Category: Best Practices
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Do you have a holiday gifts category?
It’s the end of October and the December gift-giving season is just around the corner. Let’s face it: giving gifts is a lot more enjoyable when you feel you can afford them. If you don’t already have a Gifts category in your budget, I encourage you to create one. Then set a Monthly Savings Builder…
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Looking for an elusive transaction?
Sometimes things come up in YNAB that cause me to scratch my head in puzzlement. That happened today and I came up with an easy way to figure it out, so I thought I’d share it with you. When I logged into YNAB this morning there was $54.38 in Ready to Assign in my business…
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Entering a credit card payment in YNAB
The way YNAB handles credit cards is part of its magic. But for people just getting started actually entering the payment can be a little confusing. I made a little video to show how to do it. The easiest way is to use Record Payment in the credit card account. It will automatically populate the…
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WAM Dos and Don’ts
Rule Three: Roll with the Punches, encourages us to move money around among categories as necessary. Over in the wonderful YNAB Fans Facebook Group, participants refer to moving money from one category to another as WAMing (short for Whac-A-Mole). Covering overspending (either proactively or reactively) is an essential part of YNAB. But there are ways…
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Beginning-of-the-month challenges
Even when you’re paying close attention to your budget, the beginning of the month can cause problems if you’re using Direct Import to automatically import your transactions into YNAB. There is often a delay of a day or two between when you spend money and when it shows up in YNAB. The result is that…
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Cover overspending as it happens
It’s the end of the month and it’s a good time to focus on whether you have any overspending in your budget before it turns over to a new month. Let’s face it. Overspending happens. The magic thing about YNAB is that you can overspend without breaking the budget by employing Rule Three: Roll with…
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Reconcile often
If you’re old enough, you might remember having a paper checkbook register, in which you jotted down every check you wrote and kept a running balance. Once a month, when your bank statement came in the mail, you would reconcile your checkbook, which meant making sure that your running balance matched your bank balance, taking…
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Always budget to zero
YNAB is a zero-based budget method. If you follow Rule One: Give Every Dollar a Job, you’ll budget every dollar to zero. It can feel tempting to leave money in Ready to Assign and bask in its green glow. It might give you a feeling of abundance. But it’s not helpful. In fact, it’s counter…
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End-of-the-month YNAB checklist
The end of the month is a special time in YNAB. When the calendar month rolls over, things happen. Luckily, they’re predictable, so you can prepare for them (though it took me quite a few months before I stopped being taken by surprise). Some of the things you’ll observe include: When I overspend in a…
