I’ve had a tumultuous summer, with downsizing from a house to an apartment and a major surgical procedure in my family. But YNAB has kept me on the straight and narrow financially. For the most part, I kept up with daily transaction categorizing, covering overspending and reconciling. (Daily is so much easier than letting it pile up.) If not for YNAB, I would have added money stress to my considerable list of things to be stressed about over the last few months. Now that we’re on the other side of it, I can dig a little deeper into my budget.
Today, I took a look at my targets to make sure everything was okay. And I discovered that not all my targets were on target! By going through the targets one by one I found a couple of targets for true expenses that hadn’t repeated properly. The result was that I wasn’t putting aside any money for these expenses. I had to create new targets and consequently assign more per month to meet them. I also found a couple of targets I was funding unnecessarily, for subscriptions that I was intending to cancel rather than renew. And I found a monthly target I could eliminate because the total set aside was sufficient.
How did I go about doing my check up? In the YNAB web version, I use the Toolkit for YNAB Firefox extension to add a Target column that displays the target set for each category. (I enable “Display Target and Emphasize Overbudget” with Display Target Amount with No Emphasis selected, see above.) That made it easy to scan down the categories in my budget and note those that didn’t have a target. I also scanned the Available column for each category to see if I had accumulated larger amounts than I might need. The process was pretty simple.
This task took me probably 15 minutes and it was time well spent. Now I know my targets are okay (though I’ll need to continue to check up on them) and I can rely on my budget for financial peace of mind!
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