreation (Booze, Entertainment, fun money)
Savings
Subscriptions
Transportation (Tax, insurance, repairs and maintenance for car and motorbike)
Home (Cleaner, Electricity, Equipment, Gas, Insurance, Maintenance & repairs, Phone/TV/Internet)
Work Expense

[roakleyca]

Getting some great ideas. Thanks!

Anyone using a Cateogry setup that divides their expenses by week or by paycheck? This is one that I might do (thought it seems like a bit more work)...and would love to hear some peoples experiences with it....

[Joel]

I have two main master categories:

Expenses (the category balance is changed to 0 at the end of every month)
Savings (these category balances build up month-after-month)

Under Expenses:
Eating Out
Fun
Gasoline
Groceries
Stuff (this is my catch-all for miscellaneous stuff)
Work (this if for purchases I frequently make and am reimbursed from my work)

*I conservatively over-budget money to these categories every month, and often times I can move money around between these categories. (more Eating Out, less Groceries). But at the end of the month, I change my budget so that all of these have a 0 category balance and push the extra money towards my Savings master category.

Savings Master-category includes:
Future (this is where any extra money goes - includes saving for a wedding, house, etc. all the big major expenses that will happen at some point)
Dodge (my hot rod savings fund)
Fitness & Golf (for adult sports, runs, and golf)
Gifts (xmas, birthday, etc.)
Honda (my car maintenance, registration, and new car fund)
Insurance (auto insurance - save up monthly to pay annually in full)
Medical (anything medical, I try to keep at least $1000 in here and build it back up if I use it)
Phone (includes my monthly phone bill as well as saving $20/month towards a new phone)
Rent (includes rent, cable, and utilities - note I could call this housing)
Retirement (I save up $5000 for my IRA every year throughout the year)
Vacation (I save up monthly in order to ENJOY my money!)
*School (I have a school account as I finish up my degree, but with two weeks left, I am simply waiting to graduate to zero out the balance and hide this category)
*Specific Vacations (I am going to Alaska with my dad and grandpa this summer, and I'm handling all the money, so everything Alaska-related has a specific category until we go. After the trip, I will zero out the balance and hide this category)

[kbeakley]

I do mine this way:

Debt - each loan laid out, plus snowball
Biweely payments - Mortgage only
Monthly Bills - Automatic Debit
Monthly Bills - Manual pay
Monthly Discretionary - food, spending, fuel, etc...
Quarterly
Annual
Sinking Funds / Savings

I do it this way because I was getting confused and double-paying some bills and forgetting to pay others that I thought were automatic. This keeps me in line.

[Malisa]

Phone (includes my monthly phone bill as well as saving $20/month towards a new phone)

Doh! What a simple little thing to do. Why have I not thought about doing this. It'll be much safer tucked away in my phone category. I have a Things We Want: iPhone 5 category sitting empty. I will start budgeting SOMETHING extra to my phone category each month. Super idea. Thanks.

[Malisa]

Getting some great ideas. Thanks!

Anyone using a Cateogry setup that divides their expenses by week or by paycheck? This is one that I might do (thought it seems like a bit more work)...and would love to hear some peoples experiences with it....

I do it from time to time for categories that are getting hard to handle. Here's a post I just wrote in another thread.

owever, now to the problem, I get this chunk of money for say dining out at the beginning of the month... If I tend to overspend this category and want to pace myself (the point of budgeting), how do I avoid overspending in the beginning and having nothing at the end? One idea I have is to withdraw cash for a weeks worth and use that, however, that may not work for something like groceries where you find out how much you spent while checking out. I'm not going to go put stuff back to meet my budget and if I overestimate, what is the point of budgeting it in the first place?

I will be doing this, again, in May for groceries.

I look at the month and decide if I want to call it a 4 week month or 5. I'm calling May a 5 week month and saying I'll budget $500 to make things easy. I make a separate category somewhere in the budget to hold (in this case) 4 weeks worth of the grocery money or $400 and I'll budget the first week's grocery money to my regular grocery category $100. Then on whatever day I consider a new week to start, I'll 'release' some money from that separate category. I'll negative budget $100 there (changing it to $300) and re-allocate that money to my regular category. Rinse and repeat each week.

The thing about groceries, at least for us, is it can be very lumpy. So if you over or underspend you have to think about what your pantry looks like, if you just did a big shop, etc. And if you eat out much, you need to make sure you're not compensating for the scrutiny of the grocery category by sacrificing your dining out category (ask me how I know )

We've been terrific about eating out less. Both of us together and each of us individually. We're also trying to eat better. So while we were eating a lot of frozen this and that, it was cheaper than eating out. But since we're also trying now to eat more real food, etc....it's tough.

I'm very happy with the food we bought in April health and quality-wise. I'm not happy with what we spent. So...back to weekly budgeting for groceries for May. We'll re-evaluate at the end of May and decide if we need to continue in June. If not, hide the category (or even delete it because it will not show any activity at the end of the month because we emptied it out).

So far so good. We've spent 33% of our grocery money, but that should get us through early/mid week next week.

[litterbug]

Anyone using a Cateogry setup that divides their expenses by week or by paycheck? This is one that I might do (thought it seems like a bit more work)...and would love to hear some peoples experiences with it....

