Yesss to fun names! 🙌🏻 My debt re-payment category group was called: 🦁 A Lannister Always Pays... My Sinking Funds Category Group is called: 🐺 Winter is Coming My healthcare category group is: 🧛♀ "Immortality Becomes You" ✨ (a Twilight reference!)
Quick story: my BFFs name is Bethany, she’s very forgetful and I always say ‘damn it Bethany’ when she tells me she forgot something. ‘Damn it Bethany’ is my forgotten expenses category name!
Our Emergency Fund is called “What Fresh Hell Is This?”, and the funeral fund line I created after my Dad died so that we could pay for either our own funeral or someone’s in our immediate family if needed is called “Crossing The Bar” after the Tennyson poem that was read at his funeral. The categories aren’t fun, but the creative names help me cope with needing them.
I had a medical debt from a healthcare org whose initials were POA. The doctors there had treated me like trash and I winced every time I saw their name on the budget. So I changed their name in YNAB from POA to POS. Paying off the debt at that organization was so satisfying.
I'm a teacher, so the category I build up for each upcoming summer is called, "Sittin' in sun; salary's done." I suppose the opposite misc category to put extra funds into during the school year could be, "Sittin' in shade, at least I'm getting paid!" 😂
I call my debt repayment “freedom” and my emergency fund “peace of mind”. Both make me happy and remind what both bring me - can’t wait till I’ve paid off the debt and the “freedom” money can have a new creative name!!! 💕
I once named my savings account in a weird way (can't exactly remember) similar to "NO TOUCHY!" and it was effective. It also made the bank teller laugh.
My dining out category is '🍕| Lazy Tax' and fun money is '🎉 | Gittin Out'. Vacation group is '✈️| Get Outta Town' with categories of '👋🏼| Over the 🌈' and '⛽| Gas to Git'. Haircuts and clothes are '👗| Pamper Me💈' and my mortgage is '🏠| Our House🎵🎶' after the Crosby Stills Nash and Young song. Definitely keeps me feeling more engaged with my budget when I'm filling fun category names!
I love this! I got excited and went and changed almost all of my category names, haha. Got a little carried away. My favorite is "Make Someone's Day" which is a category for one-time spontaneous giving. 🥰
I’ve been routinely covering overspending with home maintenance and scooter maintenance and it needs to stop, so I changed the titles to “Warm, Safe & Happy (Home Maintenance)” and “Samantha’s Magical Broomstick (Scooter Maintenance)” I think that might actually get me to stop continually dipping in I also changed “Fun Money” to “Pocket Money”. It may just be regional, but if I see “Pocket Money”, I instinctively know it’s for movies on Apple TV, books, bars of chocolate and so on. Whereas, if I see “Fun Money” I’m not 100% sure what that means Thanks Those changes do feel better, and if it wasn’t for this video I’d probably have continued to feel like I was just being dumb
My emergency fund is and always has been called "the high ledge". It's from my German granny, who said you always need to have some money "on the high ledge", which referred to a a ledge high up on her granny's kitchen fireplace chimney. An adult needed to climb onto a chair to reach it, children couldn't get to it at all. There was a jar with some money. For unforeseen circumstances or whatever. This was before normal people had bank accounts. In German, "having something on the high ledge" is an actual expression, equivalent to the English "having a bit of a cushion ". According to my grandma the expression came from this practice of keeping something high up on the kitchen chimney ledge. Her grandma wasn't the only one to do that.
My favorite name (I stole this from someone else) in my budget is Banana Stand instead of miscellaneous. Because, there's always money in the Banana Stand ...
@@tania5378that’s what I did! My Baby Emergency Fund is The Banana Stand. My 3-6 month income replacement fund is called Prudent Reserve, and I think of it as a wild animal sanctuary, with all my dollary-dos grazing fat and happy. 😂
My emergency fund is the “Batarang Budget 🦇” - as a reference to a Teen Titans comic where Robin gets his own batmobile by hiding it in the batarang budget, in his words “it’s bigger than you’d think”
:::Rushes to budget template to change 'emergency fund' to 'Stressica Alba: 2 Fast 2 Furious the Reboot, Emergency Edition':::: Alright, it needs some work shopping, but Stressica Alba is a 🔥 name for a stess ball.
My main categories have awesome names that are all song titles or lyrics (Vacation, All I Ever Wanted; Let's Make Lots of Money; Video Killed the Radio Star). However, most of category names are boring and practical. I'm going to have to do something about that. I do have one called Pig Lipstick for our house remodel. My husband's fun money category is Guns & Ammo BBQ (after an actual location). Oh, and my hurricane preparedness category is called Storm's-A-Comin'!!
I am normally very simple and "boring" with my categories but I just retired and was planning to start a new budget and thought WHY NOT have some fun... I'm stealing some that I have read here but I like "Jolly Jingles" for Christmas and "Bonding Bucks" for Family Time (I love this one!)
For things I forgot or didn't plan to spend money on I call it the 'ummmm 🤨' category, since I couldn't think of anything else. I didn't know it was a way of spicing up my budget. 😅
i think the only funny name i have right now is "sh*t I forgot to plan for" as my misc category. but i have fun emojis on all my categories and group names
I stole my emergency fund for income replacement name from a TH-camr. They called theirs Gringotts and I use Gringotts Vault 713. My debt category is now known as “Other People’s Money.”
I don't know what happened to me!!!! I'm such a complete nerd now. :( I mean, I have a No Pilfering category??? who says that?? OK, well me, but I love fun names also, so I'll be stealing some ideas. But they also have to make sense for me or I won't know what they're for! lol This was a great video giving me permission to get away from stuffy "auto maintenance" lol
Love this! My husband intriduced me to a very old fake comerical where the narrator tells you all your money should go to the fake speakers, not "homogonized milk, shoes for the children, or a 2nd dress" for mom. 😂😂😂 So we have "shoes for the children" and "2nd dress" as categories. Just as a coincidence they both have $0 in them right now 😅😅😅
I loved this idea when I watched the video, so I went about changing some of the names of my categories. Now I hate them LOL After changing them, when I look at them I just get annoyed. I think I'm just terrible at making up names. I do like a few of them: "Planes, Trains, and Running Away" (vacation), "Simon Goes to the Vet," "OMG Replace that Phone," but apparently I need to rethink the others.
I get really stressed about naming a category something and then forgetting what purpose it was for… Anyone else get that?? Or naming it something that’s too ambiguous so I categorize things incorrectly
I was wondering, is it better to have a holiday category and put all the transportation, food , accommodation and other things inside or is it better to divide by category in the first place?
This is up to personal preference - some people budget pull from the main category, some from the vacation category, some even have a vacation group with vacation food, fun, hotel, travel all separate categories. Try one way and see if it works for you. ( I just have one vacation category but i put info and tags in the memo so I can break it out later of i want to know. )
Personally I like to put all of it in the holiday category so that spending money doesn't have the stress of taking away from your existing categories. I don't want to go to a restaurant on vacation and think "I should probably just get a sandwich so I don't run out my Eating Out money for the month". I also think it helps remove abnormal spending from those categories when looking at reports.
I always think of it as a trade-off between precision and ease. Categorizing is way simpler with just one, but having multiple categories definitely gives you a better sense of how everything is being spent. There's a freedom element too, I think. We recently condensed a bunch of our food-related categories into one big category. I personally really like having a big fat number for "Food." It gives me that, "Oh yeah, we DO have money for this" feeling. 😁 - Ben M 🎨
One more vote for separating into smaller subcategories. Using smaller categories now helps me with knowing how much to budget for the next vacation. For example, we took our first big family vacation this summer, and I completely did not realize how much we spend on small medical emergencies and food while on flights/long drives. Medical problems and food while using transportation are not really fun things, and I forgot they happen more often during vacation. :) (And it is not a problem if you underbudget for any one subcategory: it is very east to WAM from another vacation subcategory).
love this! but i have a question that I'm sure you've covered: if I cover an overspent category with funds, then I won't have a true picture of where I am overspending when looking back, right?
