Hellobee Boards

Currently we have 6 months worth of living expenses in our checking acct.

@bluestriped bee: Yea, we have 2 separate savings accounts. A tax free saving account (high interest) and a general high interest saving account.

Yes, now we are! But only after we started using Ynab. It has been an amazing source of accountability for us. I had trouble reconciling at first too, but now all my numbers match whew!

I prefer to manually reconcile by inputting my transactions in vs. downloading so I login to all my spending accounts at least once per day or every other day. It keeps me aware of my spending too.

I am not sure how to answer the question...do you mean if we spend more than we take in per month?

Sometimes we do and it can not be avoided, but we have savings to cover that (apart from our emergency fund).

@Mrs. High Heels: whoa I didn't know you could do automatic imports. I've been doing it all manually, but I think that's better for me.

Yes, we have last months pay in our checking acct and we have a hefty savings as well.

@Bookworm: That's what we do too. ^_^ We also put a lot of our extra money into our mortgage after building a pretty good savings account.

We live on many past months income.

I put other, because we kind of do. We both only get paid once a month, at the end of the month. Our deposits go in around the 30th, so that's the money we use for the next month. (So, March 29th's paycheck is paying for April's bills). But I don't know if that really counts, because if we got paid once a month at the beginning of the month, we'd use that money for the rest of the month.

We had/have YNAB and I really liked it as a system for keeping track of our bills/expenses & budgeting. But I'm not a great money person - every month I'd have a breakdown about how we are poor and will never have enough money to do XYZ (buy a house, have a kid, take a vacation). Except, we are not "poor" and do have money to save/spend, so my husband took pity on me and now does the finances. All I need to know is if I need to think twice before making a "frivolous" purchase

We use YNAB and are at least a month ahead, plus built up an emergency fund. It took some persistance: we work hard but don't make very much due to DH being in grad school, but we did it. DH does all of the expense tracking and we are good about not spending on things we don't need. We've been using YNAB since 2008 and it took us at least a few years to get this far ahead. Stick with it!

Our accounts are always growing, both the savings and checking. We put most toward retirement accounts and savings accounts, but leave a generous amount in checking also, which gets wiped out by periodic big expenses like house projects or vacations. Last month the checking account had grown to almost 10k, this month after paying taxes, some home repair and for a vacation, it's been knocked down to 3k, which will be just enough to pay the mortgage next month, but luckily we get paid this week so we're still ahead.