You can budget the month before the month ever starts You never have to worry about the timing of your bills If you’re still not sold on being a month ahead, here are some advantages: Remember, it’s just for a few months and the more you can cut, the faster it will go. No new clothes or spending on things you don’t absolutely need. I suggest a Spending Freeze for a few months. Get it done quick, though, or you’ll lose steam.
If you can live on 4/5 of your income, then do that and it’ll just take you 5 months. You get to budget for Month 4 entirely with the money you’ve been setting aside! And the money you earn in Month 4? You use that for Month 5, and so on.Īnd look - maybe you can’t live on 2/3 of your income.
#Move steam ynab 4 to ynab 5 full#
When you get to the end of Month 3, you should have one full month’s worth of income set aside! Or you can actually transfer it into a separate bank account to make sure you don’t spend it.Īfter just two months, you’ll have 2/3 of one-month’s worth of income saved up. If you’re good at budgeting, you can do this by budgeting it in a “holding” account If you can live on 2/3 of your income, you can get a month ahead in just a few months. All this means is that every single dollar of income we bring in gets budgeted in the following month. The best thing we’ve ever done for our finances is getting one month ahead. We constantly found ourselves dipping into the emergency fund or having trouble timing our income with our expenses. But with a large and growing family, we quickly found that it wasn’t quite enough. The $1,000 baby emergency fund that Dave Ramsey has you set up in the very beginning was helpful. There’s a YNAB book that covers the method. We actually found that a lot of the principles from the YNAB method worked better for us than Dave Ramsey’s baby steps. YNAB worked for us all the way from 1 kid to 5 kids, lots of debt to virtually no debt, and every income level on the way. Finally, several years ago, we found the tool that worked best for us: YNAB (You Need A Budget). We’ve tried all the tools we could find: Quicken, Excel, envelopes, etc. I was finishing up my accounting degree and I ate that stuff up.ĭid we even remotely follow the plan over the next dozen years or so? Absolutely not.īut one thing that stuck with us was budgeting. When Jessica and I got engaged, her dad gave us two books by Dave Ramsey: Staying One Month Ahead Dave Ramsey Didn’t Cut It