12
How to deal with temporary categories?
(lemmy.world)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2023
12 points (100.0% liked)
YNAB
478 readers
1 users here now
Welcome to YNAB! This community is dedicated to the discussion on the popular budget software You Need A Budget. We welcome any posts here regarding YNAB. Feel free to post your questions, budget strategies & advice.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
I haven’t done this myself so take it with a grain of salt but you could have a generic vacation category that you then move some of that money into the your normal “food” category when it comes time to take the trip. You’d leave some money in the travel category to cover transportation/accommodations since normally that’s just 2 transactions or so.
Though for myself I’d just spend from the travel category since for most of my travel the flight/hotel is paid ahead of time so once I get to the destination anything left in the travel category is fair game.
One more idea if you are saving for multiple trips is to have a generic travel category and then a “current trip” category that you move the appropriate amount of money into from the main travel category when you are about to embark.
All that said I have a number of hidden categories like for things I saved for then hid once I had bought. You could do the same with your handful of travel-related categories and just un-hide as needed. I don’t ever think or worry about my hidden categories.
Yeah on the one hand, you want the fine-grained detail of separate categories for everything but then again, a general vacation category saves me a lot of headache.
I've seen people use the Wish Farm approach and first tag the transactions (e.g.
#2023-sydney) using the memo field, and then delete the category which will prompt YNAB to reassign the transactions and remaining money to another category. So a specific trip could go to "travel", something for the house could go into "home improvement", a new drawing table could go into "hobbies", etc.I do exactly this. I wish farm for specific things, but when i'm done, I delete the category and assign the spending to a more generic one. For instance, I might save up for a new motorcycle helmet. Once purchased, I delete that category and move the transaction to the more generic 'motorcycling' category.
I like this becaus, it lets me prioritize individual larger purchases, but also gives me an idea of how much spending i'm doing overall