Let’s say Matt was planning a cross-country road trip. Want to really get detailed with your planning? Create a new budget for planning your project. This method also works great for planning home renovation projects and holiday shopping! Add subcategories to your budget to help plan for vacations. Then he can delete the planning categories to keep his reports useful and tracking a breeze! Matt also adds custom “tags” (like #Texas2022Flights and #texas2022breweries) to the memo field of these transactions, to help him plan future trips in detail.

(He’d much rather set aside money for a national park pass and local breweries than a fancy hotel room.)īefore he heads off on a trip, Matt moves all the money in his individual planning categories to his main Travel category to simplify transaction entry. Matt sets targets on each category to help him save, and to help prioritize what’s most important to him about his trip. Matt finds that planning vacations feels a little too big for the category notes section, so he creates a new category group for his vacation, then creates categories for each type of expense he’ll have on his trip: flights, lodging, dining out, souvenirs, passport fees, gratuities, tours, etc. We polled the YNAB Support Team to see when and how they add additional categorization levels into their budgets, and here’s what they said: For planning complex projects like vacations: You’ve organized your spending into categories and grouped those categories together by common themes, but you’re craving that one extra level of clarity. But occasionally, you may find yourself wishing that you could organize things just a bit more neatly in YNAB. Fewer moving parts in your budget means fewer things to manage in your budget, which means more time to live your life. So how do you possibly organize your entire life into some lines of a budget? As demonstrated by the YNAB method, there’s beauty in simplifying. It reveals more than your financial goals it tells the story of your days and reveals your hopes for the future. Your budget is a reflection of your family meals, your kids’ milestones, your aspirations, and that big vacation you want to take for your anniversary. Organizing your budget is a bit like organizing your whole life.

How to organize your life and finances