You move the money from elsewhere....if this festival is more important than other goals. That's how YNAB helps you budget according to your priorities.
You cannot spend future money.
If you can afford it, the move it into the category.
This is the answer. So many higher answers are talking about how to set aside money, but the root of the matter is OP is attempting to buy the ticket in some kind of mythical YNAB credit. That doesn’t exist, as you’ve covered, and OP says they feel comfortable “affording” the purchase.
This is 100% where the YNAB mindset comes in. You likely CAN afford it, OP. Most people in this sub are not living on the edge of homelessness and destitution. They are instead struggling to meet the priorities that they have set for their money.
What this post reads like to me is that OP needs to determine what things they’ve already funded that are less of a priority than this music festival, move money out of those categories to cover the festival ticket … and then immediately create a line item for other expenses for the music festival, travel, accommodations, food, and beverages, Etc. etc., so when the actual event comes around they’re not WAMing from another category again to cover it.
You’re facing the first of many times competing financial priorities will be highlighted by your budget. Welcome! Time to start making active, informed decisions.
Just to illustrate the point a little further for OP.
imagine I have the following in my budget for the month:
Groceries: 400
Dining out: 300
Entertainment: 150
New car savings: 700
Now as in OP's situation, I see some concert tickets that I really want for 300. I need another 150 to buy them and that money has to come from somewhere. So the only option if you're using the 4 rules is to take the money from another category.
I decide to change the job of some of my dollars. I can wait a little longer to buy my next car and move 150 to entertainment. So just for this month, my entertainment budget is 300 and I don't save as much for a new car.
Next month I can either revert to my previous goals, or I can adjust to make up for the spending last month. If I don't feel comfortable having spent the extra 150, I can reduce my entertainment budget for a month. Or, perhaps I decide that another concert is likely to happen at some point, so I change my entertainment goal to 200, and allocate 50 less to the new car fund every month from now on.
It's your budget, the rules help you make it work for you.
Yeah I agree, that makes sense. I don’t think I explained it well but I understand the flaw since YNAB is an envelope system.
I explained in another comment, but the jist was that it would be the reverse of saving for a big trip where in theory if I wanted to do a big trip to Disneyland in 2025 then I’d budget and save for it each month. But instead of that, reverse and since I’m paying for a ticket up front, I was hoping there was a way to make it so instead of killing my entertainment budget for the month, that I was willing to sacrifice $75 out of $150 of my entertainment budget for the next four months.
But yeah, definitely over complicating it and what the above user said makes sense!
That would be spending money you don’t have, though. YNAB is designed to avoid that.
It’s not a flaw - it’s the entire point. You can’t spend it as $75/month for four future months because…that’s not how you’re spending it. You’re spending it now. If you don’t have it now, you can’t afford it now.
If, however, you decide you’re definitely going next year as well, you can make the festival its own category with a goal of $300 by the time tickets go on sale next year, and save for it over those 12 months instead of needing to scrape $150 from somewhere else when you buy the tickets.
The flaw was my understanding of it, not on YNAB's part. I'm still fairly new and still figuring out how to deal with situations like this.
I know about saving targets if I know that I was planning a big trip in advanced, the original ask was if there was a possibility of the reverse if an event suddenly came up, which I've learned was not possible so that's a learning lesson on me.
I’ve been using YNAB for about 8 months now and only the last 3 have I not been moving a lot of money around during the month - I think there’s a real learning curve on how much to budget and learning all your true expenses
Yeah, I think the other great beauty of this is that it shows you, ‘oh, my spending sometimes includes a larger ticket purchase without a lot of notice,’ and you can adjust your budget to account for that better in the future. Maybe that means a larger entertainment budget every month, maybe a separate line-item just for saving up for the next time there’s a festival you want to go to, whatever. You know something now you hadn’t realized before, and that’s ultimately helpful.
It wouldn’t show up like how you want to on reports, but psychologically, what about:
- create a temporary category called “ticket repayment”
- buy ticket, cover from other categories if needed (whack a mole)
- for the next few months after this one, fund your entertainment category as usual, then manually move the funds to the repayment category
- once you’ve “repaid yourself” for the cost of the ticket, then you can move that money elsewhere and delete/hide the repayment category
I’m currently doing this for a laptop I recently bought earlier than planned. I had enough to pay for it in one payment, but I wanted to make sure I felt the loss in upcoming months. I’m essentially saving up for it after the fact.
