My husband and I have three freezer spaces in our house. The main one in our kitchen is a bottom drawer freezer. (The other two are top freezers in extra refrigerators.)
The drawer freezer was a hot (well, cold) mess. I find it’s really easy to lose stuff in it. My husband, Barry, who is the main cook in the house, kept saying that we needed to inventory the freezers and I was dragging my feet. Then I thought of a way to make it fun: Use YNAB to keep track of the freezer contents!
It took us a couple of hours yesterday, but when we were finished we’d thrown away a lot of old food (don’t even ask the oldest Sell By date we saw) and we now know exactly what we have and where it is.
I created Category Groups and within them individual categories. The number of items in a category was entered as assigned and when I pulled out a couple of things to use (see below), I created a transaction in a Buy and Use account.
Here’s a snapshot of our category groups.
I elected to keep all three freezers in one budget. The default location is the kitchen (which is on the second floor) and I marked 1F for first-floor freezer and designated basement where appropriate.
So, for example, here are the categories in our Dessert Ingredients category group, whose categories are in two freezers. My husband is trained as a pastry chef so we have some unusual dessert ingredients in our freezers. There were items I had no knowledge of.
As we emptied and organized the freezer contents we discovered that we had ingredients to make meatloaf for dinner that night. I set up an Account called Buy and Use and created transactions for those ingredients that Barry would use for meatloaf. That way the inventory would be accurate and the activity would be shown in the budget. When I set it up I used 1,000 as the starting balance, so I didn’t have to look at a negative RTA. Here’s what that looked like:
I thought about just adjusting the Assigned amount in the budget to reflect an accurate inventory, but I’d like to see if we can keep up with using transactions when we use and purchase freezer food. I think that will give us some interesting insight on what we’re using (and buying). These are early days, so it remains to be seen whether that is sustainable. While I’m a YNAB power user for our finances, Barry never looks at the budget. But he recognizes that, as the cook in the family, it will be up to him to stay on top of the inventory. The YNAB app should make that easy.
I’m really excited at the idea of using YNAB this way. I’ll provide a update after we’ve been using it awhile!
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