Even if you don’t cover it, you still won’t have a good record looking back 6 months from now. The best ways to handle that would be to either flag every transaction that pushed you into overspending where you had to move money, so you can look back on flags, or look at reports from previous months. If I know my grocery budget is $300/month, and I see 4 out of the last 6 months I spent $325/month, that’s a good indication I’m overspending. If the reasons are in line with your values and you should change your budget instead of your spending, that’s up to you to decide
Hi Seth! If it's just a one-time thing, then probably not. But that's also probably OK. Odds are, you overspent because your priorities shifted in some meaningful way. If it's chronic, though, you can start looking at Money Spent to your category's target. Or comparing "Average Assigned" to your target. Or you can use the Money Moves tool to see what categories tend to be on the receiving end of money shifts most often. - Ben M 🎨
Definitely wanting new names for my accounts that are more creative. (Suggestions welcome) Current: The Bare Necessities (bills) Treat Yourself (fun money) Goals (Emergency fund)
I have a question on adding emojis. In this video it shows the word being typed and the emoji popping up to be clicked on. (for example "Christmas Magic Sparkle", sparkle emojis pop up.) How do I do this? I want a quick way to add emojis. Also, I used ChatGPT to help me name some categories. AI is super helpful to get creative juices going. Here are some examples for the toiletries category : "Hygiene Hijinks" "Bathroom Bucks" "Soap Opera Expenses" "Sudsy Spending" "Pamper Pennies" "Clean Routine Costs" "Loo Loot" "Scrub-a-Dub Budget" "Freshness Funds" "Toilet Treasure"
On my Windows computer, I hit "Windows + ." to pull up the emoji keyboard. On a Mac, I believe it should be "Ctrl + Cmd + Space." Loo Loot has me in tears 😂 - Ben M 🎨
In a 6nab fb page I'm on someone posted asking what people name their categories. It was fun what people name their categories. Mine are boring. Haveingv5he icons are fun enough for me but maybe when I do a fresh start I might make my categories more exciting.v
Yesss to fun names! 🙌🏻 My debt re-payment category group was called: 🦁 A Lannister Always Pays...
My Sinking Funds Category Group is called: 🐺 Winter is Coming
My healthcare category group is: 🧛♀ "Immortality Becomes You" ✨ (a Twilight reference!)
I love how aspirational that healthcare category is 😂
- Ben M 🎨
These are so good!
Quick story: my BFFs name is Bethany, she’s very forgetful and I always say ‘damn it Bethany’ when she tells me she forgot something. ‘Damn it Bethany’ is my forgotten expenses category name!
What a great idea! I immediately changed some of my categories. My favorite one I changed is "Medical/Pharmacy" to "Staying Alive!"
🎵 AH! Ah! ah! ah... 🎵
- Ben M 🎨
I like that one. I am going to use that one.
Omg, if I would ever start a medical insurance company, I would call it that 😂
My 16-year-old has been saving for a car for two years and named this category “my cop magnet” 😂
Oh no 😅
- Ben M 🎨
Good idea 😂
Best one of the day!
Our Emergency Fund is called “What Fresh Hell Is This?”, and the funeral fund line I created after my Dad died so that we could pay for either our own funeral or someone’s in our immediate family if needed is called “Crossing The Bar” after the Tennyson poem that was read at his funeral. The categories aren’t fun, but the creative names help me cope with needing them.
not a category, but i have adhd and struggle to budget consistently so i changed my budget name to "click for dopamine"
I. ❤️. this.
- Ben M 🎨
I had a medical debt from a healthcare org whose initials were POA. The doctors there had treated me like trash and I winced every time I saw their name on the budget. So I changed their name in YNAB from POA to POS. Paying off the debt at that organization was so satisfying.
I'm gonna name my dining out category "I was too lazy to cook" so I feel guilty every time I enter a transaction there
I’m stealing this…great idea 😅
I just did this! Hurts to even type it!
