This is an awesome idea! I have a separate budget in YNAB to track frequent flyer points for both myself and my fiancé. It’s fun to watch the balances grow and assign the points to future vacations as they accrue. I can also analyse the reports to see how the points are being earned.
@@colleencaffrey4195 It’s all manual entry. But that’s how I manage my $ budget, so I don’t know what I’m missing out on ☺️ I live in Australia and linked accounts aren’t a thing, only file-based importing. It would be cool if there was a way to do it through file-based importing. It could work if the airline had an option to export transactions in a compatible file format.
OMG - This finally solves the riddle of how to have a budget that only uses whole dollar amounts. Right in the number format setup. I have been looking for this for years. Nugget of wisdom tucked away in a video about leave days. I could hug everyone right now over this
YAY!! Music to our ears!! Just wait until you have a fully funded Christmas or Valentines or Birthday category-it's so fun to just buy gifts and celebrate holidays totally financially guilt- and worry-free! 🌻 Hannah
I totally understand! It's a BLESSING having so much, but there's still some weird guilt in taking work off or feeling like we should be working more. But truthfully, if your employer is gifting your 7 weeks of vacation, that is part of your compensation and you should use it ALL!! I'm trying to get better at this myself! 🌻 Hannah
I have a budget for my time off so I can keep track. I also have one for my paycheques and one showing my employer contributions as well. I love that we can "budget" anything we want 🥰
I honestly don't know how you guys do it... America is like a different world to me. Here in Europe, Slovakia, vacation days are paid, you get 20-35 depending on company and your age (after you turn 35 you are entitled to 25 days every year) and we take it and often even need more. We get 7 days off paid for doctor visits plus 7 days off paid for doctor visits with a family member, also mandated by law and 9 bank holidays. I would be lost without these days and I genuinely admire you guys being able to do this and having to track it yourself. Here the employer is responsible for it (although I track mine because I'm a control freak). Very neat idea for US, this is how I treat my vaccay days, it's part of my paycheck indeed.
Wowwwww. That sounds... amazing. The idea that you get days off specifically for doctor visits and more days off specifically for *family* doctor visits is amazing, and should definitely be more common practice. A hard working parent shouldn't have to use a "vacation" day to stay home with their stomach-bug-ridden child... that's absolutely not a vacation. Hopefully your way will eventually rub off on the US!! Amazing!! 🌻 Hannah
I use it to track my fieldwork experience hours for my degree. I have two types of hours to accrue per month and I like to "fund" it on a week to week basis to see how many of each I need to hit to meet my goal before the end of the month.
I love this and have been doing it for a few years now. My job separates sick time and vacation time, and they accrue differently, so I have 2 "accounts" for them. My sick time rolls over each year and is use it or lose it. I set that up as a tracking account so I can just see how much I have left. Vacation accrues each month though so I use that one just like in the video. I love the tip about the running balance though. Definitely going to turn that one on. Much like in my regular budget, I also have a couple days in an "unplanned" category to save for unexpected needs like taking time off to help a friend in an emergency, etc.
That is so very smart, Vanessa!! I LOVE the "unplanned" bank of days. You just never know when you'll need a day off for whatever reason, but now you know you have the *cushion* to take a day off whenever it's needed! So smart! 🌻 Hannah
This is very helpful. I'm 27 hours per week (weird I know), and get paid weekly, so I accrue PTO at a different rate than others weekly. This is so helpful to be able to see if I'll have enough time for the trips I have planned. Thanks for showing each step!
😭😭 That ain't right. Every parent should get "Kid Days" where the sole reason you're taking off work is because your kid. Why should they get penalized for snow days and stomach bugs?? I smell a new petition in the air. 👃🏻💪🏻🦸🏻♀️ 🌻 Hannah
Hannah, you mad scientist, you've actually gotten me to create a second budget for PTO! I was absolutely doing the same thing with my PTO that I was doing with my money pre-YNAB (e.g. if I wanted to use it, I would look at how much I had and then have to mentally keep track of how much was already reserved for other things to find my "actual" balance... super confusing). It's only been a month and I'm already fretting way less. :)
Micro dosing retirement - love it. 😂 I usually use what my job provides, but of course that is only when I’m on my work laptop. I may do this. I carried over 5 days from last year that I have to use by March 15 before I start the new days.
Inspired! I'm going to try a new budget for shows the family wants to watch. Category Groups for streaming services, categories are the shows, scheduled transactions for when new episodes come out maybe. I don't subscribe all the time so if I hear about something good I can add it to the budget, then do a month of Paramount + for example and watch a few things then turn it off. Easy to target what the kids actually want to watch and not subscribe to all the things
I genuinely might use this. I always struggle with keeping my PTO days in mind so I just never take them. Then at the end of the year, because our PTO doesn't roll over, I just fill all of December with my remaining time. There have been multiple years where I just take off the last 3 weeks of the year...