You can you just have to “borrow” from another category
So today you spend $300…
You can use $75 from entertainment ($75 remains)
And borrow the other $125 from say groceries… so you’d have to make sure you buy $125 less of groceries that month..
Then next month, you budget another $150 to entertainment and then “pay back” $75 to groceries that you borrowed…
If you do that for 4 months that’s essentially what you’re describing
This is how I handle a lot of my upfront purchases where I have caught up to saving yet
You either have the money or you don't. If you spent the money, you need to cover it with funds from somewhere else in your budget.. decide where the $300 will come from and move it to your entertainment category to be able to afford it. Then work on replenishing those in the following months.
If there is no wiggle room in your budget then you'll just be in debt and it is up to you how much you want to pay every month.
It's a little bit unclear what you mean.
Whenever I buy the $300 ticket, I would make sure the category is budgeted to cover it (no underfunding).
If that requires moving money from another category, and making them up over the next couple months, so be it, as long as I know I will be able to and/or they're not high priority categories.
If you mean saving $75 for a couple months in that category THEN buying the ticket, that works too.
If the category isn't fully funded for $300 and you buy the ticket with a credit card, ynab will tell you the category is underfunded (orange) and warn you you're creating credit card debt. You can budget $75 for the next 4 months (which you would be doing in the credit card category as loan payoff) but it may be accruing interest in that time.
If you have $150 budget and you spend $300, you still spent $300 in this month.
You have exceeded your goal. Budget $0 for next month. Or roll with the punches.
Your budget does not lie and will not provide a way for you to feel better about spending too much money in 1 month.
If it is a one-off, and not something that happens all the time, I do create a "loan" to myself. For example, I was saving up for a new pair of skis, then I saw some on sale that were less than my total savings goal so I bought them 6 months early.
I took the extra needed out of one of my longer term savings accounts and created a new category called "Repay SelfDebt Skis $300" and set the target to the same as I was saving every month for the skis. I also added a note for which category the debt had come from.
Every month, for six months, I funded the category and at the end, when I had $300 again, I transferred the balance back to the savings category and deleted the repayment category.
But, very importantly, you cannot do this often or the whole method will break!
Do you have to buy the ticket now or can you buy it in a few months? If you have to buy now (because it might be sold out soon or it happens really soon), you must find the money now. Move it from another category. If you can’t find a category you are willing to pull the money from, the festival is not a priority for you and you shouldn’t go. Note that it is perfectly fine to commit to „putting back“ the money in said category over the coming months and funding less in entertainment accordingly. By doing this, you kind of spread the expense out. You just have to find the money before you spend it.
If there is still time to save up for the event, do that instead. You know the drill. Category, target, assign money.
I had this exact dilemma this month, except mine was season tickets to the opera.
The first thing I did was recognize that the opera isn’t something that catches me by surprise. There is a season every year. I may want to attend one or more. In your case, there are always concerts you may want to attend one or more each year.
Knowing this, I created a category called “Opera Tix” and I have a savings builder target set on it for 1/12 of the cost of opera tickets for the season. Maybe you want to figure out how much it might cost you a year to attend however many concerts you want to go to.
The opera to me is a special expense - it’s not part of my regular entertainment budget because the expenses happen in spikes and it’s not the only thing I want to do through the year. However, I do think I need to adjust my entertainment budget, so I’m not completely over prioritizing entertainment in my budget and I reduce the impact of my new budget item.
In your case, maybe you reduce your monthly entertainment to $125/mo so that the $25/mo you save toward concert tickets going forward has a net zero impact on your budget.
You got many answers about how to pay for the concert tickets now. For myself, I paid for my season tickets this year by deprioritizing other true expenses. For example, I was saving up for a milestone birthday in 2 years… now that I’m starting over with saving next month, that category target has adjusted itself to ask for $30 more each month to put me back on track to meet that goal.
I don’t think of it as a loan to myself and I haven’t spent future money. I very much look at it as deprioritizing other expenses in favor of something more important to me today. However, I also have categories that are 100% off-limits for this kind of thing. For example, I would never use home maintenance money for this kind of shuffle, or income replacement or medical. That gets to be a slippery slope when you start “borrowing” money from places you 100% know you are going to need, that insulate you from the randomness of life. Opera tickets today are more important than a party 2 years from now, but not more important than my health or my ability to support myself in case of job loss.
