Financier Forums

Usually I try to follow a similar method when receiving a paycheck. Only after the will to reduce spending to less than income are you truly going to get ahead. For most this may take some time depending on your situation.

1. Pay necessary utilities (things needed to survive - rent, food, electricity) * Careful not to include wants
2. Pay x% to debt (how much depends on your income and your debt level)
3. Pay x% to savings (even if its $1)
4. Pay unnecessary utilities (Netflix, gym membership, etc)

If you can make it to Step 4 with your paycheck and still have a few dollars left over, you are ahead of the game. Its only amount of time before you start shifting more of your money from #2 to #3. #3 is a key to getting ahead. If you start shifting your money from #2 to #4, then you'll never be ready for those "emergencies".

My goal was to eliminate #2 or at least get to where it was PIF. Once I fulfilled my saving requirements for #3, I was able to enjoy the added niceties of #4.

Thanks everyone for the feedback.

I'll continue to fund categories according to my previous methods. Variables categories will let the money "roll over" to account for the variability. Other more static categories will continue to be funded to $0.

To follow up on my original question...how do people handle their RDFs/Savings? Do you have a single account you disperse from as needed (regardless of the reason) or do you set up specific categories?

I can see the appeal of both methods, a single account means a cleaner budget, where as multiple account can provide the granularity of what you're saving for.

Thanks

So we know the rule to budget our available income to $0.

But I'm curious if people also budget their categories this way too?

For instance, should I budget my eating out category to just cover expenses for the month (so at the end of the month my category is $0) or do people budget a certain amount each month and let the remaining amount roll over to the next month? Or a combination of the two?

I find budgeting a specific amount each month helps "roll with the punches" when you go over a bit in a category, and building up those balances looks great too, but if each of my individual categories is turned into a rainy day fund is there a need for any individualized savings categories?

Trying to find out if I should just budget my categories to $0, and roll all surplus funds into a single RDF to be used for WAMing purposes or continue with they way I do it now. It seems to me just a personal preference to which envelope you want your excess funds to sit in.

Thanks

We recently (in the last 3 months or so) switched to Chase Amazon for all our purchases from the Chase Freedom card. We make many purchases from Amazon so it just seemed more logical to use/get the points from there.

We have several other credit/store cards that we may use for one off purchases like Target card at Target, but 99% of our spending is on the Chase Amazon card now. In fact, a strategy I like to employ is to charge all our utilities, doctor bills, and whatever else I can pay with a credit card online to the Amazon card. We do have a few companies that charge for this option so we either write a check or draft from our Checking account, but most we are able to charge to the card.

It also means I typically pay one credit card a month for most everything in my budget, and we get many more point than we would just using it for day to day transactions.

We do not track cash as we use credit cards for about 99% of our spending. We are comfortable with the fact that less 1% of our income is not recorded and not a key factor in any major spending we do so to us its an unnecessary process.

If we spent more cash than we do each month (<$50) I would probably try to track it, but I doubt I'd get my wife on board with that level of required entry.

Unless I'm missing something on that report it just displays all activity.

It would be helpful if there were a few options either static (YTD, 1 year, etc) or dynamic (specify date range - perhaps by year(s) or month/year).

Thanks

I see we can now resize the category column on the budget screen.

It would be nice to be able to resize the columns while viewing an account as well.

Thanks

Just imported my most recent version of YNAB (2+ years of data) in less than a minute.

So far everything looks good. Awesome Job @Alex!

Hello Everyone,

Like so many others here, I too am a YNAB'r. I started with the spreadsheets many years ago, but they amounted to nothing more than tracking my overall expenses since I didn't record each transaction. It started to become difficult to determine why groceries were up this month, but down last month. But it give me a basic picture of my expenses and knew I would need something more than a spreadsheet to get it under control.

Enter YNAB. I've been with YNAB since the beginning of YNAB4. I didn't fully immersed myself until about 2 years ago and haven't looked back since. When I eagerly awaited a new release and was disappointed by the nYNAB offering, I decided I was going to keep using YNAB4 until it no longer functioned. Then I began to see posts for Financier and after poking around for a week or so knew this was the replacement I was looking for.

I'm wanting to get both YNAB and Financier running in parallel by the first of the new year and hopefully drop YNAB at some point their after. I am so excited to get into something on the ground floor and have that input that you just couldn't find in YNAB. I look forward to continued success with Financier.

Thanks