02443: Budget Efforts


Beef Yakiniku and a Salad

Metro Manila Community Quarantine - Day 55

I'm writing this post in the middle of our Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective game on Discord, for which I am thankful that we are still able to game at all. With the fate of the quarantine beyond 15 May still uncertain, these online alternatives do help us cope with things. But I wonder if we would do better at these cases had we been discussing our theories in person.

Since I wrote about finance apps, I've been giving YNAB a test drive since my sister is a big believer in the system and at least one other social media friend also uses the app. Most others polled just using more manual methods for tracking expenses and such, which is my current method on Google Sheets.

It has taken some time to encode both Tobie and my accounts into the system. It is taking me some time to fully wrap my head around the budgeting process, especially with Tobie's funds also getting into the mix of things. But I think I'm getting a hang of it. The biggest achievement of all this is that YNAB does make you feel very guilty about credit card spending since it's quick to add your purchases to your accumulated debt and thus you'll want to eliminate it as quickly as possible. I've been feeling a little guilty about how much credit card debt I carry from month to month - I'm guilty of spending today's money for last month's purchases but to a degree that mostly avoids finance charges. 

I'm not fully committed to YNAB just yet, especially since it's a paid solution. but we'll see how this works out during the one month trial period and go from there. It is interesting to be so transparent about our joint finances in order to tackle this budget together. Our individual debts are our own, of course, but we'll figure things out together for the most part. 

Regardless of what tool we end up using, it's important that we're working on this together. 

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