It’s ALL My Own Fault
Well, I have found the culprit, and the culprit is me.
I *did* enter in the expected escrow check refund.
CORRECTION! It was mostly me, but partly YNAB - it was entered, but YNAB has this little quirkiness where even though there aren’t enough entries to span the entire screen, it will still have a scrollable scrollbar, and the scrollbar was scrolled down ever so slightly so that the pertinent escrow entry was hidden from view.
Doh!
So, in a way I’m relieved, because this means I didn’t make a truly HORRIBLE mistake that I have no idea what it was. I deleted the escrow income entry which threw my top “Available” balance into the negative around 1600. Not fun, but it wasn’t *too* hard to tweak things around to fix.
I moved everything out of our “buffer” category (which is pretty much like savings, for those not in the YNAB know). I had to get rid of any savings in the car repair/tires categories, and then I was really in a pickle. Since it’s the end of the month, it’s not like I can change our grocery budgeted amount, because we’ve already spent all our money on groceries. Now, maybe it’s just me, but it’s awful hard to cut back on money you’ve already spent. I didn’t mind pulling money out of the car categories, because when the check *does* come in, it will just go right back there (buffer too).
But after I cut out the “easy” stuff, I was left with the hard stuff. I have $375 budgeted to tuition, as my husband is in school and that’s the amount I figured would keep us OK each term for tuition, and I worked hard to figure out what the “average” monthly amount should be. I also have $110 going into a “Christmas” category, and I didn’t want to pull it out of there either, even if I knew I could just put it back the next month. Something about those categories staying rock solid and never ever changing just makes me feel happy.
But there was no other place to pull the negative $100 I still had!
I sat and looked at my budget screen for a long while and finally, I decided I would lower the budgeted amounts for categories that had already been spent. I chose to do this in our “debt reduction” categories, as that’s an area that won’t mess up the data too much. (ie: i want to know that I budgeted $400 for groceries, and I don’t want any weird tweaking to mess that up.)
In doing this, the negative amount is carried over to the next month, subtracting it from the available balance.
This is better shown by looking at YNAB:
Lowering the budgeted debt amount:
OK, so I’m getting a little slap-happy with the photoshop, but it displays my point - much easier to reallocate money you *haven’t* spent yet, then money you have.
YNAB - Please fix that damn scrollbar thing. And let me reconcile, while you’re at it 