Let’s talk budgets. Bear with me, this is a realllly long blog post. And if you are not interested in me going on and on and on about budgets, then just skip it.
When my husband and I got married almost five years ago, we kept our own separate bank accounts. It just seemed easier that way because we each already had them and were established at our banks. But as time went by, things just got too confusing with my husband paying certain bills and me paying certain bills, etc. So we decided to lump our money together.
We ended up with a joint checking account that my entire paycheck goes into every two weeks, and a portion of my husband’s paycheck goes into every two weeks. The rest of my husband’s check gets deposited into another account. That account is our savings and is also the account that we pay his student loans out of. The rest of the bills get paid out of our joint checking account and I pay them all each month.
We’ve always had a budget on paper….but it pretty much stopped there. You know, it’svery easy to write out what your monthly income is in one column and then write your monthly expenses in another column and allocate a certain amount of money per month for groceries, gas, haircuts, whatever. But actually keeping TRACK of what you’re spending and if you’re exceeding your allocated amount is a whole other story. That’s the hard part. I tried tracking our spending and everything else with an Excel spreadsheet, but it was just soooooo tedious and I would forget to do it half the time.
Something needed to change. We have some pretty aggressive financial goals that we would like to accomplish in the next few years (mostly paying off my husband’s student loans, our other car, and paying down our mortgage once the student loans are gone). We knew that our current system was not cutting it.
So after a LOT of research, we got a free trial of YNAB. Yes, it’s called YNAB. It stands for You Need A Budget. It’s big amongst Dave Ramsey followers (the snowball method of paying off debt…if you’re not familiar with the snowball method, check it out), although he is not affiliated with the software at all. We are not followers of his, but let me tell you….this budget system has pretty much been a game changer for us.
The concept is this: You work off of your budget, NOT what’s in your bank account. Huh? Sounds crazy, right? But it works. Here’s how.
Every single dollar that you have coming in (inflow) is assigned a job. So say you get paid $1,000 each week. On payday, you log onto your software, plug in your $1,000 as income, and figure out what bills are due that need paid before you get paid again, and assign EVERY SINGLE DOLLAR of that $1,000 a job.
For example:
$500 – rent
$100 – groceries
$20 – gas
$15 – haircut
$100 – credit card payment
$50 – spending money
$50 – eating out
$65 - savings
$100 – upcoming car insurance
TOTAL: $1,000
So, that’s your budget until you get paid again. When you go to the grocery store, DON’T LOOK AT WHAT’S IN YOUR BANK ACCOUNT. Look at what you have in your grocery budget category. If you look at your bank account, you’ll see a number that’s $1,000+ and may be inclined to go nuts at the grocery store and toss all kinds of things in your cart. But if you look at your budget, you will see that you have only $100 to spend.
As you spend money, you record each transaction into the software (it looks just like a checkbook register, which I love) and then assign it a category (groceries, gas, rent, etc.). Once you do this, you will see the amount that is remaining within each category decrease. So if you go out to eat and spend $40, your budget software will tell you that you only have $10 left to eat out until you get paid again and budget your next paycheck. Below, the amount in the first column is what you have budget for a certain category. The amount in green is what you have left.
Here’s where the software works it’s magic. Say you have an event coming up (like a wedding!) that involves some travel and a wedding gift. You can create a category called ‘Nebraska trip’ and can budget money in that category each month. So say you add $100 a month for 6 months in your ‘Nebraska trip’ budget. The money remains untouched in your bank account, but remains in your budget category. Because you are NOT working off of the balance in your bank account, but instead your budget software, when it comes time for the Nebraska trip the money is already there just sitting in your bank account. You don’t have to worry about taking a hit on your finances, because you’ve been saving for 4 months. And better yet, you don’t have to reach for the credit card AT ALL. Magic!
A better example is car insurance. A lot of people pay their car insurance every six months. Say your bill is $600 every six months for car insurance. Each month, you budget $100 in the ‘Car Insurance’ category. That way, when the bill is due, you simply write out the $600 check out and DON’T EVEN FEEL IT. Does that make sense? You work with the money within each category of your budget, NOT your bank account.
This software is pretty much exactly like using the ‘cash envelope’ system without actually using cash. Which is perfect for us, because we NEVER use cash and we like to track things long-term. So this works for us.
Each time you get paid and enter your income, the software will tell you to budget EVERY SINGLE DOLLAR of that income. If you have .50 left to budget, it will let you know! It’s not happy until every dollar has been assigned a category. The categories you can create are endless and unlimited. If you want to have a category called ‘leftover money I don’t know what to do with’, you can. Here’s our categories (we have a lot):
Mortgage
T-Mobile
Century Link
PNM (Electric)
NM Gas
State Farm Insurance
Homeowners Association
Weight Watchers
Kingdom Hall Contributions
Hyundai
Credit Card
Groceries
Pets
Household Goods (ranges from light bulbs to air filters to Borax)
Fuel
Medical (Prescriptions & doctor’s appointments copays)
Spending Money – Angie
Spending Money – Joshua
Restaurants
Clothing
Entertainment
Misc.
Emergency Fund
Car Repairs (oil changes mostly)
Home Maintenance (furnace filters, etc)
Gifts
Car Replacement (we want to pay cash for our next car….hopefully that will be a long time from now!)
Vacation
A couple of things to note….we left off our student loan category and our savings category out from this list, because those two things are tied to a completely different bank account. You can have multiple bank accounts on YNAB, and we actually do track our second account as well. But it’s much, much simpler than our ‘main’ account. So we do have it on YNAB, but just to see the balance of our savings account.
