My 4 Quick End of Month Chores for YNAB

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll share the chores that I do in YNAB at the end of every month.

I've been using YNAB for about 2 years now.  Since I come from a more traditional budgeting mindset, I set up my YNAB a little differently than most, which I have a video on, if you are interested.  One of the peculiarities of my setup is that I have all of our monthly expenses under one category group.  I do this because I like knowing how much we regularly spend each month and category groups give you totals up in the heading for your Budgeted, Activity, and Available.  However, I also want to separate out the budget categories that go to zero at the end of each month and those that accumulate funds from month to month.  So -- I separate them with this fake budget name and put all of my Sinking Funds underneathe this "heading".    I tell you this only because it effects one of the chores that I do at the end of every month. 

So, I'm in YNAB at least every other day categorizing transactions and fixing any budgets that go over.  It's important to keep on top of this because of the way that YNAB handles credit card funds -- if you don't have any money available in your budget, YNAB can't move it into your Credit Card fund, so when it comes time to pay, you won't have quite enough.  As long as you stay on top of it and make sure you have money in your budgets -- everything seems to work better. 

In addition to the every other day YNAB check, I do 4 things I do at the end of each month.  I fund next month's budgets, fix my available amounts, scrape down from available, and then scrape down from To Be Budgeted.  Let's go through them one at a time:

• Fund Next Month - This is the first thing I do.  By the end of the month, I usually have enough in To Be Budgeted to fully budget for the next month.  So, I look forward to the next month and fill up all of my budget categories.  I include the amount that I want to fund each category right in the budget line title like Nick True suggests, but an easier way to do this for me, is to hit Budgeted Last Month.  That way, YNAB will take what you budgeted last month and will duplicate it for this month.  This does most of the work for me.  I will go back and check each budget to make sure it matches this number, but it's a lot easier to check and only correct the ones that are off than to have to type them all in from scratch.  Once that is done, I
• Fix Available Amounts - I try to make sure that, at the end of each month, I don't have any negative numbers in my Available column.  If I do, YNAB will take care of this for me by pulling money from To Be Budgeted, but I want to have more control over how I'm covering these shortfalls.  So, at the end of each month, I click on each negative amount and decide where to steal the money from.  I have a pretty sizeable budget category called Miscellaneous, which is the first budget I use to cover anything.  Once that is gone, I prefer to use any of my other budget categories that are not sinking funds.  In other words, categories that can go down to zero at the end of the month, so that I can start from scratch the next month.  I don't want to steal from my sinking funds, since I'm not sure whether I'll have an bill due soon that I won't be able to cover.  For example, if I take money from insurance, it would be bad if right away I got an invoice for car insurance that exceeds my funds available.  So, to review, first I'll take from my miscellaneous budget, then I'll take from a non-sinking fund.  If neither of those works, then I look for a sinking fund that has a surplus of money.  Right now, that would be Kids Activities since we are in Covid lockdown and my kids are not doing their normal activities.  But if none of these options work, only then will I take from To Be Budgeted, but that is my last resort.  Next, I
• Scrape Down Available - Okay -- scraping down is a term I coined -- and I go into much more detail in my video about Paying Down Debt with YNAB, if you are interested — but basically, for all of my budget categories that are not sinking funds, I scrape down whatever is left in the Available column down into my Annual Savings.  I'll show you how to do this in a second.  If I were paying off debt, I would scrape this money into a debt payoff category.  Why do I do this?  Before I started doing this, what I was finding is that whatever was leftover in YNAB just carried over from month to month and so I stopped getting a sense of how much I needed and how much was left over.  Plus -- since everything was still in Available, I didn't know which funds I could free up to pay for other things or be considered savings.  Here's how I do this: first I have a budget called 2021 Savings.  I know this is a no-no in the YNAB universe, but since we generally have money left over at the end of the month, I can't be bothered to parse out every single out-of-the-ordinary thing we spend our money on.  I prefer to have one big category than 100 smaller categories cluttering up my screen.  I use the Memo line to show what the money was spent on and do a report on this category periodically.  So, here's how I scrape down -- I click on each positive amount in the Available column -- and remember, this is just for budgets that are not sinking funds or that don't accumulate from month to month.  Then I tell YNAB I want to move this money into 2021 Savings.  And I do this for each non-sinking budget with a positive balance.  When I'm finished, I should have all zeros for Available above the Sinking Funds heading AND I can see how much I scraped down into my Savings in this budgeted spot (unless of course I've already put a bunch of money in Savings this month).  Okay -- my last chore is to
• Scrape Down To Be Budgeted - Okay -- I've already budgeted for next month and fixed all of the issues with this month.  Now, whatever is left in my To Be Budgeted, I scrape down to 2021 Savings.  There are a couple of reasons for this, but the main one is that I really want to live on what I have planned and having a bunch of money in To Be Budgeted makes me think I can just take from that stash any time I want.  Also, this helps me to get an idea of how much we have left over and how much we are actively putting away and not spending.  By scraping down this money, I start to get a sense of how much we have saved during this year -- sort of like a rolling income statement. 

Once I've done these 4 chores, I'm ready to start the new month with new transactions and brand new, fully stocked budget categories.  Let me know what you think.  Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching!