YNAB You Need A Budget

[gunghorjc]

Hi everyone. I'm 27 years old, and have been tired of living pay check to pay check, feeling like I can never get ahead.

I found the website for You Need a Budget and the program/philosophy looks really interesting. So I'm currently using the trial version to see how it works and if it'll work for me.

The video tutorials have been helpful so far but I still have a question.

Let's say for the month of August I had available to budget $100 dollars from my checking account. $35 needs to go to my cell phone bill. When I put $35 into the category under budgeted it shows up two rows over under balance also. Then If I look over to the month of September, it shows $35 dollars there in the balance as well, even though I haven't budgeted for it yet. Is there a step I am missing?

Thanks for any helpful advice and possibly links to videos that will help as well.

[tindelsurf]

The $35 will show in the next months budget because anything you don't spend in a category carries over to the next month. When you actually pay your phone bill, the $35 won't show in the September budget. The software works like this so that if you're saving for something over multiple months, then the balance that you've saved will carry over from month to month.

[gunghorjc]

Thanks tindelsurf! I was playing around a bit more with the software and realized in order to actually "spend" the budget I have to make a new transaction from one of my on budget accounts with an outflow for the category I spent the money in.