And it seems logical that a budget would just exacerbate that.īut here’s where that’s proven untrue for us. Remember those priorities I mentioned above? Well, once our funds are allocated, my budget basically wants me to spend money. Yes, I still have to be realistic about how much money we’re making. Scarcity mindset tells us there is never enough. Can you afford this? And if you can, should you? Yeah, that was me a year ago. But every time you go shopping, you get anxiety. Let’s say you make enough money to do the things you want to do. Myth: Budgeting will trigger my scarcity mindset So all those priorities have to align realistically with our income. Which means YNAB won’t let us dig ourselves into debt. And that is basically the opposite of taking away our money. Then we plan for those things in our budget.īut here’s the kicker: the one thing that we can’t change is how much money we make. For us, that includes things like saving up for a vacation, having discretionary spending for my clothing habit and Michael’s board game habit, and making sure we have enough money budgeted each month to go out to dinner with our friends. Before we spend a penny of our money, we think about what we want our lives to look like. So you can reach them.Īs for how that theory applies in practical terms, it’s about prioritizing. Your budget is your priorities, all laid out. You think about restriction or denial. Let those stereotypes go. When you hear the word budget, you probably think about spreadsheets and accounting (egads!). The idea behind budgeting is that you control your money, instead of it controlling you. But that is not how budgeting is supposed to work. I didn’t want some financial tool telling me where and how I could spend my money.
Myth: A budget is just going to take away my moneyīefore I started using YNAB, I assumed budgeting was not for me. So while it’s still more work than we were doing before, it genuinely only takes a few minutes out of our day and saves us hours of arguing.
#Ynab budgeting when broke update#
You can even update YNAB from your phone. All you have to do is tell YNAB which budget category your purchases should be allocated to (aka is that Target bill for household goods, groceries, or “fun money”?). You just link your financial accounts (they even had access to my tiny credit union from Maine and our credit cards), and YNAB will automatically sync any transactions as they happen in real time. But with the recent launch of the new YNAB, budgeting is actually really, really simple. I put off budgeting for years, simply because it seemed like it was a lot of work. Michael had been trying to get me on board with this financial projection spreadsheet he’d created that felt like all the worst parts of math class. Here’s what I had gotten wrong: Myth: budgeting is hard work Within a year, I was a fully converted budget advocate, convinced that we didn’t just need a budget, but we also kind of loved having one.
And within a few months, all those preconceived notions about budgeting had eroded. With a ton of remaining debt and recurring fights about money, Michael and I signed up for the app You Need A Budget (or YNAB) as a last ditch effort to get our finances in order. But then last year, I hit a breaking point. Specifically, that it’s a lot of hard work and all you’ll ever have to show for it is a bank account with a really high number and an unfulfilled life. And because of the former group, I have spent my life with lots of preconceived notions about what budgeting means. And if I had to have my pick? I’d always choose the latter. My family is split into two distinct factions: hyper-vigilant budgeters who never seem to have any fun and carefree go-with-the-flow people who never seem to have any money. But how we stayed in debt is easier to pin down. Our wedding cost more than we planned for. The story of how we got so deep is nebulous at best-lots of little unexpected things added up. For more about APW and how we make money, please click here.Ī few short years ago, Michael and I looked at our bank statements and realized we were $33,000 in debt (not including our gigantic student loans).