humblr grumblr

YNAB tip - building your buffer

With YNAB one of the things you should try to do is build a cash buffer so that at some point you’ll always be a month ahead, i.e. you can budget next month’s expenses today.

But building that buffer can take a bit of time, and just leaving money sitting unallocated to a certain budget category can get both confusing and tempting.

This is how I get around it:-

That box above is what you see at the bottom of the budget screen in YNAB. In green you can see the amount of cash you have left to budget for the month, and on the very last line if you haven’t allocated that cash it forms part of your buffer.

I always get tempted to allocate every last penny to budget categories and it leaves me behind, not getting ahead with building a buffer.

So you see that little droparrow my big red arrow is pointing to? Next time you’ve allocated as you usually would to your budget categories just click that arrow and this happens:-

All you get to see is the buffer amount. No green available to budget category, so you don’t feel tempted to put it anywhere else.

Believe it or not, this simple thing is actually working for me. If you find it distracting when building your buffer seeing ‘available to budget’ cash just sitting there, hit the button!