YNAB Tutorial/Overview From a Former Mint User - Part 2
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 5 ส.ค. 2024
- In this video, I'll do the second of a two part overview and tutorial of YNAB -- a popular budgeting app.
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*** A full transcript can be found at www.marblejar.net. ***
Hi, everyone. This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video I'll do the second of a two part overview and tutorial of YNAB -- a popular budgeting app.
In the first tutorial video, I went over how YNAB treats budgets, accounts, and true expenses. We had just finished discussing how YNAB doesn't pre-populate budget amounts for you like Mint does each month. YNAB sort of handles this usingGOALSYNAB allows you to put a goal in for each budget category. This may be helpful in categories where you are trying to save a little each month or ones where you won't use the money all at one time during the month -- like for groceries. So, let’s say you don’t want to spend any more than $700 for groceries for the month. The first paycheck you get, you may not have enough to fund all of your categories (unless you are literally living on half of your salary, in which case, yay, you!), so you are just going to fund half of what you may need for the full month until you get paid a second time. Here's how YNAB's goals help. Click on the groceries line item. Now look over here on this right panel and down here under Goal, click on Create Groceries Goal. There are three different options for creating goals, which we won't go into in depth here -- but suffice it to say, YNAB will do a little math for you to determine how much you should be putting in this category every month. If you select monthly funding goal and put in a goal of $700 for this category, the icon in the available column will notify you that you haven’t quite funded this category fully yet by staying orange and displaying a teeny pie diagram with how much is left to go. So, now that we've discussed a bit of how YNAB works, let's discuss theBudget ColumnsThe budgeted column is the amount that you have funded for that category from your To Be Budgeted pitcher. The next column, Activity shows you how much you have spent for the month. For example, in my groceries line item, I've put in three transactions for groceries that total $150.00 that I have spent this month. The final column shows how much is Available. It's not quite a simple subtraction of what you spent from what you have budgeted since there could be carry over from the month prior. For example, for this Christmas line item, I only budgeted $50 this month and there is no activity, but since I have been saving $50/month for the past three months, the total Available is $150. YNAB carries over positive balances from the month before, but not negative ones. You need to either take money from another category to get rid of a negative balance OR YNAB will take it from the To Be Budgeted amount for the next month. Just a quick comment on how YNAB treatsCredit CardsThis is one of the more complicated parts of YNAB in practice, but conceptually it is fairly straightforward. YNAB really wants you to treat credit card purchases the way you treat cash purchases. In other words, once you spend the money, it comes out of your budget for the month. The problem is that the point at which the money actually comes out of your bank account is different than the point at which you make the purchase. You may buy groceries for $70 on a credit card today, but you won't have to actually pay that credit card bill until the middle of next month. So, here is how YNAB handles it. Let's use that example, I bought $70 of groceries from my $700 budget. If I was paying cash or using a debit card, the money would just come out of the glass end of story. If I'm using a credit card, the money gets added to the available balance for my credit card, which is also a line item in my budget. Each time I make a purchase, instead of pouring that money into the sink, it gets transferred to the credit card glass. What that means is that in a month when I am ready to pay my credit card bill, I have all of the money gathered together to pay it right away. I hope that makes sense. Okay -- that gives you a little introduction to how YNAB is set up. But how do you use it on a regular basis? Every Day UseThere are four things you will do with YNAB regularly. The first is
* Approve Transactions - Most of you will choose to have your bank and credit card accounts linked to YNAB. It makes life a lot easier than having to input each transaction manually. When you have new transactions to approve, YNAB for the web lets you know by putting a dot to the right of the account where there are new transactions. The mobile app has a notification badge lets you know how many transactions you have to approve, plus you can see that number down here under accounts as well. . . - แนวปฏิบัติและการใช้ชีวิต
I've been a YNAB user since 2015 (YNAB 4). (Engineer, budget nerd and I don't connect YNAB to my bank accounts.) Earlier this year upgraded to the new browser based version. There are some features that I used (and liked) in YNAB 4 but were removed. But some were kept. I wanted to mentioned two items that are helpful which, from your description, you seem to have missed. First, you stated that you must budget amounts for each category each and every month verses all the budget amounts being carried forward. Not so. If you have all of 'this months' budget amounts set, in the browser 'Budget' screen, go into next month's page, on the far right of the screen, select the 'Budgeted Last Month' and then the 'Update Budgeted Amounts'. HUGE time saver. Second, I set up transactions to "Repeat', bills, transfers from checking to named savings accounts at my credit union AND importantly, income that is 'To Be Budgeted'. (Sufficient choices in the 'Repeat' dropdown.) So the 'To Be Budgeted' starts the month, fully negative. As paychecks come in, and I approve the correct amounts verified from the credit union, 'To Be Budgeted' increases through the month. You had a 'Savings' category, I have 'Buffer'. Any positive numbers at the end of the month ... added to the 'Buffer' category. Everything zeroed out for the month.
Your videos are the BEST I've found on YNAB. Thank you for creating them to be straightforward and useful. I'm starting to get the hang of it from your videos alone. Thank you!
Thanks for the nice feedback!
Clearly, you are a pros pro! Very concise and super helpful.
You are a fantastic educator!
You’re helping me a lot Thank you
Great videos!
good work; thanks
Great video. I love Ynab but still learned a lot from you.
To help out. The difference between reports and toolkit reports is that the former is native to YNAB and the latter is part of a chrome extension called YNAB toolkit
Hence the seeming duplication
Thank you! I did finally manage to figure this out (forgot that I added that Chrome extension), but still haven't totally explored everything that the extension does. :-)
Good teaching...and easy on the eyes to boot! Lol. Keep it up!