I had already named mine "Laziest food ever"; it can be a blessing and a curse, lol
I'm stealing this one too! This is great!! (I'm glad the budget police suck at their job) :)
I'm a teacher, so the category I build up for each upcoming summer is called, "Sittin' in sun; salary's done." I suppose the opposite misc category to put extra funds into during the school year could be, "Sittin' in shade, at least I'm getting paid!" 😂
I call my debt repayment “freedom” and my emergency fund “peace of mind”. Both make me happy and remind what both bring me - can’t wait till I’ve paid off the debt and the “freedom” money can have a new creative name!!! 💕
I don't have any clever category names, but I named my car Allen because it was the Touring model.
I once named my savings account in a weird way (can't exactly remember) similar to "NO TOUCHY!" and it was effective. It also made the bank teller laugh.
My dining out category is '🍕| Lazy Tax' and fun money is '🎉 | Gittin Out'. Vacation group is '✈️| Get Outta Town' with categories of '👋🏼| Over the 🌈' and '⛽| Gas to Git'. Haircuts and clothes are '👗| Pamper Me💈' and my mortgage is '🏠| Our House🎵🎶' after the Crosby Stills Nash and Young song. Definitely keeps me feeling more engaged with my budget when I'm filling fun category names!
I love calling it Lazy Tax!! I’m going to change mine to that right now!
I love this! I got excited and went and changed almost all of my category names, haha. Got a little carried away. My favorite is "Make Someone's Day" which is a category for one-time spontaneous giving. 🥰
Oh, I love that 🥰
- Ben M 🎨
I’ve been routinely covering overspending with home maintenance and scooter maintenance and it needs to stop, so I changed the titles to “Warm, Safe & Happy (Home Maintenance)” and “Samantha’s Magical Broomstick (Scooter Maintenance)”
I think that might actually get me to stop continually dipping in
I also changed “Fun Money” to “Pocket Money”. It may just be regional, but if I see “Pocket Money”, I instinctively know it’s for movies on Apple TV, books, bars of chocolate and so on. Whereas, if I see “Fun Money” I’m not 100% sure what that means
Thanks
Those changes do feel better, and if it wasn’t for this video I’d probably have continued to feel like I was just being dumb
I just named my 'eating out' restaurant category the 'cooking avoidance' category hahaha
Your honesty is an inspiration to us all 😌
- Ben M 🎨
Love these new brush stroke animations!
I'm so happy to use YNAB that this channel exists
Currently, my emergency fund is called “the world’s on fire” 😂
My emergency fund is and always has been called "the high ledge". It's from my German granny, who said you always need to have some money "on the high ledge", which referred to a a ledge high up on her granny's kitchen fireplace chimney. An adult needed to climb onto a chair to reach it, children couldn't get to it at all. There was a jar with some money. For unforeseen circumstances or whatever. This was before normal people had bank accounts.
In German, "having something on the high ledge" is an actual expression, equivalent to the English "having a bit of a cushion ".
According to my grandma the expression came from this practice of keeping something high up on the kitchen chimney ledge. Her grandma wasn't the only one to do that.
My favorite name (I stole this from someone else) in my budget is Banana Stand instead of miscellaneous. Because, there's always money in the Banana Stand ...
I feel this could work for an emergency fund as well - too good
@@tania5378that’s what I did! My Baby Emergency Fund is The Banana Stand. My 3-6 month income replacement fund is called Prudent Reserve, and I think of it as a wild animal sanctuary, with all my dollary-dos grazing fat and happy. 😂
I also stole banana stand from someone. Love it!
Ditto
My EF is “Banana Stand” too!!
“I cannot emphasize enough how bad the budget police are at their job” 😂
My emergency fund is the “Batarang Budget 🦇” - as a reference to a Teen Titans comic where Robin gets his own batmobile by hiding it in the batarang budget, in his words “it’s bigger than you’d think”
Erica, I think our budgets would get along 🤓
- Ben M 🎨
I’ll stick with emojis. My husband would be too confused with creative names!
My favourite category name is " Treat Yoself!" for my fun money. 😎
:::Rushes to budget template to change 'emergency fund' to 'Stressica Alba: 2 Fast 2 Furious the Reboot, Emergency Edition'::::
Alright, it needs some work shopping, but Stressica Alba is a 🔥 name for a stess ball.
