My husband and I both work full time salaried jobs, which means there’s no variations in our income to worry about.
Entering in our april paychecks into YNAB and doing a quick runthrough for april, entering categories willy nilly, I came up alarmingly in the negative. For those who do not know how YNAB works, you enter in your income, and it becomes the “available” balance with which to budget. Then you enter in dollar amounts in your budget categories, and as you do so, it subtracts those amounts from the available balance. You continue to enter until your available balance is down to 0.
When I was done entering budgeted category amounts, the available balance was around -$1000. NOT GOOD.
Now, I had been fairly generous in places, so I did a quick re-run through and try to hack off some of the excess. Good, but I only managed to get it down to about -400.
The biggest culprits:
- Mortgage payment: we have a larger payment than usual on our mortgage. We refinanced in february, and instead of having us prepay the interest in our closing costs, they tack that on to the first payment. It’s about $500 more than it will be in May.
- Savings goals: There are several things we’re saving for with monthly budgeted amounts, even though they won’t be paid/used until later.
- car tax: We have $70 going into a car tax category for a estimated $700 bill that will be due in october.
- tuition: my husband is completing his bachelor’s degree at night, taking 1-2 classes a semester. His employer pays for a good bit of it, but as he starts taking more general electives, they will cover less of those costs. We have $375 going to tuition each month.
- christmas: we know it’s coming! We’re putting $110 toward our christmas category so we’ll have a tidy sum at the end of the year for all the festivities.
- Debt Reduction: When we started getting serious about budgeting, we decided we could throw $1k/month at our debt.
Please understand: I’m not saying I want to cut back on our savings or debt reduction. AND I’m not saying that the rest of the budget couldn’t use a little trimming. I just want to be sure to recognize (to myself & my husband, at least) that these are not insignificant portions of our budget. Tuition, Savings, and Debt reduction add up to $1555. Tag that with the addition $500 bucks going toward the mortgage payment, and you’ve got over $2k. Yeouch.
I’m mostly thinking about our debt number. When we decided to put $1k toward debt a month, I HAD NOT YET figured out what we should be saving for tuition costs, or other yearly expenses. Could it be that we were too hasty in picking this amount? I hope not, because I WANT TO PAY OFF THIS DEBT!! Unfortunately for our debt, that is the category that it is the easiest to lower down.
We have a busy rest of the week in front of us, as well as a busy weekend planned, but maybe Sunday night, Husband and I can settle in and take a look at April and see if we can figure something out.