What budgeting advice do you recommend? Money management method?
YNAB = you need a budget
YNAB is a web app and mobile app. It’s beauty is that it helps you look FORWARD, instead of tracking your PAST spending.
It’s not much use to see that you spent too much last month, again. Instead, YNAB helps you know what your average expenses are and lets you set aside meaningful amounts for each kind of expense = that’s what we call a BUDGET.
Yes, it has a cost. Yes, it’s ironic to spend money on a tool to save money. But here’s the thing: it really works! For me, it’s easily worth the cost.
I second this. I feel silly paying for it, but if you (and your spouse, if applicable) totally buy into their system, it’s a way of life. The biggest thing is how it sets up purposeful sinking funds (instead of just “savings”) - every dollar has a job. Now when we have major expenses, it’s like - meh! Water heater went out? No sweat, home maintenace got you covered. And if it doesn’t, you roll with the punches and transfer it from some other category.
It’s made finances so much less stressful.
Using YNAB’s sinking funds helped me get out of my considerable divorce debt. They’re like envelopes you put money into ahead of time, for every single category/thing you want to spend on or save for.
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If you need to spend more than is in the envelope, you must transfer from another envelope first
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If a bill is higher than expected, transfer money from another envelope
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If you want to make an impulse purchase that doesn’t fit an envelope, make mine and transfer money in from an existing one
And so on. It’s a great system, and I continue to use it even though I’m now debt free, except for my monthly bills and car lease payment.
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Same here. I see a lot of people complaining gabout paying for it, but it’s solid software, and worth the money. It’s helped my wife and I manage our finances and we never argue about money. That’s worth a lot of money IMO.
Yup. The ease of use for my wife and us being able to check our own funds real time has made it invaluable. I’m sure! there ways i could do it myself but she’s gotta be able to use it.
“Pay yourself first”. My bank has a feature that allows me to setup automated money transfers to and from different accounts based on rules I setup. The most important one is when any deposit is received from my employer, 20% of the amount is automatically transferred from my chequing account to my retirement account. My paycheque is deposited overnight and the money is already “gone” by the time I wake up in the morning. Treat it like another tax on your income that you have no way to avoid paying. Then live off what’s left.
This is the way for stress free living.
You know for a fact that you’ll have enough to deal with most of life’s surprises.
That and stopping buying things on impulse. Wait a week and buy it if you still remember.
I’ve heard this called the jar method.
I have accounts for travel, house expenses, utility bills, groceries, car expenses, and fun money. Each of them gets part of my paycheck. Every couple of months I take a look to see if things are getting out of whack.
The best part is that I can be an idiot and overspend with the fun money account. If I spend it all, there’s absolutely no repercussions, since everything important is already safely in different accounts.
Also, when car expenses (or vacations) roll around, I already have money put aside for it.
I just go into notes app or pen and paper of choice nothing too fancy
Also take this with a grain of salt as while I’m still living with my parents and don’t really pay
In one section I have subscriptions that cannot exceed like $35 a month and that’s more a list that rarely gets updated
Then as for month to month expenses I divide into money to spend on games and toys/treats for my dogs and taking out the gf and gas and an other category and I allocate money towards those categories
I do it so I don’t over spend in one section like blow all my money on my dogs then have no money to spend for my girlfriend or something
Each month when I “refresh” my monthly budget any unspent money (and minus some to put into savings) rolls over to next months budget
It works wonders and I can move money for spending around easy since it’s all visual
My wife and I have a pretty simple method. First, we each have our own bank accounts with our own spending money. Then, we have a joint account that we use for bills. Finally, we have a separate bank that we use for groceries and gas.
With these allocated separately, we can each have our own spending money, and have enough in every other account to take care of what we need. The paycheck just gets split between these in different direct deposit amounts.
The most important thing is to understand your costs, plan them out, and be aware of what comes out and when. Then, you just follow that plan. The biggest part is making sure you know that you can only spend exactly that much on yourself, which is where our individual accounts come in handy. Whatever we want to buy, we can, because we know safely that our needs are taken care of.
Since we have our math to allow more money in than money out, each account (minus our spending ones) accrue their own savings, and can be transferred between at any time. Overall, it works for us.
Chaos. It’s stressful but somehow it works
Maybe a bit basic but at the beginning of every month I clone this Google Sheets template, set goals in each category, and manually log receipts as I spend. Then at the end of the month, I “audit” my budget against my credit card transactions, pay off credit, and create the next month’s budget with any adjustments learned from the previous one.
For bigger view, long-term, I just linked all my accounts into Quicken and look at it sometimes.
We have a retroactive Google Sheet which pulled from Reddit years ago where we put our transactions in and categorise them. Lets us see where we spent money
My bank has some neat online banking features that break down where my money comes from and where I spend it on. It also compares my current expenses to my monthly average so I can see if I’m spending more. I’m sure I can do better by doing it on my own, but for someone lazy like me, it’s a good starting point to get an overview of my finances.
I guilt myself out of buying things I don’t need. I ask myself “Do you really need that? You have x at home.”
The X at home: twitter.com
Fuck this good haha
Don’t autopay when possible, keep your credit cards down to one or two and itemize at the end of the month so you can catch things adding up. Things like groceries, budget roughly around the same amount each time, things like eating out, door dash etc that’s where the itemization comes in, do the math or use an app to help add it up. Put money into a savings account whenever you have extra. Do not, I repeat do not look at your bank and go “sweet I have an extra $300 this month, time for a new [whatever]”, put it in the savings
No
As Jackie Mason said, “I have enough money to last me the rest of my life, unless I buy something.”
I write all my expenses and incomes down onto app called Wallet by budget bakers. I don’t set any monthly budgets or anything however, because I find that keeping track alone already makes me much more mindful consumer. I already have records of my finances for almost 3 years so it’s pretty interesting to get to monitor my spending across a long timeframe.
My bank app has an “available balance” based on regular bills I’ve input. That has helped.
I want to get cash out and do envelopes for categories of things I buy in person.
