One of the silver linings of Covid-19 was that we had less expenses in March because we spent most of the month on lockdown. I took my school paychecks for the month of March and saved them, so that they could become part of April’s “To Be Budgeted” amount. I didn’t completely realize this myself, until I made the decision in March to save my paychecks (but actually, really save them this time) and add them to April’s budget. So now you know why our budget felt tight. ThreeYear and I decided that for our particular goals and plans, it did. Some of you may think we didn’t make the right decision to pay off our mortgage so quickly when interest rates are so low, but after many discussions, Mr. That’s a lot of mortgage payment, and it does not include taxes or insurance. We also added the considerable expense of our country club swimming and tennis membership to our budget, something we’ve gotten a lot of physical and social value from, but something that has strained our budget even more.įinally, last month our mortgage payment went up to $2850, because we refinanced it to a 10-year payoff period. Then, when we moved to North Carolina, it went up to $2400 per month, while our income went down, because of North Carolina taxes being taken out (we didn’t have any state income taxes in NH). This is because when we moved from New Hampshire, our mortgage payment was $1800. ThreeYear’s paycheck to cover all our bills AND pad our budget for our periodic expenses. Part of the problem, which I realized when I formally added my pay to our budget, was that we just didn’t have quite enough money with Mr. I largely stopped the trend of overspending one month and “paying myself back” during the next month, which never worked.
#YNAB BUDGETING A MONTH AHEAD SOFTWARE#
I have continued to make the same mistakes in budgeting since I did at the beginning of our debt-free journey, and I decided that I was going to get better at this.īefore I tell you what I’ve been working on and how we got a month ahead (again), let me just share that since we switched to YNAB budgeting software in 2017, I have improved at budgeting.
That’s a long time to be bad at something.īut you know that saying, if you keep doing what you’ve been doing, you’ll keep getting what you’ve been getting? We were going over budget every single month and if we wanted to make headway on savings goals, we were going to have to have a clear-eyed vision of exactly where our money was going.Īt the same time, I finally admitted to myself that I wasn’t very good at budgeting. As much as I didn’t want that to be true, it was. I needed to add my paychecks to our budget, because we needed them to pay the bills. When we refinanced our mortgage to a 10-year, and our monthly payment went up by $450 per month, I realized that something needed to change. The months passed, and those paychecks got eaten up in some way or another, very rarely being spent on purpose like I had envisioned. When I started to get regular paychecks, I decided not to add them to our budget, because I wanted to save them, or spend them on non-budget stuff.ĭid I think that by not budgeting the money in our traditional money things we would somehow be more efficient or productive with the money? Apparently I did. Still, they’re nice additions to our bottom line. I am currently maxing out my 403b, and I’m a teacher, so to say that the paychecks aren’t huge would be an understatement.
#YNAB BUDGETING A MONTH AHEAD FULL#
I started a full time job last August, and began to get two paychecks per month. So why am I saying that we got a month ahead in our budgeting again? Two, we know exactly how much we have to spend each month, before the month starts, so there’s no guessing with budgeting.
One, we have a cushion in our bank account so we never have to worry about the timing of our credit card payment or other bills being taken out. This has been a phenomenal system for a couple of reasons. We’ve kept this system up ever since, so that the money we budget is the money we earned from the previous month. ThreeYear’s two paychecks to use for the next month, September. We lived on that money during the month of August and saved Mr. We took money we saved from not having a mortgage payment on the first month we bought our new house, together with some savings, and used that to create a bare-bones budget for the month of August. In July of 2018, just after my family moved to North Carolina, we finally made it a priority to get a month ahead in our budget.
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