Another, comment. In your video, I think you stated that the only access to the 'To Be Budgeted' breakdown was via the Reports. Go to 'All Accounts' screen, top right cornet 'Search All Accounts' type in (select from list) 'To be Budgeted', and if you want, further filter for a specific date (i.e., single month, etc.)
Thanks for these videos, I am trying to pick a budgeting software and your videos have done the best job of answering most of my questions. Where is the money physically kept that you save towards a goal? Is it no where specific and when you use the money for the goal you can take it out of any account? Right now my wife and have different accounts for each purpose, e.g. fixed expenses, variable expenses, fun money, vacation, emergency, etc. However we could never have as many accounts as we would need for each goal and the minimums spread our money out too much. Is the budgeting/YNAB idea that the money for any particular goal can be physically saved in any account? If so what account structure have you found to be the most efficient? Right now we have three sets of savings, checking, and credit accounts.
You have identified the beauty of YNAB. You can have your money anywhere physically, but YNAB conceptually keeps it all organized and categorized. Honestly, it’s way easier to have fewer accounts, but you have to be the kind of person who doesn’t steal from your savings accounts. I would propose having 2 - an emergency fund account with 3-6 months of living expenses that you don’t have on YNAB and a checking account with everything else!
When you spend money YNAB asks you which account you want to take it from
Hi Laura. Love your videos. One thing that I'd love to know how to address in YNAB is how to budget from a windfall or budget FROM a retirement savings. Where do I put that money in the YNAB budget from which I give myself a portion to budget. i.e. we are not employed receiving a paycheck but we want to pay ourselves a set amount semi-monthly from a retirement nest egg. Any ideas on how to best about this in YNAB?
Hi, Stephanie -- you would treat that just like regular income and categorize it as "To Be Budgeted." You would handle it exactly the same as you would a paycheck. Even better if you know how much you will have each month!
Thank You for the video. I have used Mint and Every Dollar. But now I am currently using a spreadsheet. How do you handle getting pay every two weeks and on monthly budget. will the app. accept monthly rent and utilities at the same time allowing for a budget for groceries and gas every two weeks? How do you handle that?
Thank you for your hard work.
Basically, you add to your budget every time you get paid. YNAB allows you to set goals so that you are reminded for categories like groceries or gas to add more the 2nd time you get paid in a month. My first paycheck (or really the last paycheck from the previous month), I budget for everything that comes out at the beginning of the month and half of the other budgets. It takes some getting used to, but i find that it is a more tactile way of managing your money.
Great video. Let’s say a married couple is sharing a budget. Can you both log into the account on each of your smart phones without having to pay for the account twice?
Yes, you can!
@@marblejarchannel awesome thanks
I'm currently a Mint user, but can you suggest a better website & app for what I want? I'm not interested in creating a budget. I'm interested in aggregating my checking and credit card accounts into one place, putting a category to each transaction, and creating category reports of my spending and income. I want the transactions to upload from my financial institutions (and not manually input them), and to see reports of how I spend my money by category. Mint does this but Mint has a few bugs that bother me, such as category changes sometimes don't carry over. Thanks.
In some ways, Mint is the best way to do what you want, but YNAB is so much faster for transaction categorization, you may want to look into that. They have good 30 and 60 day free trials if you look online.
Thank you.
How much time do you spend in YNAB per month? Just a general idea. I'm switching from mint to YNAB but I'm feeling like YNAB might take a lot longer per month and I already felt like I was spending way too much time. About 2 hours per month.
It’s hard to judge. It’s so much faster to categorize transactions in YNAB, but it requires a little more of you since you have to budget and transfer money to even out your accounts. I guess I would say it’s fairly even, but the time I spend in YNAB actually helps me to change my behavior, whereas Mint just felt like busy work.
The longer you use YNAB and fine tune it a bit the shorter the time will be entering your data
In the beginning when you're figuring out what categories and goals works for you, it will take a few hours to fine tune it. But once it's set, it's pretty streamlined.
I've been using YNAB for over a year and I spend probably 10 minutes/week with transactions and ~20 minutes a month talking over the budget with my wife, so a total of an hour or so spread out throughout the month.
Questions: Does YNAB allows you to take money from savings if you overspend? Does YNAB show you what you overspent in each category from the originally budgeted amount (not an updated amount if you took money from another category)? For Net Worth, does YNAB include investment accounts? Thanks!
Hi, Tony -- yes, you can take money that you've accumulated in another category (like Savings) if you overspend. It does not show you how much you overspent from your originally budgeted amount. And you can include investment accounts as "Tracking Accounts" if you want to see your full net worth.
Marble Jar Channel Okay. Not seeing how much you are off from original budget is a bit of a downer. After the month is over, I like to discuss with my wife any over/under. Any suggestion on how to do this? Mint shows this. Great to know about the other items you mentioned. Thanks!
Hi, Tony. I would do a report (you can export your budget and transactions from YNAB), but honestly, since I've switched over to YNAB, I've gotten less fixated on not overspending in a single category and more fixated on not overspending during the month on a cluster of discretionary accounts (groceries, gas, household, etc.)
@@marblejarchannel Sure, I hear you. Makes sense. I guess since I am from the business world, I do monthly budget reviews and we are very specific on keeping categories separate and reporting on the surplus/deficit.
Yes, that’s what it sounds like!