The Marble Jar Channel

Hi, everyone.  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll show you how I set up YNAB to work best for me as someone with maybe a non-standard profile: I'm debt-free and have money left over at the end of the month.   I'll admit that my profile looks different than most folks starting out with YNAB: we don't have any debt and we generally have money left over at the end of the month.  In addition, I'm a former Mint user and have that standard budgeting mindset, so the way I use YNAB reflects that a bit.  My hope in putting this out there is to provide some ideas to those who may have been really successful in reining things in with YNAB and also those (like me) who budget even when they don't absolutely need to just to keep things on track.  I've been keeping a budget religiously since I was in college.  Since I like financial data and reporting, I do it regardless of whether we really need it.  We've gon...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video, I’ll tell you about my big review of all of my regular monthly expenses.   I think I established in a couple of my other videos that I am a bit of a budget nerd.  I like setting up a budget, tracking expenses, and maintaining the system.  But, as with any project, I’m always most excited about the setting up part.  The problem is that, as you live your life, you add new things to your monthly expenses and expand your budget to accommodate them, but if you are like me, you rarely take a good, hard look at everything to determine if you REALLY need to spend that money, or if you might be paying too much in each category.  In this video, I am advocating doing this process once a year.   Now, this can be a pretty big project depending on how trim your budget is or how good you are about researching things before you sign up for them.  For me, it had ...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video, I’ll share my rule of thumb for deciding whether I needed smartphone insurance and for how long.   I’ve been going though this process of examining each of our monthly payments and to determine whether I’m paying too much and whether they are still worth the price.  One of the areas I looked at was our smartphone insurance.   Smartphones are expensive, easy to break, and easy to lose.  The fact that we have them with us at every moment makes the risk of loss or damage even higher.  Someone recognized all of this and is making big money off of smartphone insurance.  We are good candidates for insurance.  Both of my kids have ADHD which makes loss or damage almost unavoidable and, although their phones are not top of the line, they are definitely not cheap.  Not all insurance is created equal — some only cover manufacturer defects, others cover...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel.  This is the last video in this four part series where I will walk through the steps to start budgeting using Mint.  This video will cover tracking your spending progress against your budget and making adjustments when needed. In the 4 steps to successful budgeting, this video will cover the last 2: tracking progress and making adjustments.  So far we have linked all of your spending accounts to Mint, developed a list of budget categories, tagged your historic transactions, set an amount for each budget category, done a quick savings check, and entered your budget into Mint.  Now you are ready to start to spend some money and Track Your Progress I split this step into two different parts: categorizing your ongoing transactions and reporting on your budget.  Let’s start with Categorizing Your Transactions As you spend, Mint automatically imports your tran...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel.  This is the third video in a four part series where I will walk through the steps to start budgeting using Mint.  This video and the last one cover all of the steps involved in creating a budget.  In this one, we will do a quick savings check and enter your budget into Mint. In the 4 steps to successful budgeting, we are still on the second step -- create a budget.  So far we have linked all of your spending accounts to Mint, developed a list of budget categories, tagged your historic transactions, and set an amount for each budget category.  Now it is time to do a  Quick Savings Check I’m assuming that the whole reason you are budgeting is to save a little more money, right?  Or pay down some debt? Well, let’s check to see if your budget is going to allow you to do this.  First figure out your monthly take home pay -- that is the money that ...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel.  This is the second video in a four part series where I will walk through the steps to start budgeting using Mint.  This video and the next one will cover all of the steps involved in creating a budget.  In this one we'll tag all of the transactions that we've pull in from Mint and set an amount for each budget category. In the 4 steps to successful budgeting, we are still on the second step -- create a budget.  In the last video, we linked all of your spending accounts to Mint and developed a list of budget categories.  So, now it is time to Tag Historic Transactions This part takes some time, so make sure you block off some time to do this.  To figure out how you have been spending your money, you need to go back through the historic transactions that have been pulled into Mint from each of your accounts and tag each transaction with one of your budget cat...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel.  This is the first video in a four part series where I will walk through the steps to start budgeting using Mint.  In this first video we will talk about gathering historic data (which involves linking your accounts) and choosing budget categories. Okay -- I've done a bunch of videos recently about budgeting.  The last series of videos that I did was an overview and explainer on the process of budgeting and the types of budgets that exist.  This series will break down exactly how to get started with budgeting using the platform that I use -- Mint.com .  There will be some repetition from my other videos, since the overall budgeting process is similar, so apologies about that in advance.   If you watched my 3 part budgeting series, you'll know that the 4 steps to successful budgeting are: determine your current behavior, set a new plan, track your behavior, and make adju...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel.  This is the final video of a three part series on Budgeting Basics.  The first one was on the what, why, and how of budgeting, the second was an overview of all of the different budgeting systems, and this one is a quick video on how to get started. There are a ton of budgeting videos on YouTube -- many of them are really inspiring.  Folks who pulled themselves out of really tough financial situations by making a budget and sticking with it.  In the end, budgeting is really just a way to create behavior change.  Financial behavior change.  And because of this, following a budget has the same steps of all successful behavior change systems: Determine your current behavior Set a plan for new behavior Track your actual behavior Make adjustments if needed These are the same steps used for keeping new years resolutions, staying on a diet, quitting bad habits, and formin...

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video, I’ll talk about a bunch of different kinds of budgeting systems.  This is the second in a three part series. The first video in this series covers the basics of budgeting — what is it, why would you do, it and how does it work.  For many people, budgeting is about as appealing as dieting.  Which is to say — not very.  In fact — they ARE very similar processes — in both you are required to follow a set of rules that change your behavior in order to achieve a goal — either to lose weight in the case of dieting or to save money, in the case of budgeting.  As you know, there are a BILLION different diets out there - Atkins, South Beach, Weight Watchers, Keto, etc.  Believe it or not — there are practically as many ways to budget as well.  In the same way that not all diets work for everyone — not all budgeting systems work for everyone either.  In this ...