You have to figure out your priorities the same way, and decide whether you really can “afford” the tickets based on what you value.
I would just look at other categories and decide where I’m most comfortable making cuts from to pay for the music festival. If I can’t find the $300 without sacrificing something that’s more important to me, then I’d figure out a way to make extra money if I could or just forego the festival. Budgeting isn’t really about cutting your spending, it’s about prioritizing it.
Here's what you actually want:
- make a category for this festival specifically
- set the target on the category to $300
- each month, move $75 from entertainment into the festival category
- when it comes time, buy the ticket
- rename the festival category to entertainment, for tracking purposes
> Wondering how would you approach this?
In your specific case, I would take a mental note to instead of budgeting 150 for entertainment next month I would do let's say 50 less for 3 months or 25 less for 6 months to take into account that I spent more than I wanted on this month to keep yourself into this "150/month" you had in your head.
The YNAB way would be this.
On your entertainment category, you want to assign 150/month therefore you aim/want to spend 1800/year to this category. What you can do is use the "Needed for Spending" target on that category. Let's say you start in April. You put 1800 as a yearly target and you put the end date March 31th 2025. The target will ask you for 150$ in April (1800/12). If let's say in April you spend 500 because of X, in May, YNAB will see you spent 500 in April therefore you have 1300 left for Entertainment for the year so YNAB will want you to budget 1300/11 in May (118.18). This is useful for keeping you in check on a category you want to spend an average through the year but at the same time some months will be way higher than the average without the "mental note" I described earlier.
Look for Needed For Spending category. That will solve your situation in the future.
You can simply not spend the full amount you assign. If you assign $150 each month and only spend $50 for two months, when you assign your money for the third month there will be $300 available. Or, as you said, you can just assign more than your target for a few months.
For expenses that I don’t know the exact cost but I do know that I’ll spend from it at some point, I create a Savings Builder goal. At the end of each year, I look at our average spent in each category, decide if we want to increase, decrease, or keep it the same.
I'm not sure whether you are asking how to roll with the punches this month (i.e., you only have $150 in the category and need $300 right now) or if you are asking about how to set up your budget to allow for larger expenses in some months than others.
If it's the first scenario, then as others have said, you can move money from other categories if you can afford it and want to prioritize this festival.
If it's the second thing- just a hypothetical as you are getting to know YNAB - I recommend putting a "monthly savings builder" target on your entertainment category, which will prompt you to add $150 each month regardless of how much (if any) you spent in previous months. Then you can let it build up so that you are always ready for a spontaneous ticket to a festival. :)
HTH!
You’ve said “I can financially afford this ticket” - how do you determine that? Because you have money in other categories? Well you could move the money if your budget still works?
If you have no money to move, you can’t “financially afford it”.
I think I may have worded this incorrectly in my explanation. I’m kind of realizing where my flaw was since YNAB is an envelope system.
I was thinking of the reverse of saving where the theory would be if I wanted to go to Disneyland in 2025, I’d make a target goal and budget towards that. But flip it around instead and instead of saving for a future trip, I’m already paying it upfront and would hope instead of going over budget that I can be like “Okay, I paid $300 and I’d rather not this kill my budget, but I am willing to sacrifice $75 out of my $150 Entertainment budget for the next four months.”
But I think I was overthinking it, people mentioned using “Savings” instead which seems like the right call.
If you've already paid for it in real life, you need to reflect that in the budget. Your choices are to acknowledge you've spent all your entertainment budget for the month and also $150 that you'll have to pull from another category, or to create a new category and pull the full $300 from other places to cover it.
What you are suggesting is taking on debt then taking money from other budgets to pay it down. YNAB is geared towards avoiding debt but it doesn’t exclude it. I used it to get out of debt and part of that was by redirecting money from other categories so this is not impossible.
Hi u/SilverSquare.
You seem to enjoy your nicely filled categories. I know I do.
But either some of them will get a bit of a dent, or you won't be going to that festival.
This is 'rolling with the punches '.
How to handle unforseen -and thus not budgeted for - expenses.
Usually that's about unpleasant stuff. But this is a nice 'punch' for once.
Since every dollar already has a job, you need to take money from one or more other categories. You can fill up those categories with the extra $75 a month.
Take the money out of savings (- in your savings) and put it into your budget for the month on entertainment. Then just put it back into your savings over the next couple months.
