April 2015 Budget Review & May 2015 Budget

The past few months I’ve split my review of the past month’s budget (ex. March 2015) and the preview of the next month’s budget (ex. April 2015) in separate posts, but this month I thought I’d try something a little different… I’m going to put both the review of April and the preview of May in the same post.  We’ll see if I like it… Let me know what you think too.

April marked the first month that we started using the YNAB software to make our budget and track our spending.  And I’ve loved it!  My trial period is almost up, so I’ll be splurging and spending the $60 USD to purchase a license.

You Need A Budget

If you aren’t familiar with YNAB, the software is pretty simple to use and helps to get you to use the YNAB methodology, which consists of four rules:

1. Give Every Dollar a Job.

2. Save for a Rainy Day.

3. Roll With the Punches.

4. Live on Last Month’s Income.

Because every dollar needs a job, and April we put in the existing balances from all our accounts, the April income is totally weird and inflated.  However, in the future we shouldn’t have that issue.  The saving for a rainy day is the basic idea of “funds” for larger expenses that only come around every once in a while… This is great because I used to just have this sort of “slush fund” that things like that would come from, but now I can see where all that money is sitting and why it is waiting there, rather than thinking I can just go spend it… As you’ll see when we go over the numbers, the whole rolling with the punches thing is really important and we used that a lot.  Basically, if something comes up and you have to spend money on something unexpected, just rearrange the money you’ve budgeted for other things to account for that.  Once you’ve got your rainy day funds in place, this will happen less and less, but until then, rearranging is how we kept things going.  The last rule we haven’t really got under control yet, but we are pretty close.  I get paid every other Friday and since May 1st was a payday Friday, that pay is going to be used for the month of May instead of saving it for June… but there will be two more pay days in May that I will put towards June’s budget…

And now on to the numbers…

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April 2015 Budget

So, this month’s budget is going to be messed up… I downloaded a trial version of the YNAB software, and am trying it out this month.  I’m really hoping that it helps us stay on budget and track our expenses throughout the month to know when we have gone over…

However, because I’m putting in all our accounts for the first time in the YNAB software, it thinks that all of our savings are income for this month, and I’m having to budget for the “funds” that already have some sort of balance in them… So it looks like we are making a lot of money this month… also, because I have put together this budget and the month of April has already started, the balances and such already include some expenses, so those may be missing when we do the review at the end of the month (I don’t really want to bother with putting in past transactions…)

The good folks over at You and Me Make Cents have done their March budget review and April budget preview using a screenshot of the YNAB software, and I have decided to copy them… I hope that is okay…

So without further ado, here is our “budget” for April: