This concept seems a bit abstract, but it simply means you want to live on last month’s money. Here’s the bottom line: No budget is perfect, you can’t predict the future, so roll with it, adjust, and move on! Rule #4 – Age Your Money We’ll cover this in more detail later, but YNAB makes this SUPER simple, simply allowing you move money from one budget to another. When you overspend in any category, you can simply adjust your budget, and grab the funds from somewhere else in the budget.
This is where I find YNAB is the MOST useful. You can read more about how I fund Savings Buckets HERE Rule # 3 – Roll With The Punches
It requires you to ONLY budget money you actually have, and to give every dollar a job.
YNAB is a zero-based budgeting software that gives you (almost) complete control of your budget, and is probably my favorite budgeting software on the market today. It grew quickly, and based on their 4 Rules of Budgeting, has helped thousands and thousands of people take back control of their money. After 3 years, he partnered with a developer and created the first stand-alone software version of YNAB. When you roll your own spreadsheet, it’s surprisingly complex to allow for cleared and uncleared transactions.YNAB is the brain-child of Jesse Mecham, a spreadsheet nerd (like myself) who built his budgeting spreadsheet in 2003, and started selling it. YNAB walks you through the process of reconciling your account. Reviewing Your (shared) transactions and resolving any discrepancies, aka budget reconciliation, is also very simple. You might actually keep a true budget instead of a ledger. If that happens it’s much easier to help them be engaged from the beginning thanks to a dedicated budgeting tool. Think about the following: your partner might want to pitch in from time to time, or sooner or later the person managing the budget will change. It provides a better, more efficient interface than Excel. It’s a system that doesn’t need maintenance and it’s constantly improving. It takes most of the work of your hands allowing you to purely focus on budgeting. When talking about limitations it can be good to compare to YNAB.
These accounts can be investment accounts but also a mortgage. This an overview of my tracking accounts.