Wednesday, January 15, 2014

Time to Reorganize

I am an organization person - not that you can tell by my house.  I love to rethink and reorganize things around me. The beginning of something like a season or year is when I love to do it the most.

That being said, I been thinking about reorganizing my YNAB categories to see if this will help me budget even more. My categories currently look like this:
 I have been using YNAB for about a year and I really enjoy it. At the beginning of using it, this is similar to their preset categories. I have used it for the last 11 months and now I think it's time for a change. This is the proposed changes:

As you can see, I have broken the categories into Expenses on the 1-14 and 15-30 of the month. I think this is going to help me with tracking. I am curious to see, though, if the double sub-categories are going to work or not. That's one of the other great things about YNAB, you adjust as you go along - which happens to be Rule 3: Roll with the Punches.
This category set up would be an ideal setting if you are paid on the 1st and 15th of every month - which my husband is. I am paid every 2 weeks so I will just add mine in as they come up.
For those of you reading this who are not familiar with the YNAB principles, they are pretty simple: put in your paycheck every time you get paid then give every dollar a job - what does my money need to do before I get paid next (Rule 1).
The 2nd rule is Save for a Rainy Day - which you can see in the above pictures. I will admit, we are not very good at this one yet. I am still wrapping my head around not looking at my bank webiste, seeing there is money in there and want to spend it - hence the title of the blog. I have really good intentions every month but fail - hey, it's a process, right?
The 3rd rule, as I mentioned earlier, is Roll with the Punches. Nothing about YNAB is set in stone. You personalize and adjust as you need to. I have used other software and it is set up just the way it is. You can make minor changes but not like this. The other part of this rule is YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE PERFECT - another thing I am working on. I want to put everything in and have it work perfectly... yup, doesn't happen. There are adjustments made all the time.
The 4th rule is Live on Last Month's Income. I think my hubby and I are starting to do that more than we think. We started Dave Ramsey's baby steps as well by saving $1000 emergency fund. We were actually able to double that in the last month which was good timing for us. We may need to truly use it as an emergency. If, Lord willing, we do not need to use it in an emergency, we are 1/4 of the way to living on last month's income. Now, we have it set aside in a different account. As I said earlier, I cannot see money sitting in our joint account and not want to spend it.
I will keep you posted in week or two as to how the new categories are going.

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