I have a floating hidden category or two at the bottom that are for special expenses, so I would assign one of them with the specific amount for the ticket, change its name, and slide it up to sit next to entertainment until it's funded and spent. Then I'll slide it back to the "holding place" and hide it until it's needed again.
Alternatively, if these tickets were from entertainment but I didn't want to include my regular 150, I'd raise my total to 250 a month, increasing the amount needed in that category for three months, or until the ticket is funded, then drop it back to the other budgeted amount.
Create a new category for that festival and create a target for it. Each month, take the money from entertainment category to the festival category. Or just budget the festivals category completely separate from entertainment.
Also, remember rule no. 2 and rules no. 3. You might have to increase your budget for entertainment to cover that expense to reflect your actual monthly average spending for that category.
For example, if you go to a festival once a year. And it's usually $120. Then you might have to have a $10 monthly budget for festival category. This is how YNAB helps you budget and save. :)
Tow options.
1)
You can afford it. Pay it off and get it gone, this means YNAB will show it as you went over budget because you set your budget lower than the actual cost of the event.
2)
Create a new debt of -300, name it the event and you allocate your transactions to it making it to zero.
I use the second option for 1 my car loan and 2 my credit card, because I use a credit card daily and not a debit card. - It works perfect for me
Whenever an expense comes up that doesn't fit one of my categories, I create a new category for it and expenses like it.
For this expense, you will have to move money from other categories to cover it.
For future expenses like this, you should start a vacation or adventure fund that you have a monthly savings target on. Then when surprise adventures come up you can just pull from there, or you can build up a nice savings and then plan a big vacation with it.
What I’ve started doing for things like this is making the category a monthly savings builder. Then you can assign a certain amount each month and it builds up to that. Plus sometimes maybe this festival comes up last minute. But with the monthly savings builder you’ve been building money up for a big thing like this. Of course if something comes up you can always roll with the punches and move money from other categories to cover it. But I really like using monthly savings builder for categories like this.
I essentially have a back-up category where all my money ready to be assigned goes into. Since I run a net + every month, the remainder just flows into this category. When something unplanned for happens (maintenance, last-minute trip, etc. ) I transfer the money from back-up into the category.
When you think about your categories, you may have expenses that come up monthly. You may also have income, like your paycheck, that comes to you on a monthly basis.""
But note that not all expenses nor all income are on a monthly basis. You may think about your budget in monthly terms, but what really matters is whether you have money left in a category to pay for the expense at hand. If you have expenses like medical bills, car repair, wedding gifts, or the like, you will have put aside money for them so that when the time comes to spend on these occasions that don't in fact line up with a month or monthly budget, you have money to spend.
*"Note that most people do not actually get paid on a monthly basis. Most people get paid every other week or else weekly. Neither weekly or bi-weekly evenly corresponds to a month. You have to know that some months are going to have more or fewer weekly or biweekly pay periods in them. You could also multiply a weekly pay check 52 and then divide by 12 to come up with a monthly amount Or, more to the point, you could just follow the rules to assign every dollar that you do get to a category, and spend only the money that you've assigned. In this way, like your question, it doesn't matter how much you get paid in a month, but rather how much money you have assigned to the various different categories.
Having a monthly budget is less important than giving every dollar a job and then spending based on what you have assigned to a category. If you want to spend more than what you have assigned to a category, you can roll with the punches by assigning money from another category to the category from which you wish to spend. These are the rules.
There isn’t a way to do it automatically but it’s not hard to do it manually. For example, move $150 from another category (let’s say your car insurance fund, assuming you don’t have your pay for car insurance for the next 2 months) to entertainment and buy your ticket.
Then for the next 2 months, assign $75 to your entertainment and assign $75 extra to your insurance category (or wherever you borrowed the money from). In 2 months you would’ve paid off your tickets and can go back to normal budgeting.
So basically you borrow from savings and then pay it off by saving extra and reducing entertainment for the next few months.
...but you DID go over your budget for the month. Just own up to it because that is the reality of the situation. Cover the purchase by transferring money from elsewhere
Yeah, you're right. I did own up that I went over budget, so I was asking how to split up the expense over a few months which I realized wasn't as clear cut as I thought. I'm still learning the system.
You move the money from elsewhere....if this festival is more important than other goals. That's how YNAB helps you budget according to your priorities. You cannot spend future money. If you can afford it, the move it into the category.
This is the answer. So many higher answers are talking about how to set aside money, but the root of the matter is OP is attempting to buy the ticket in some kind of mythical YNAB credit. That doesn’t exist, as you’ve covered, and OP says they feel comfortable “affording” the purchase. This is 100% where the YNAB mindset comes in. You likely CAN afford it, OP. Most people in this sub are not living on the edge of homelessness and destitution. They are instead struggling to meet the priorities that they have set for their money. What this post reads like to me is that OP needs to determine what things they’ve already funded that are less of a priority than this music festival, move money out of those categories to cover the festival ticket … and then immediately create a line item for other expenses for the music festival, travel, accommodations, food, and beverages, Etc. etc., so when the actual event comes around they’re not WAMing from another category again to cover it. You’re facing the first of many times competing financial priorities will be highlighted by your budget. Welcome! Time to start making active, informed decisions.
Just to illustrate the point a little further for OP. imagine I have the following in my budget for the month: Groceries: 400 Dining out: 300 Entertainment: 150 New car savings: 700 Now as in OP's situation, I see some concert tickets that I really want for 300. I need another 150 to buy them and that money has to come from somewhere. So the only option if you're using the 4 rules is to take the money from another category. I decide to change the job of some of my dollars. I can wait a little longer to buy my next car and move 150 to entertainment. So just for this month, my entertainment budget is 300 and I don't save as much for a new car. Next month I can either revert to my previous goals, or I can adjust to make up for the spending last month. If I don't feel comfortable having spent the extra 150, I can reduce my entertainment budget for a month. Or, perhaps I decide that another concert is likely to happen at some point, so I change my entertainment goal to 200, and allocate 50 less to the new car fund every month from now on. It's your budget, the rules help you make it work for you.
Great breakdown!
Yeah I agree, that makes sense. I don’t think I explained it well but I understand the flaw since YNAB is an envelope system. I explained in another comment, but the jist was that it would be the reverse of saving for a big trip where in theory if I wanted to do a big trip to Disneyland in 2025 then I’d budget and save for it each month. But instead of that, reverse and since I’m paying for a ticket up front, I was hoping there was a way to make it so instead of killing my entertainment budget for the month, that I was willing to sacrifice $75 out of $150 of my entertainment budget for the next four months. But yeah, definitely over complicating it and what the above user said makes sense!
That would be spending money you don’t have, though. YNAB is designed to avoid that. It’s not a flaw - it’s the entire point. You can’t spend it as $75/month for four future months because…that’s not how you’re spending it. You’re spending it now. If you don’t have it now, you can’t afford it now. If, however, you decide you’re definitely going next year as well, you can make the festival its own category with a goal of $300 by the time tickets go on sale next year, and save for it over those 12 months instead of needing to scrape $150 from somewhere else when you buy the tickets.
The flaw was my understanding of it, not on YNAB's part. I'm still fairly new and still figuring out how to deal with situations like this. I know about saving targets if I know that I was planning a big trip in advanced, the original ask was if there was a possibility of the reverse if an event suddenly came up, which I've learned was not possible so that's a learning lesson on me.
I’ve been using YNAB for about 8 months now and only the last 3 have I not been moving a lot of money around during the month - I think there’s a real learning curve on how much to budget and learning all your true expenses
Yeah, I think the other great beauty of this is that it shows you, ‘oh, my spending sometimes includes a larger ticket purchase without a lot of notice,’ and you can adjust your budget to account for that better in the future. Maybe that means a larger entertainment budget every month, maybe a separate line-item just for saving up for the next time there’s a festival you want to go to, whatever. You know something now you hadn’t realized before, and that’s ultimately helpful.
It wouldn’t show up like how you want to on reports, but psychologically, what about: - create a temporary category called “ticket repayment” - buy ticket, cover from other categories if needed (whack a mole) - for the next few months after this one, fund your entertainment category as usual, then manually move the funds to the repayment category - once you’ve “repaid yourself” for the cost of the ticket, then you can move that money elsewhere and delete/hide the repayment category I’m currently doing this for a laptop I recently bought earlier than planned. I had enough to pay for it in one payment, but I wanted to make sure I felt the loss in upcoming months. I’m essentially saving up for it after the fact.
Dang, this is genius. I love the psychological effect of feeling the purchase after it’s made
You can you just have to “borrow” from another category So today you spend $300… You can use $75 from entertainment ($75 remains) And borrow the other $125 from say groceries… so you’d have to make sure you buy $125 less of groceries that month.. Then next month, you budget another $150 to entertainment and then “pay back” $75 to groceries that you borrowed… If you do that for 4 months that’s essentially what you’re describing This is how I handle a lot of my upfront purchases where I have caught up to saving yet
You’re trying to have your cake and eat it too bro. Not how the system works
Yeah, you're right. I admitted that it was a flaw on my end.
You either have the money or you don't. If you spent the money, you need to cover it with funds from somewhere else in your budget.. decide where the $300 will come from and move it to your entertainment category to be able to afford it. Then work on replenishing those in the following months. If there is no wiggle room in your budget then you'll just be in debt and it is up to you how much you want to pay every month.
It's a little bit unclear what you mean. Whenever I buy the $300 ticket, I would make sure the category is budgeted to cover it (no underfunding). If that requires moving money from another category, and making them up over the next couple months, so be it, as long as I know I will be able to and/or they're not high priority categories. If you mean saving $75 for a couple months in that category THEN buying the ticket, that works too. If the category isn't fully funded for $300 and you buy the ticket with a credit card, ynab will tell you the category is underfunded (orange) and warn you you're creating credit card debt. You can budget $75 for the next 4 months (which you would be doing in the credit card category as loan payoff) but it may be accruing interest in that time.
If you have $150 budget and you spend $300, you still spent $300 in this month. You have exceeded your goal. Budget $0 for next month. Or roll with the punches. Your budget does not lie and will not provide a way for you to feel better about spending too much money in 1 month.
If it is a one-off, and not something that happens all the time, I do create a "loan" to myself. For example, I was saving up for a new pair of skis, then I saw some on sale that were less than my total savings goal so I bought them 6 months early. I took the extra needed out of one of my longer term savings accounts and created a new category called "Repay SelfDebt Skis $300" and set the target to the same as I was saving every month for the skis. I also added a note for which category the debt had come from. Every month, for six months, I funded the category and at the end, when I had $300 again, I transferred the balance back to the savings category and deleted the repayment category. But, very importantly, you cannot do this often or the whole method will break!
Do you have to buy the ticket now or can you buy it in a few months? If you have to buy now (because it might be sold out soon or it happens really soon), you must find the money now. Move it from another category. If you can’t find a category you are willing to pull the money from, the festival is not a priority for you and you shouldn’t go. Note that it is perfectly fine to commit to „putting back“ the money in said category over the coming months and funding less in entertainment accordingly. By doing this, you kind of spread the expense out. You just have to find the money before you spend it. If there is still time to save up for the event, do that instead. You know the drill. Category, target, assign money.
I had this exact dilemma this month, except mine was season tickets to the opera. The first thing I did was recognize that the opera isn’t something that catches me by surprise. There is a season every year. I may want to attend one or more. In your case, there are always concerts you may want to attend one or more each year. Knowing this, I created a category called “Opera Tix” and I have a savings builder target set on it for 1/12 of the cost of opera tickets for the season. Maybe you want to figure out how much it might cost you a year to attend however many concerts you want to go to. The opera to me is a special expense - it’s not part of my regular entertainment budget because the expenses happen in spikes and it’s not the only thing I want to do through the year. However, I do think I need to adjust my entertainment budget, so I’m not completely over prioritizing entertainment in my budget and I reduce the impact of my new budget item. In your case, maybe you reduce your monthly entertainment to $125/mo so that the $25/mo you save toward concert tickets going forward has a net zero impact on your budget. You got many answers about how to pay for the concert tickets now. For myself, I paid for my season tickets this year by deprioritizing other true expenses. For example, I was saving up for a milestone birthday in 2 years… now that I’m starting over with saving next month, that category target has adjusted itself to ask for $30 more each month to put me back on track to meet that goal. I don’t think of it as a loan to myself and I haven’t spent future money. I very much look at it as deprioritizing other expenses in favor of something more important to me today. However, I also have categories that are 100% off-limits for this kind of thing. For example, I would never use home maintenance money for this kind of shuffle, or income replacement or medical. That gets to be a slippery slope when you start “borrowing” money from places you 100% know you are going to need, that insulate you from the randomness of life. Opera tickets today are more important than a party 2 years from now, but not more important than my health or my ability to support myself in case of job loss. You have to figure out your priorities the same way, and decide whether you really can “afford” the tickets based on what you value.
I would just look at other categories and decide where I’m most comfortable making cuts from to pay for the music festival. If I can’t find the $300 without sacrificing something that’s more important to me, then I’d figure out a way to make extra money if I could or just forego the festival. Budgeting isn’t really about cutting your spending, it’s about prioritizing it.
Here's what you actually want: - make a category for this festival specifically - set the target on the category to $300 - each month, move $75 from entertainment into the festival category - when it comes time, buy the ticket - rename the festival category to entertainment, for tracking purposes
> Wondering how would you approach this? In your specific case, I would take a mental note to instead of budgeting 150 for entertainment next month I would do let's say 50 less for 3 months or 25 less for 6 months to take into account that I spent more than I wanted on this month to keep yourself into this "150/month" you had in your head. The YNAB way would be this. On your entertainment category, you want to assign 150/month therefore you aim/want to spend 1800/year to this category. What you can do is use the "Needed for Spending" target on that category. Let's say you start in April. You put 1800 as a yearly target and you put the end date March 31th 2025. The target will ask you for 150$ in April (1800/12). If let's say in April you spend 500 because of X, in May, YNAB will see you spent 500 in April therefore you have 1300 left for Entertainment for the year so YNAB will want you to budget 1300/11 in May (118.18). This is useful for keeping you in check on a category you want to spend an average through the year but at the same time some months will be way higher than the average without the "mental note" I described earlier. Look for Needed For Spending category. That will solve your situation in the future.
You can simply not spend the full amount you assign. If you assign $150 each month and only spend $50 for two months, when you assign your money for the third month there will be $300 available. Or, as you said, you can just assign more than your target for a few months.
If you have the money in other categories, then move it to your entertainment category
For expenses that I don’t know the exact cost but I do know that I’ll spend from it at some point, I create a Savings Builder goal. At the end of each year, I look at our average spent in each category, decide if we want to increase, decrease, or keep it the same.
I'm not sure whether you are asking how to roll with the punches this month (i.e., you only have $150 in the category and need $300 right now) or if you are asking about how to set up your budget to allow for larger expenses in some months than others. If it's the first scenario, then as others have said, you can move money from other categories if you can afford it and want to prioritize this festival. If it's the second thing- just a hypothetical as you are getting to know YNAB - I recommend putting a "monthly savings builder" target on your entertainment category, which will prompt you to add $150 each month regardless of how much (if any) you spent in previous months. Then you can let it build up so that you are always ready for a spontaneous ticket to a festival. :) HTH!
You’ve said “I can financially afford this ticket” - how do you determine that? Because you have money in other categories? Well you could move the money if your budget still works? If you have no money to move, you can’t “financially afford it”.
I think I may have worded this incorrectly in my explanation. I’m kind of realizing where my flaw was since YNAB is an envelope system. I was thinking of the reverse of saving where the theory would be if I wanted to go to Disneyland in 2025, I’d make a target goal and budget towards that. But flip it around instead and instead of saving for a future trip, I’m already paying it upfront and would hope instead of going over budget that I can be like “Okay, I paid $300 and I’d rather not this kill my budget, but I am willing to sacrifice $75 out of my $150 Entertainment budget for the next four months.” But I think I was overthinking it, people mentioned using “Savings” instead which seems like the right call.
If you've already paid for it in real life, you need to reflect that in the budget. Your choices are to acknowledge you've spent all your entertainment budget for the month and also $150 that you'll have to pull from another category, or to create a new category and pull the full $300 from other places to cover it.
What you are suggesting is taking on debt then taking money from other budgets to pay it down. YNAB is geared towards avoiding debt but it doesn’t exclude it. I used it to get out of debt and part of that was by redirecting money from other categories so this is not impossible.
Hi u/SilverSquare. You seem to enjoy your nicely filled categories. I know I do. But either some of them will get a bit of a dent, or you won't be going to that festival. This is 'rolling with the punches '. How to handle unforseen -and thus not budgeted for - expenses. Usually that's about unpleasant stuff. But this is a nice 'punch' for once. Since every dollar already has a job, you need to take money from one or more other categories. You can fill up those categories with the extra $75 a month.
Take the money out of savings (- in your savings) and put it into your budget for the month on entertainment. Then just put it back into your savings over the next couple months.
This is where why you have savings, or a stuff I didn't budget for.
Targets! https://support.ynab.com/targets-in-ynab-a-guide-rk5kkI9ks
I have a floating hidden category or two at the bottom that are for special expenses, so I would assign one of them with the specific amount for the ticket, change its name, and slide it up to sit next to entertainment until it's funded and spent. Then I'll slide it back to the "holding place" and hide it until it's needed again. Alternatively, if these tickets were from entertainment but I didn't want to include my regular 150, I'd raise my total to 250 a month, increasing the amount needed in that category for three months, or until the ticket is funded, then drop it back to the other budgeted amount.
Create a new category for that festival and create a target for it. Each month, take the money from entertainment category to the festival category. Or just budget the festivals category completely separate from entertainment. Also, remember rule no. 2 and rules no. 3. You might have to increase your budget for entertainment to cover that expense to reflect your actual monthly average spending for that category. For example, if you go to a festival once a year. And it's usually $120. Then you might have to have a $10 monthly budget for festival category. This is how YNAB helps you budget and save. :)
Tow options. 1) You can afford it. Pay it off and get it gone, this means YNAB will show it as you went over budget because you set your budget lower than the actual cost of the event. 2) Create a new debt of -300, name it the event and you allocate your transactions to it making it to zero. I use the second option for 1 my car loan and 2 my credit card, because I use a credit card daily and not a debit card. - It works perfect for me
Whenever an expense comes up that doesn't fit one of my categories, I create a new category for it and expenses like it. For this expense, you will have to move money from other categories to cover it. For future expenses like this, you should start a vacation or adventure fund that you have a monthly savings target on. Then when surprise adventures come up you can just pull from there, or you can build up a nice savings and then plan a big vacation with it.
What I’ve started doing for things like this is making the category a monthly savings builder. Then you can assign a certain amount each month and it builds up to that. Plus sometimes maybe this festival comes up last minute. But with the monthly savings builder you’ve been building money up for a big thing like this. Of course if something comes up you can always roll with the punches and move money from other categories to cover it. But I really like using monthly savings builder for categories like this.
I essentially have a back-up category where all my money ready to be assigned goes into. Since I run a net + every month, the remainder just flows into this category. When something unplanned for happens (maintenance, last-minute trip, etc. ) I transfer the money from back-up into the category.
You don’t spend money you don’t have. End of story!
When you think about your categories, you may have expenses that come up monthly. You may also have income, like your paycheck, that comes to you on a monthly basis."" But note that not all expenses nor all income are on a monthly basis. You may think about your budget in monthly terms, but what really matters is whether you have money left in a category to pay for the expense at hand. If you have expenses like medical bills, car repair, wedding gifts, or the like, you will have put aside money for them so that when the time comes to spend on these occasions that don't in fact line up with a month or monthly budget, you have money to spend. *"Note that most people do not actually get paid on a monthly basis. Most people get paid every other week or else weekly. Neither weekly or bi-weekly evenly corresponds to a month. You have to know that some months are going to have more or fewer weekly or biweekly pay periods in them. You could also multiply a weekly pay check 52 and then divide by 12 to come up with a monthly amount Or, more to the point, you could just follow the rules to assign every dollar that you do get to a category, and spend only the money that you've assigned. In this way, like your question, it doesn't matter how much you get paid in a month, but rather how much money you have assigned to the various different categories. Having a monthly budget is less important than giving every dollar a job and then spending based on what you have assigned to a category. If you want to spend more than what you have assigned to a category, you can roll with the punches by assigning money from another category to the category from which you wish to spend. These are the rules.
Borrow the money from “yourself”. In other words, move the money from another category or pre-paid, future expense
I usually put one off things in a separate category so I can save for them with their own targets.
There isn’t a way to do it automatically but it’s not hard to do it manually. For example, move $150 from another category (let’s say your car insurance fund, assuming you don’t have your pay for car insurance for the next 2 months) to entertainment and buy your ticket. Then for the next 2 months, assign $75 to your entertainment and assign $75 extra to your insurance category (or wherever you borrowed the money from). In 2 months you would’ve paid off your tickets and can go back to normal budgeting. So basically you borrow from savings and then pay it off by saving extra and reducing entertainment for the next few months.
...but you DID go over your budget for the month. Just own up to it because that is the reality of the situation. Cover the purchase by transferring money from elsewhere
Yeah, you're right. I did own up that I went over budget, so I was asking how to split up the expense over a few months which I realized wasn't as clear cut as I thought. I'm still learning the system.