I haven't done this. Malisa's idea of using it as a temporary tool to learn how to control problem areas is very good. I got the same benefit by breaking my grocery category down into food, non-food, and Burkina, of all things, because I use a couple of very pricey but effective ones and suggestive enzymes that really distorted the budget. Baking three it let me watch how well I dud during the month and budget separately for what I know I need.

But the question is how weekly budgeting will help you manage your money. Are you trying to make yourself 'hit your marks' if you break the month down? Are you having trouble with overspending and not realizing it until it's to late? If so, are you entering your transactions at least every other day? In my mind, updating your budget several times a week and then spending according to category balances us what kept me on my toes for a long time. Now I've gotten better at knowing hire much to budget, and between my steel-trap memory (:lol:) and the Android app, i have a constant sense of where I am with the monthly category balances.

[tindelsurf]

I just rearranged my categories tonight - as follows:

Charity
-Church
-Other
Expenses
-Mortgage
-Childcare
-Groceries
-Dining
-DW blow fund
-My blow fund
-DD blow fund
-Gas
-Electric
-Water
-Comcast
-Sprint
-Medical(FSA)
-Prescriptions
-Gifts
-Entertainment
-Office Supplies
-Clothing
-Home Maintenance
-Car Maintenance
-Vehicle Registration
-Other
Debts
-ACS - DW
-ACS - Me
-Nelnet - DW
-Medical #1
-Medical #2
-Snowflake
Savings
-Emergency Fund
-Vacation
-Car
-HOA
-Car Insurance
-Christmas
-DD ESA

I'm still trying to figure out how to organize my 'expenses' a bit better. I do like the idea about saving $20 a month for a new phone! I might have to steal that one too.

[roakleyca]

But the question is how weekly budgeting will help you manage your money.

Well, here's my problem.

As long as I don't have my full month buffer, I'm still living pay check to pay check. Which means I can't (or shouldn't) budget for an entire month, but only for 2 weeks at a time (cause I get paid every 2 weeks).

But I can't make good decisions on just 2 weeks as my bills and stuff are monthly.

So when a new month rolls over, I instinctively want to fill in a full months buffer --- which obviously leaves me in the hole cause I don't have the money yet to pay for everything!

And now I'm doing the "expected income" account thing - which helps me to budget but gets me really nervous that I'm now spending money I don't have.

Do you see the problem?

So I thought that perhaps I could rearrange my categories so that I knew which bills were due when (trying to avoid having to use a spreadsheet, I suppose).

Question: Is there any downfall of changing your categories on a regular basis? Or is it fine to change things up constantly until you find what works?

[Budget_Ninja]

But the question is how weekly budgeting will help you manage your money.

Well, here's my problem.

As long as I don't have my full month buffer, I'm still living pay check to pay check. Which means I can't (or shouldn't) budget for an entire month, but only for 2 weeks at a time (cause I get paid every 2 weeks).

But I can't make good decisions on just 2 weeks as my bills and stuff are monthly.

So when a new month rolls over, I instinctively want to fill in a full months buffer --- which obviously leaves me in the hole cause I don't have the money yet to pay for everything!

And now I'm doing the "expected income" account thing - which helps me to budget but gets me really nervous that I'm now spending money I don't have.

Do you see the problem?

So I thought that perhaps I could rearrange my categories so that I knew which bills were due when (trying to avoid having to use a spreadsheet, I suppose).

Question: Is there any downfall of changing your categories on a regular basis? Or is it fine to change things up constantly until you find what works?

We were in the same position when we were building our buffer. We used a spreadsheet to track our bills. It listed all our bills, dates and amounts, after our paycheck arrived we would update the sheet indicating which bills had been budgeted for. This worked fine for us. We would stretch our paycheck as far as we could and leave the rest of the month un-budgeted based on the timing our spreadsheet indicated. Then finish it up with the next paycheck and see if we could stretch our dollars as far as we could down the spreadsheet & in the budget.

I rearranged our categories a few times when we first started out. Re-organization was not a problem, we ran into difficulty if we wanted to be more granular on a category. Each transaction with that category needed to be analyzed and re-categorized. I only ended up doing that with Clothing, because my wife would spend all the money in the clothing budget and I wouldn't get anything... I broke it out into His Clothing and Her Clothing!

[INAB26]

I'm on my 3rd year using YNAB and I've tweaked my categories along the way and totally redone them twice. I'm not sure if there will ever be anything perfect and I probably have too many, but I find that when I notice an expense regularly tripping me up, it really helps me to pull it out into a separate category.

I won't list all my subcategories, but my current masters are:
Food (groceries, restaurants, coffee...yes, it needs it's own category )
Household (things like clothing, gifts, misc. household stuff, electronics)
Kids (school expenses, scouts, sports, music lessons, camps, savings etc.)
Pets (food, supplies, vet)
Transportation (gas, maintenance, tolls, registration, insurance)
Personal (each family member has a category here...I use this for kids' allowance and our personal money)
Reimbursable (for work expenses and medical flex)
Donations (church, public radio and tv etc.)
Monthly Bills (utilities, mortgage, Netflix, subscriptions, life insurance etc.)
Yearly Bills (Memberships, HOA dues, homeowner's insurance, property taxes etc.)
Savings (Efund, Vacations, Christmas etc.)