BETRAYAL!
Let me just start this off by saying, I still love you, YNAB. I do.
So why do I feel so GUILTY???
Because I installed quicken.
DON’T LEAVE ME YNAB! I PROMISE I WAS THINKING OF YOU THE WHOLE TIME! *sniff*
OK, let me back up.
We are not operating on a buffer yet. For those of you who do not know, Rule #1 of the YNAB methodology is to live on LAST month’s income. It is ingenius, really. If you’re living on the last month’s income, then you’re not touching this month’s income as it gets deposited and there’s never any fear of anything bouncing or being out of whack. No waiting until paydate X to pay bill Y, etc.
when you are living on last month’s income, this extra padding of money in your spending account is called the “buffer,” because it buffers you from that $0 balance.
Now, we are not living on last month’s income yet, and honestly, at least until we pay off our credit card debt, I don’t see this happening. We have the opportunity to build up to it, but at this point, I’d rather put everything we can towards debt, even if that means we don’t have a buffer. I think after the credit cards are gone next march, we may take a month and do it, but right now - no buffer. And also, our paydates are spaced pretty well so that for the most part, there usually isn’t any intense juggling going on, mostly, I just have to be careful about the beginning of the month when a lot of things are due/paid.
So I sat down today to enter in the last few days worth of transactions into YNAB and just check up on finance things in general, when I realized I made a mistake.
In YNAB, it’s easy to forget about your running checking account balance, because the only balance for the account is up in the tab for the account that you’re in, rather than a running balance in the actual register. Our mortgage payment is going to be high next month because we just refinanced and instead of prepaying the interest that would be accrued up to our first payment, that interest is due in our first payment.
So, I was going to time things carefully and wait until after my husband’s paycheck hits the checking account (on the 3rd) and then send the mortgage payment. However, I had already entered the mortgage payment into my bank’s online bill pay for 4/1, and unfortunately, it is now “processing” which means I can’t modify the date on it. Doh.
So I kind of scrambled a bit, not totally sure whether the plethora of things coming due at the beginning of the month would interfere with the mortgage payment going through. Even when I enter things ahead of time into my checking register in YNAB, without a running balance, it’s hard to see how things are going to play out.
So I installed quicken, I am sorry to say. I still love you YNAB, but there are some things that quicken just does better. And when I was entering all my past transactions and carefully cross-checking with YNAB to get it in the right category — I found a few errors that I had made in YNAB. One transaction I had never entered, and another I had entered twice.
So I guess now, I am going to be a dual software user - both quicken and YNAB. On a whim, I checked out the budgeting screen in quicken, and was quickly underwhelmed. YNAB does awesome budgeting, hands down. Now if it only would download transactions automatically, reconcile, and show a running balance, I will go back to being faithful to YNAB, and YNAB only.
Until then… I have to sneak out and meet my dark quicken lover in the dead of night, in seedy motels, and quickly shower afterward to get rid of my shame…
*Ahem* Sorry, got a little off track there 
I still love you YNAB.
ps - no quick transfers from e*trade account necessary, looks like the mini buffer in our checking account from our savings categories, as well as category overages are enough to keep us from going in the red until some paychecks hit.
March 31st, 2008 at 3:08 pm
Hi again,
I fully understand the dual software routine to balance the checking account. Before YNAB I used excel as my check register, and I have a little formula on the side of the page that quickly “reconciles” my account (checks that haven’t cleared + actual balance = bank balance). I am still using my excel register to make sure my bank account is accurate (and YNAB is accurate). This also means I’m entering every checking transactin twice (once in YNAB and once in excel) but ce la vie. Even if I was living Rule #1 (and we’re not either yet), I still want to make sure my checking account balances.
A few other points:
1) I use separate register tabs in YNAB for different accounts: checking, ING savings, AmEx (where most of our monthly expenses are charged), and cash. I always make sure the total on my YNAB checking tab matches my excel spreadsheet to the penny. Then I know I haven’t missed anything.
2) We just switched to the Schwab High Yield checking account, which I love!! This was primarily motivated by YNAB… we have $3000 in buffer (which is also serving as our emergency fund), and it helps to have that sitting in the checking account to “sort of” live Rule #1 (enough so that I can pay bills whenever and not worry about spacing them out across the month). But, I didn’t want to sacrafice the interest I was getting when the buffer was sitting in ING (my bank of america checking was paying 0.2% inerest, or something horrible like that). Solution: Schwab checking. It’s totally free - no monthly fee, no min. balance, free checks, free online bill pay AND unlimited ATM fee rebates (=awesome), PLUS they pay 3.01% interest on your checking balance. Basically equal to the ING rate (which is 3.00% right now). So this was a no brainer. Schwab has been amazing so far. Excellent customer service. You do have to open a brokerage account to get this checking product, but it’s painless, you don’t have to fund it, and there’s no fee on that either (so ours will just sit there at $0).
I know I sound like a commercial, but this has really worked well for us.
So don’t feel guilty for using quicken - whatever works!