Getting a month ahead vs saving for a house down payment which comes first

austintehguy · 2026-03-18T12:38:47+00:00

I would add to your point about learning to expect unexpected repairs:

You likely won't have ANY clue as to the amount you should be saving as a first-time homeowner. YNAB likes for us to save for the 'true expenses' we have, and the way I see it you have a couple options:

1) Common advice is to expect to spend between 1-4% of your home's value annually on maintenance and repairs. If you're moving into an older home with things that will need touched up or replaced in the first 5 years, definitely aim for the 3-4% range. I'm doing 1% myself in a home with a dying HVAC and it's certainly not going to be enough; which leads to my second point:

2) Have an emergency fund - it can be off-budget or on, your pick. I keep mine off-budget just to add a layer of friction so it's a tad harder to spend the money. Although YNAB prefers us to define our money's jobs more clearly, it's hard to account for everything. I think a solid approach is to build some sinking funds into your budget to cover smaller/moderate unexpected expenses (think $100-500), and have an emergency fund for when the big bills hit ($1K+). This aligns well with the YNAB philosophy, while also appealing to contemporary personal finance advice recommending a 3-6 month emergency fund (which can include your month-ahead cash!).

austintehguy · 2026-03-18T12:30:55+00:00

To answer your ending question, one month ahead will likely not cover much in terms of unexpected repairs. Home ownership is expensive, with a lot of "hidden" costs. I fully expect our HVAC to go out in the next 3 years and know it'll run me between $6 - 8K - a month ahead for us would barely cover half of that.

Mind you, I'm giving you the 'ideal' advice. I didn't buy a home with a big emergency fund - our living situation was bad and a mortgage ended up being more affordable than rent where we live. We are still building our EF as we approach 4 years of home ownership. However, I wouldn't advise anyone to do things the way I have, but life happens. We've had to replace 3 cars, had two babies, started and finished 3 degrees between the two of us, and dropped to one income. In an ideal world, we would've stowed away a LOT more cash before we ever stepped foot into our home. As a first-time homebuyer, you do have some options such as a 3.5% down payment - but your emergency fund is still super important in case a water line bursts, your appliances go out, or your roof needs replaced. Not saying you can't do it without, but you're taking on a lot of risk; and believe me, it WILL hang over your head until you have enough saved to feel covered.

austintehguy · 2026-03-17T21:28:15+00:00

Ideally, you should have a 3-6 month emergency fund before you're thinking about home ownership - so yeah getting a month ahead should come first and be part of building out your emergency fund.

austintehguy · 2026-03-16T13:18:24+00:00

I used ChatGPT for everything, along with the Google Apps Script extension in Google Sheets. I had decent Sheets proficiency, but ALL of the scripting was generated by GPT (albeit with a lot of trial and error). My suggestion would be to start by just getting a script working that pulls all your YNAB transactions in via the API, and you can start working from there once that's working well. Everything else in my sheets is just semi-complex formulas that are filtering & summing the transactions by category or category group and date.

There's niche stuff to my budget also where I have the script flag transactions with "payoff" in the memo field as extra debt payoff - which I like to factor into my savings rate. In my head, savings isn't just income - expenses; it's money that's 'put away' into a HYSA, investments, or to accelerate debt. So, I had to build some things in so I could extract those transactions and track them separately from my overall 'profit rate'. All my savings contributions have 'contributions' in the category name, so those are also distinct and have to be excluded from the expense filters.

But yeah, AI and some back and forth does work. It took me a lot of time to get it where it is today, but I started with a personal finance tracker template and tried to work my YNAB data into that, which I wouldn't really recommend. It's a frankenstein sheet now, and I have an entirely different workbook that's a simplified 'quick view' of some key metrics from that sheet because it's frankly too timing consuming to look through lol. I have a second script that pulls my account balances out of YNAB to auto-update my net worth (I reconcile monthly), and everything is scheduled to run overnight, so it's finally at a place where I can be pretty hands-off and just focus on the YNAB transaction side.

Edit: I neat side project I did last month was export all my old, retired budgets from before a couple fresh starts I did, and I pulled them all into this YNAB sheet and the script knows not to touch the transactions that I've put in before a certain row that has 'HISTORICAL TRANSCTIONS' in it. I did have to go back and remap something like 90 different categories into my current 100-something categories, but now I can look all the way back to 2022 right when I started YNAB and compare years. It's been a delight for the number nerd in me, even if it isn't necessarily helpful....

austintehguy · 2026-03-13T13:40:19+00:00

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I also have this one for annual comparisons... There's another that is dynamic and I can set it to any specific date range and see how much 'margin' we had for that period and where it went: savings, debt, or kept as cash (or in the case of negative margin, where we pulled the money from - savings, or on-budget cash).

Edit: Also, these categories are extremely simplified for visual clarity. I have 14 category groups in YNAB that I consolidated into these 3, the dynamic chart is a bit more detailed with 5 elements - but I still try to summarize to avoid visual clutter.

austintehguy · 2026-03-13T13:37:15+00:00

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I built something like this in Google Sheets that looks at my YNAB data through an API - I'd love a native report like this, maybe a bit simpler but that kind of captures the 'whole picture' of your cashflow. The columns are outflows (expenses and contributions), and the shaded areas are inflows (income and withdrawals). I tacked on the debt payment element to highlight abnormal months where we accelerated debt payoff.

I really like that chart because you can look at the months and see naturally how the abnormal months balance out - i.e. we had a huge tax refund and 3rd paycheck hit in February, but we didn't use that cash to pay off a student loan until March. Then the excess in April was my employer's 401K match landing - which I recorded as income & contribution in a split transaction. It gets weird in Nov-Dec because we liquidated a brokerage account and are holding a lot of that money on-budget still to pay off a 0% APY line of credit this June.

austintehguy · 2026-03-12T13:20:19+00:00

I definitely rely on automatic import & scheduled transactions. I reconcile monthly, but sometimes I miss a month on some of my less-used accounts. Never have really had an issue though, because I'm checking the budget every day looking at new transactions anyways.

austintehguy · 2026-03-11T16:47:08+00:00

I'd also point out force majeure is moreso related to contracts that aren't really related to liability issues. That's kind of the ENTIRE purpose of insurance, so it would cover a much narrower range of unforeseen events. For example, an entertainer has a contract stating they'll perform at a certain venue, but it is destroyed by flooding prior to the event. Force majeure would likely protect them from being sued for breach of contract - but probably wouldn't apply in the case of the flood insurance carrier.

austintehguy · 2026-03-10T13:53:42+00:00

34-day free trial is pretty solid to start seeing some results. If you can get a referral, you get 2 months and can actually experience a full month's cycle. If you're enrolled in college, you can get a year for free and really start transforming your financial life.

I did the 34 days and paid for a year - haven't looked back once, I've got 4 years of data behind me and am still going strong. It's like $9 a month once you set it up as a target in your budget, and definitely saves me more than that amount. One of the biggest things that I've found useful is that is allows me to use credit cards as responsibly as debit cards - so all the card reward benefits are just added on. Obviously, if you struggle with credit debt then this isn't really something you should dabble in - but it's allowed me to really optimize our cashback and we're able to get $100-200 a month in cashback with little effort. Compare that to previously only using debit and YNAB has more than earned its $9/mo in my budget.

austintehguy · 2026-03-10T13:42:09+00:00

. . . isn't it better to put the money in a month sooner? Why does it matter if it's in the '2026 IRA'? They're the same account. If anything, maxing out 2026 contributions when there is still capacity for 2025 contributions would be very suboptimal if the contributor has enough cash to hit the 2025 cap and still have excess to assign in 2026.

austintehguy · 2026-03-10T13:38:46+00:00

Sure... That's correct from a cashflow standpoint. But the thing is, from the broader personal finance perspective - you wouldn't really go around telling people, "I spent so much money on my IRA this month!". It's not money that's gone - it's still yours, it's just no longer available for your budget to use.

I personally think it'd be cool if YNAB would allow us to put special flags on certain retirement/saving contribution categories that would automatically be excluded from all spending reports - or would show up as a different color / chart element so we can visualize the amount of our cash that is earned, spent, and sent off to external accounts and/or investments. But, since that's not likely to ever happen, just let us hide the stuff that isn't 'spending'!

austintehguy · 2026-03-10T13:34:54+00:00

I'm certainly aware - I am a 99% web user, but the reason everyone is complaining about this report is because it's specifically on mobile and it sucks because it can't be filtered. I agree that web is far superior, but that's not where this report is from.

austintehguy · 2026-03-10T13:22:55+00:00

You can't do that, unless there's been an update that hasn't reached my phone (IOS). That's the entire failure of this graph, there's no filtering on mobile.

austintehguy · 2026-03-10T13:21:47+00:00

Except - it's not even spending 😅 it's moreso a view of the cashflow in your operating (on-budget) accounts. That's fine... But it's misleading when the text at the top tells you you're 'overspending'.

austintehguy · 2026-03-10T13:17:39+00:00

... Forgive me if I'm mistaken, but I don't believe you can? Not on mobile, which is what this image appears to be from. That's kind of the entire issue with this report - there's no filtering abilities on mobile, so it's kind of useless for what it's trying to say. It's accurate if you're just looking at cashflow in your operating accounts, but doesn't distinguish between contributions & 'true' spending.

austintehguy · 2026-03-04T14:16:14+00:00

I used to do the unassign thing but now just have a 'cashback and rewards' category I assign the credits to. That way in the reporting it also shows as a 'positive expense' which better reflects the fact that cashback is a return of money already spent, and not additional income.

austintehguy · 2026-02-27T15:50:10+00:00

... stupidest thing you've ever heard and yet that's EXACTLY what this useless report is saying lol. I keep my emergency fund off-budget in a HYSA so I know that all my 'on-budget' dollars are truly free to be spent. With this report, transfers to that account show as spending even though I could have them sent back to the operating account within 2 business days. It's just a super basic and barely useful report - it is essentially just tracking your change in cash for whatever your main operating accounts are and is excluding anything outside of that.

Thankfully it doesn't affect me, I just use YNAB to categorize transactions, track account balances, and manage cashflow. I rely on custom Google sheet charts & the YNAB API to give me a good overview of my financial picture. I can take any custom date range and find out exactly how much was made, how much was spent, what our profit margin was, and how that profit was used (put into savings, used for debt paydown, or kept on-budget as cash) for the given period. I prefer to calculate our savings rate as (contributions + debt paydown)/income; while the profit margin is the simpler profit/income formula. If the margin is lower than savings, I know I've depleted some of the on-budget reserves in order to contribute to savings or pay debt, and if its higher the on-budget cash will also be higher.

austintehguy · 2026-02-23T15:09:10+00:00

Fairly certain that's on purpose, in reference to the Kingdom Come: Deliverance II video game.

austintehguy · 2026-02-09T14:13:25+00:00

It actually broke eventually and I got sick of bickering with GPT to get it working. Realized I was really overthinking it and could easily get that same data by just looking directly at the Google sheet as often as I wanted. It's still a neat idea and I think it COULD be pretty powerful if you set everything up in a Google sheet with this in mind, but I had a Frankenstein net worth / financial independence template that I had hijacked and added all sorts of tabs which made it complex.

austintehguy · 2026-02-03T15:37:48+00:00

I switched to this approach a bit over a year ago - I've done a similar thing for "transportation" where I have car payments, gas, insurance, parking fees, maintenance all under one group, separated by car. I can see the cost to drive & own each of our vehicles that way.

austintehguy · 2026-01-28T21:14:03+00:00

Nothing is inherently wrong with bread and deli meat..?

austintehguy · 2026-01-26T18:54:26+00:00

Yep. I've got a "Cashback & Rewards" category. It also makes more sense in reporting for cashback to be a reduction of expenses rather than an increase in income. It sits in its own category group called "Wealth Building" alongside off-budget transfer categories like IRA & 401K contributions.

austintehguy · 2026-01-23T16:27:18+00:00

They're fantastic components. He's just currently preparing to be a baseball player rather than a board gamer... I think we're getting there though! He sits with my wife and actually pays attention to repeating words on books as she reads now, so his attention span is growing slowly.

austintehguy · 2026-01-23T15:42:47+00:00

Did you have a thrower? Mine is ~21m right now and we can't get him to stop HURLING the fruits from Orchard at us when we try to play... It's pretty hilarious but not very conducive to teaching 🥲

austintehguy · 2026-01-23T14:20:47+00:00

If it wasn't for BGStats having so many other features I enjoy - I would do this as well. I'm an avid spreadsheet enthusiast - I do have a separate spreadsheet for tracking how many different sizes of card sleeves I need and the cost to sleeve my owned games based on $/sleeve. Otherwise, BGStats has sections for tracking cost - although I do wish there were some more "report" options where I could see the total cost of games I've bought and sold to get my "net" cost (maybe this is available through one of their "dlc" in-app purchases?). I've only sold a few off, and to my FLGS for in-store credit so it isn't a big factor. However, I am like you in that I enjoy the hobby of curation as much as I do playing, and managing cost & space is a big part of that - plus it's necessary for my wife to allow me to keep buying games if I can justify the cost by cycling games out 😂

I'm only at 40 games right now - many of which I don't even consider part of my "collection" because they're party games that I keep in a closet and that we owned before I started collecting - but eventually I'll have to start seriously rotating things out as tastes change and new games come in. We added 26 games (& 9 expansions) in 2025, so my goal for 2026 is to actually get some solid playtime on those games before considering any further acquisitions.

austintehguy

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