We also have an ‘emergency fund’ category in here. Although we’re thinking of removing that, just because that’s kind of what our savings account is for. So we don’t really see the need to have that category right now.
What happens if you have extra money left in your categories? For example, say you budget $40 for the week for gas. You’ve only used $30, and so you have $10 left in your ‘gas’ category and it’s now payday again (the day when you ‘fund’ your categories). Well, you can leave the $10 in there and fund another $30 instead of the full $40. Or you can move the $10 into a savings category or a different category. That $10 is still available in your budget AND your checking account, so you can move it wherever you want.
Another feature that I like about the software is that you can ‘split’ a single transaction into different categories. Example: Target. I get most all of my groceries at Target. But I also get most of our pet supplies at Target. So if I have one transaction totaling $100, and I spent $75 on groceries and $25 on the animals, the software will allow me to enter that transaction into the register as ONE transaction, but then split that transaction into TWO (or more) different categories. It will then deduct $75 from the grocery category and $25 for the animal category.
Does this mean that you’ll never look at your actual bank account ever again? Of course not. I still check our bank account daily to see what has cleared, so I can mark it as cleared in our software. Does our bank account balance match our budget software balance? Absolutely not. And it probably never well. The bank account should be higher (hopefully much higher) than what’s in your budget. For example, we budgeted for our Nebraska trip for a few months. So while that money was already ‘spent’ in our budget, it was not actually spent from our bank account until this past weekend.
The goal is to eventually live on last months’ money (basically getting one entire month ahead with your bills), while also building up your debt snowball and/or savings. In the first two weeks that we used this program, I was able to pay FOUR bills that were due in January from December’s money. AMAZING!
It works, IF you stick with it. This system is not going to work if you spend all of the money in your ‘spending money’ category and then decide you MUST have something else and therefore move money from the ‘car insurance’ category to the ‘spending money’ category. Or if you completely blow your grocery money budget amount and just move money over from your ‘savings’ category to cover it. There is obviously some self-discipline involved. I have a grocery budget now, and I never really had one before. It’s forcing us to meal plan and coupon more, which is fun (I’m a nerd). I also calculate everything as I’m going along (my mom used to do this!) so I can make sure I’m not going over budget. We have also cut out our eating out by at least half, if not more than that.
I have never felt more in control of our finances. As my friend Nancy put it, ‘budgets are FREEING!’. I think a lot of people are intimidated by them (they CAN be complicated) but YNAB is incredibly easy. The software also comes with an app, so it will sync with your phone or tablet. I filled my car up with gas a few days ago and before I drove off, I spent 20 seconds in my car entering my transaction into the app.
Soooo easy. I knew immediately that we had $30 left in our gas budget until the next payday. (And dang, $30 will get you pretty far these days!) The app uses ‘Dropbox’ to sync….so we have the system on my laptop at home, and the app on my ipad, my husband’s ipad and on both of our phones. So he can enter a transaction and I will be able to see it right away and vise-versa.
Before we decided on a software program, we read a bunch of reviews and the #1 complaint about YNAB is that it doesn’t automatically sync up with your bank account. There is a feature to import a bank statement, but you still have to go in and assign categories to everything. The creators of YNAB did this on purpose because they WANT you to enter your transactions. They WANT you to know and be aware of where every single one of your dollars is going. And if you enter your transactions as they happen, it doesn’t take that long at all. They recommend that you sit down with your spouse and have a budget meeting each time one of you gets paid, so you can budget that incoming money accordingly. Hubby and I have been doing this for a month now and our budget meetings take maybe 30 minutes tops. We usually sit at the breakfast bar after dinnerwith the laptop and do it then. It is SO important that both spouses are on the same page. It’s actually quite enjoyable! (we’re nerds)
Another thing to keep in mind about the whole budget process is this: It is not perfect. And it will not ever be perfect. Stuff happens, unexpected expenses come up, you budget too much in one category and too little in another category, etc. YNAB stresses that you MUST roll with the punches and BE FLEXIBLE. Here’s an example: Clothing. I had budgeted $100 for clothing this month because I wanted to get something new to wear to my nephews wedding. Now, I NEVER spend $100 a month on clothing. I rarely buy clothes. I hate it. But I wanted something different to wear. So I went to Ross (of course) and spent $40 total on a new shirt and a half-sweater thing to go over it (Calvin Klein even…I love Ross!). I was happy with that. So I had $60 left in my clothing budget.
Around this same time, I decided I wanted to get my hair highlighted. I talked it over with my husband (highlighting is expensive!) and of course he was all for it (I rarely get my hair done or spend money on myself like that, so he always encourages me to). So I took the $60 leftover from my clothing category, and moved it over into my ‘Spending money’ category (I had about $75 remaining in that category). So now I had $145 to get my hair cut and highlighted. BE FLEXIBLE!! Move stuff around if you have to. And learn from your mistakes. If you want to get your hair highlighted every 3 months, create a ‘hair’ category and put away $30 or $40 a month to have it done. This is what I SHOULD have been doing, but I didn’t. But I moved a couple things around and ‘found’ the money to do it. Easy-peasy.
I know I’m not explaining the software very well and I apologize for that. But you can get a free 34-day trial of YNAB and there is TONS of information on there (including videos and live webinars and classes you can sign up for…the support for this budget software is amazing!). If you decide you love it, it’s a one-time cost of $60. I bought the program just two weeks in to our free trial. I loved it that much. It has been completely worth it for us!
Happy budgeting!