I would watch the heck out of a Fast & Furious movie where it's just Vin Diesel trying to assign his dollars as quickly as possible.
- Ben M 🎨
I'm going to have to buy a stress ball just so I can name it Stressica Alba
Over the Garden Wall!
Found my people 🐸
- Ben M 🎨
My main categories have awesome names that are all song titles or lyrics (Vacation, All I Ever Wanted; Let's Make Lots of Money; Video Killed the Radio Star). However, most of category names are boring and practical. I'm going to have to do something about that. I do have one called Pig Lipstick for our house remodel. My husband's fun money category is Guns & Ammo BBQ (after an actual location). Oh, and my hurricane preparedness category is called Storm's-A-Comin'!!
I feel like I definitely need a category called "Oops! I Did It Again" 😅
- Ben M 🎨
I just changed almost all my personal categories. Rent I called I love my apartment. Utilities = I like lights and hot water.
“Quack Quack Pay Back” (when someone borrows money from me) and “Mad Money” for my spending money are my only two creative ones.
I am normally very simple and "boring" with my categories but I just retired and was planning to start a new budget and thought WHY NOT have some fun... I'm stealing some that I have read here but I like "Jolly Jingles" for Christmas and "Bonding Bucks" for Family Time (I love this one!)
Empowerating 😂😂 I love that.
For things I forgot or didn't plan to spend money on I call it the 'ummmm 🤨' category, since I couldn't think of anything else. I didn't know it was a way of spicing up my budget. 😅
Actually, that's a good idea 😂
One can also name this category: "Oh God WHY"
@@Pitusha I even have a 'sh*t happens 🤦♀' category because as they say 'roll with the punches' and I never see it coming. 🤣🥲
Mine is Random Sh*t … I probably didn’t need!
I started a 3-month job loss fund and called it "You're on your own, kid" (a Taylor Swift reference)
i think the only funny name i have right now is "sh*t I forgot to plan for" as my misc category. but i have fun emojis on all my categories and group names
Perfect! The video appeared just after i make a new template for my budget and ma vacation money is actually vacation😅😅😂
Our fun money just became “Treat Yo self” money 💁🏼♀️
😂 loved the bit about the budget police
My emergency fund category is call Zombie Apocalypse. All others are mostly boring practical ones though, I might need to change that 🤔
Ben, it’s not “steeling”. The proper category’ is “R&D”.
Which stands for “Rip off & Duplicate”. 😂
My old boss taught me to R&D stuff. Don't overthink it if someone else already has.
Work smarter, not harder! 😉
- Ben M 🎨
I stole my emergency fund for income replacement name from a TH-camr. They called theirs Gringotts and I use Gringotts Vault 713.
My debt category is now known as “Other People’s Money.”
I don't know what happened to me!!!! I'm such a complete nerd now. :( I mean, I have a No Pilfering category??? who says that?? OK, well me, but I love fun names also, so I'll be stealing some ideas. But they also have to make sense for me or I won't know what they're for! lol This was a great video giving me permission to get away from stuffy "auto maintenance" lol
Love this! My husband intriduced me to a very old fake comerical where the narrator tells you all your money should go to the fake speakers, not "homogonized milk, shoes for the children, or a 2nd dress" for mom. 😂😂😂
So we have "shoes for the children" and "2nd dress" as categories. Just as a coincidence they both have $0 in them right now 😅😅😅
I loved this idea when I watched the video, so I went about changing some of the names of my categories. Now I hate them LOL After changing them, when I look at them I just get annoyed. I think I'm just terrible at making up names. I do like a few of them: "Planes, Trains, and Running Away" (vacation), "Simon Goes to the Vet," "OMG Replace that Phone," but apparently I need to rethink the others.
Sometimes I find a charge w/o a category or memo which means I dunno. I have a special category for those, called WTF
Greatness!
NO TOUCHY!!
My emergency fund is called Banana Stand
I have a fun-money category named”girls just wanna have fu-un” lol
I get really stressed about naming a category something and then forgetting what purpose it was for… Anyone else get that??
