How I Track Annual Savings in YNAB

Hi, everyone.  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll share how I keep track of how much we've saved this year in YNAB.

YNAB is a great budgeting platform -- I've been using it for about 2 years now.  It is particularly well suited to a particular kind of budgeter -- someone who is trying to escape living paycheck to paycheck and is paying down debt.  I am not this kind of budgeter, but I really appreciate many of the features of YNAB.  Because I don't fit the profile well and because I have a more traditional budgeting mindset, I've developed some hacks to get YNAB to give me the information that I am interested in.  One piece of information I like to know is how much we have saved this year.

We're not paying down debt and we live within our means, so that we generally have money left over at the end of the month.  I do a report at the end of each year showing how much we have saved, but I like to have a ongoing sense of what that number is throughout the year.  To do this, I created a budget category called Savings.  Within that category, I have our Travel budget and a budget for my Grad School -- both of these we fund at the beginning of each month.  I also have a general Savings budget and a budget called 2021 Savings.  Savings doesn't necessarily pertain to this year -- it's more of a holding category.  2021 Savings is where I put anything left over at the end of the month.  In addition, I use this category for any expenses that are outside of scope of our monthly budget -- like replacing our roof, or a particularly big political donation, or braces for the kids.  So, this budget category gives me a sense of how much we have saved during the course of the year minus any extraordinary expenses.  Kind of like a rolling Income Statement.

At the beginning of the year, I change the name.  So, this year it went from 2020 Savings to 2021 Savings.  Then, I zero out the account.  Remember, I've done a report on how much we saved in 2020, so that information about 2020 and all the past years is in a spreadsheet.  I simply move any funds that are in this budget over to the general Savings budget so I can start fresh.  Okay -- so now I have the correct name with zero funds.  Then, at the end of each month, I do a series of chores -- you can see my video on that if you are interested.  One of the chores that I do is Scrape down any Available funds from budgets that are not meant to roll over to the next month into my 2021 Savings.  I have YNAB set up so that all of these budget categories are grouped together.  To scrape down, I simply click on the positive amount and tell YNAB to move it to 2021 Savings.  Next, after I fund all of my budgets for the next month, I move anything left over in To Be Budgeted to 2021 Savings.  I do this at the end of each month. 

Then at the end of the year, I do my end of December chores, but I also look at my sinking funds.  Sinking funds are those that I want to roll over at the end of each month.  Sometimes there is a set amount that I'm saving up for -- like an insurance bill that only comes once every 6 months.  Sometimes, we pay those expenses in irregular amounts and times -- like medical expenses.  For those that are paid irregularly, sometimes I've budgeted a bit more than we needed.  For example, in 2020, I budgeted a whole bunch for my kids activities.  Well, guess what?  We didn't spend nearly as much in that area since we were in Covid lockdown for most of the year.  So, at the end of the year I average how much I've spent each month on that and scrape down any excess money to my year to date savings.  After I've done all of this, I can see in Available how much we have saved during this year.  This approach allows me to get reporting that looks a little like an annual income statement.  Let me know what you think.  Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching!