For those of you who don’t know about You Need A Budget(YNAB), it’s a way of thinking about your money that has four basic rules.
- Give every dollar a job
- Save for a rainy day
- Roll with the punches
- Live on last month’s income
It’s a pretty great philosophy. You can read more and even sign up for a class here: https://www.youneedabudget.com/method
The reason I bring this up is because for the month of May, my wife and I are going to try and live off of our savings of around $2700. This does mean trimming back the budget a bit, but not as much I though we would have to. But doing this will allow us to use all the income we get in May as our budget income for June. We will finally be doing rule #4 of YNAB which I have been wanting to do for a very long time.
Why do this? It basically means we have a whole month’s income at our disposal if worse comes to worse. It will also make budgeting a whole lot easier because we will know exactly what we have for that month. With my wife working part anywhere between 24-38 hours a week, our income can vary a lot month to month. Knowing if a month is going to be tight when the month starts is a whole lot easier to plan around than having her last paycheck of the month being 200-300 less than we expected.
This also works well because she will get paid 3 times in May. We plan on budgeting one of those paychecks into savings to help build that up our savings again.
That’s the plan! Now let’s see if we can execute on it…