Or naming it something that’s too ambiguous so I categorize things incorrectly
You can always add the boring name as a subtitle: "Lost in Translation - Vacation", or as a parenthetical: "The Day After Tomorrow (Emergency fund)".
Oooo, that's a good hack, especially for searchability 🤔
- Ben M 🎨
I usually put the boring name or the purpose of the category in the category notes section
TEAM GREG
I was wondering, is it better to have a holiday category and put all the transportation, food , accommodation and other things inside or is it better to divide by category in the first place?
This is up to personal preference - some people budget pull from the main category, some from the vacation category, some even have a vacation group with vacation food, fun, hotel, travel all separate categories. Try one way and see if it works for you. ( I just have one vacation category but i put info and tags in the memo so I can break it out later of i want to know. )
Personally I like to put all of it in the holiday category so that spending money doesn't have the stress of taking away from your existing categories. I don't want to go to a restaurant on vacation and think "I should probably just get a sandwich so I don't run out my Eating Out money for the month". I also think it helps remove abnormal spending from those categories when looking at reports.
I do separate those expenses under Holiday/Vacation category group.
I always think of it as a trade-off between precision and ease. Categorizing is way simpler with just one, but having multiple categories definitely gives you a better sense of how everything is being spent.
There's a freedom element too, I think. We recently condensed a bunch of our food-related categories into one big category. I personally really like having a big fat number for "Food." It gives me that, "Oh yeah, we DO have money for this" feeling. 😁
- Ben M 🎨
One more vote for separating into smaller subcategories. Using smaller categories now helps me with knowing how much to budget for the next vacation.
For example, we took our first big family vacation this summer, and I completely did not realize how much we spend on small medical emergencies and food while on flights/long drives. Medical problems and food while using transportation are not really fun things, and I forgot they happen more often during vacation. :)
(And it is not a problem if you underbudget for any one subcategory: it is very east to WAM from another vacation subcategory).
love this! but i have a question that I'm sure you've covered: if I cover an overspent category with funds, then I won't have a true picture of where I am overspending when looking back, right?
Even if you don’t cover it, you still won’t have a good record looking back 6 months from now. The best ways to handle that would be to either flag every transaction that pushed you into overspending where you had to move money, so you can look back on flags, or look at reports from previous months. If I know my grocery budget is $300/month, and I see 4 out of the last 6 months I spent $325/month, that’s a good indication I’m overspending. If the reasons are in line with your values and you should change your budget instead of your spending, that’s up to you to decide
Hi Seth! If it's just a one-time thing, then probably not. But that's also probably OK. Odds are, you overspent because your priorities shifted in some meaningful way.
If it's chronic, though, you can start looking at Money Spent to your category's target. Or comparing "Average Assigned" to your target. Or you can use the Money Moves tool to see what categories tend to be on the receiving end of money shifts most often.
- Ben M 🎨
Definitely wanting new names for my accounts that are more creative.
(Suggestions welcome)
Current: The Bare Necessities (bills)
Treat Yourself (fun money)
Goals (Emergency fund)
Disney budget here.
I have a question on adding emojis. In this video it shows the word being typed and the emoji popping up to be clicked on. (for example "Christmas Magic Sparkle", sparkle emojis pop up.) How do I do this? I want a quick way to add emojis.
Also, I used ChatGPT to help me name some categories. AI is super helpful to get creative juices going. Here are some examples for the toiletries category :
"Hygiene Hijinks"
"Bathroom Bucks"
"Soap Opera Expenses"
"Sudsy Spending"
"Pamper Pennies"
"Clean Routine Costs"
"Loo Loot"
"Scrub-a-Dub Budget"
"Freshness Funds"
"Toilet Treasure"
On my Windows computer, I hit "Windows + ." to pull up the emoji keyboard. On a Mac, I believe it should be "Ctrl + Cmd + Space."
Loo Loot has me in tears 😂
- Ben M 🎨
In a 6nab fb page I'm on someone posted asking what people name their categories. It was fun what people name their categories. Mine are boring. Haveingv5he icons are fun enough for me but maybe when I do a fresh start I might make my categories more exciting.v