YNAB You Need A Budget

[dehavenphoto]

I've been trying to get my budget and YNAB software working together. I'm getting pretty close. I think I saw a few lightbulbs going off yesterday and today.

I had made a "normal" spreadsheet budget before entering it into YNAB. Normal budgets really only show you where your money went! I had always thought they were a spending plan but now I see that they are not. I did the "normal" one because I thought I understood it. Well at least I was trained that way...

Working with YNAB, one of the lightbulbs that came off was the real importance of wants and needs. Everyone has heard about the difference between wants and needs BUT while trying to make my budget work, it became very obvious that I can't change the needs. I cannot make them smaller. The utility companies are going to charge me a similar amount each and every month! The only thing I can change to make my budget work is MY WANTS! They must become secondary to my needs. If there is not enough in the budget for my wants, then I either need to make more money, sell something, save up for it or fugetaboutit! There is no other way.

I know that Jessee has pretty much covered this in his writings but it clicked today.

Jack

[dehavenphoto]

Is there any way to tag or color code the budget categories? If not, that would be a nice visual feature. The above post about wants and needs... it would be really helpful to see wants in one color and needs in another.

Jack

[Patzer]

Is there any way to tag or color code the budget categories? If not, that would be a nice visual feature. The above post about wants and needs... it would be really helpful to see wants in one color and needs in another.

Right now, there's no way to change the colors used by YNAB Pro. I assume YNAB Excel users can highlight cells to their hearts' content.

What you can do in YNAB Pro is change your master category organization. For example, I know I can't rob the budget for anything in utilities master category, because they are all needs and I really need to save money now for the heating bill next winter, at the rate of $44 a month more than I was budgeting before I saw next year's price for natural gas. However, I have some play in how much I budget in the Groceries master category, and more flexibility in the Recreation master category.

The good news is that if you decide you want to reorganize your master categories, you can move a category from one master category to another without losing any of your history. YNAB will move the budgeted amounts with the category and change all your register categories appropriately, e.g. Housing:Furniture would become Wants:Furniture and Housing:Utilities would become Needs:Utilities if that's the way you move your categories around.

Patzer

[Sairey724Gamp]

Don't you just absolutely hate that feeling you get when you're almost done budgeting, there's only $x left, Needs:CategoryA requires $x, so Wants:CategoryB has to go short again this month ???

One thing that is so great about paying off debt is that it shortens your Needs list.

Sairey

[dehavenphoto]

One thing that is so great about paying off debt is that it shortens your Needs list.

Sairey

It also makes you do some soul searching about what you really do want. We spend most of our lives accumulating things only to retire and find out we have to get rid of most of them or they are outdated or unusable or.... (fill in the blank).

My wife and I retired last year. We had 4 yard sales the year before and one big auction (mostly MY STUFF). As I looked at the items, I wondered why I ever bought most of them! I also wondered why I bought things I never used!

We really need to think when we buy something. Most things we really don't need and won't want them later.

Jack