YNAB You Need A Budget

[lkoleszar]

Hi. Kinda of a newbie. I started a new budget in January. I created an account called "Credit Card" and put a starting balance of $700.00 in January for this is what we owe. In the beginning of the month(Feb), I had to take the cat to the vet which I charged on my credit card since I didn't have any extra money for this expense. It was a $87.00 charge. I added this charge into my "credit card" account as an outflow to keep track of this expense(I want to keep track of how much I spend on vet expenses, etc.). I want to pay part of my credit card bill right now. I have added in my "Checking" account an outflow of $400.00, I am paying to the credit card company. Do I make up a category to this transaction?

Also, my vet charge of $87.00 is being tracked in red as a -87.00 in my budget. How do I wipe this out with this $400.00 payment without losing the ability to track the expense.

I hope I am making sense in this posting. I am trying to bring it across cleary what I am trying to say.

Thank you so much for your time in reading this post.

Lisa

[Trakeveth]

I am also a newbie so maybe a seasoned YNABer will come along with a better answer, but here is the way I understand it...

When you set up the credit card account and entered your outstanding balance you should have also set up a budget category for credit card debt.

When you charged the vet bill you should have entered that as an outflow in the credit card account and categorized it to a vet category in your budget.

When you make the $400 payment you would enter that as an outflow in your checking account (the account the funds are coming out of) and you would enter it as a split transaction, apply the amount of the vet bill to your vet category and applying the rest to your credit card debt category.

[malisab]

I think Tracy described it correctly. It gets 'sticky' if you have a credit card that is still in use AND that you're not paying off in full each month. I think that's the situation that you described.

Since you posted in the pro forum, check out the applicable videos on the following page:
http://www.youneedabudget.com/support/t ... tutorials/

There's one specifically for that situation, but I'd encourage you to watch the other ones if time allows to cement the differences.

Post back if you've got more questions.

[ginger]

I am also a newbie so maybe a seasoned YNABer will come along with a better answer, but here is the way I understand it...

When you set up the credit card account and entered your outstanding balance you should have also set up a budget category for credit card debt.

When you charged the vet bill you should have entered that as an outflow in the credit card account and categorized it to a vet category in your budget.

The above is correct for an account where you have old debt you are paying off over multiple months (the $700), and new debt (the $87) that you want to track via categories.

When you make the $400 payment you would enter that as an outflow in your checking account (the account the funds are coming out of) and you would enter it as a split transaction, apply the amount of the vet bill to your vet category and applying the rest to your credit card debt category.

This part is not quite correct. For the $400 payment, do a split transaction. Since you already categorized the $87 as Vet when you entered it in the register, just do a transfer with no category for that part of the payment. For the other $313, use the old debt category for that portion of the transfer. If you categorize the $87 in the transfer that would be double counting that amount in you budget.

Keeping old debt and pay-off-each-month debt on the same credit card is not the ideal way to handle this, but it would be manageable if you are going to pay off the rest of the $700 fairly quickly.