Yes! That's the hope! I'm also also being nudged by my manager to take off vacation come October or November, so I feel ya. Puts it in front of you and reminds you that you actually have options and leniency to take some time off! 🌻 Hannah
Absolutely, love this. I track my PTO in Google keep // Google calendar. I love this because most times when your taking days off it will affect your budget. Nice to have it in o e place.😊
This will be so useful for tracking subscriptions. In my budget I have one line for monthly subscriptions and one for annual and it is accurate and works and is not too detailed. The thing is, I end up tracking the detail on a spreadsheet and honestly only review it occasionally. I thought about making a category in my budget just for "subscriptions" but that is a lot of lines. I find that I want to review it frequently and I forget to do so. So I think I will create a budget ( that will need to be maintained) just for subscriptions setting up a fake account using the monthly target amount I actually assign in my regular budget. Ultimately the goal is to make sure I only pay for subscriptions/memberships I use or compare prices to comparable alternatives.
I would never look at another budget for that. I had to add it to my current budget. This January I canceled the ones I haven’t been using (or paused until a later date). I need to see it in my face so I get annoyed. 😊
@@nosirrahm I understand. Keeping track on a spreadsheet, I let it slip. It’s just that I track a lot of things on my budget and I didn’t want to add so many more lines. I did set it up as a separate budget and it works great for me. Quick flip and all the detail is there with nothing else to distract. There will be some pausing and some research of competitors.
At my old job, I had a set number of vacation/personal/volunteer days every year, and I used to just right them down on a sticky note and attach it to my calendar or in my planner, so I always knew what I had available (which is funny to me because I was budgeting before I even thought I could handle YNAB). However, my new job has an accrual system, and since I'm also adjusting to my new paycheck, I love this idea for tracking!
You absolutely were! And YES, a new solution for a new situation! Perfect timing for this video to have hit. Congrats on the new job, by the way! 🌻 Hannah
This is very spiffy! While vacation is use it or lose it, our sick time just started rolling over last year, so we can accrue up to 15 days. I've always been careful to take all my time, since that's what it's there for, and this would be a good way to keep track at home in case my spreadsheet I keep at work suddenly dies.
I think I'm going to add my company's holidays into this as well, it'll help me schedule my time off around other "free" paid time off. Brilliant, I'm glad I clicked on this! YNAB is Fabulous!
I use a tracking account to track doggy daycare packages. Dollars for full days, pennies for half days. Buying a 20-day package is a $20 deposit, 20 half-days is $0.20. Every full day used is a $1 debit, etc.
Ooooh, that's smart too!! I should make Julep run her own doggy daycare budget... she can advocate for herself when she needs to get some zoomies out and go see her friends 😂 🌻 Hannah
I get 180 hours a Yr. No, that's NOT enough!! There's 52 weeks in a Yr. 4 wks a yr off is a JOKE. Before this new MG I have, I was taking UnPAID time off every 18 days for 6-10 days. And I would hord my PTO. Did it for 8 years, then my MG died. This new MG is a controling pig. Normalize taking off often! In 2022, I worked every single day I was scheduled. No call outs. THAT WAS A HUGE MISTAKE. Don't ever show a company you're that committed. TAKE TIME OFF‼️‼️‼️
Ok… just a suggestion… 😎 I went to create it and there’s no days (or time unir) for currency available… chose USD, but it would be nice to have hours, days, week as unit for this kind of budget…😎
You can't choose "days" or "hours," but you can choose just plain numbers! When selecting the "Number Format," select "123 456" toward the bottom of the menu! This will get rid of all monetary signs and decimal points! If you've already started the budget, you can adjust this budget editing the Budget Settings, found in the main menu! 🌻 Hannah
haha. Imagine having a job that gives you PTO. lol I thought this video was going to help me budget for sickdays/PTO to give myself. I guess I'll relax once I'm dead.
I get 256 PTO hours a year. Able to cash out 80 hours a year. I rarely use mine. I save mine for when the kids get sick.They roll over to the next year.
Dannnnnng!! That doesn't sound like a bad deal. Assuming each work day is 8 hours, that 32 potential days off! You're very wise to save up a stash for sick days or other kids-need-a-parent-at-home days! 🌻 Hannah
What do you recommend if we have sick days, vacation days, personal days, and floaters? I can't imagine making an a separate budget for each.. feel like it would be super time consuming..
No need for separate budgets! What I would do is make separate accounts and category groups for those. For instance, if you get 7 sick days a year, you can make a "sick days" account and add 7 to it. Make a "Sick Days" category group with a "Sick Days" category in it. Immediately assign all those 7 sick days to your "Sick Days" category group. Then make an account for vacation days. If you have 15 vacation days, make a category group for "Vacations" and a category for each separate vacation you want to take, including a "Vacation Holding" category. Assign your 15 vacation days out to all your different vacation categories, and any remaining that you haven't assigned to a specific vacation yet to the holding group. this helps make sure you've identified those unused vacation days as vacation days by putting them in the "Vacations" category group's "Vacation Holding" category. Do the same with your personal days. Create the account, create the category group and categories, then assign, with any unused or any unassigned sitting in a "Personal Days Holding" category in your "Personal Days" vacation Group. Repeat with your "floaters." You can then schedule transactions in each separate account to flow into each separate category when you earn new days. For instance, if you get 3 new vacation days at the start of each quarter, you can schedule a transaction for an inflow of "3" in your "Vacation" account, and have it flow into your "Vacation Holding" category to ensure you don't accidentally assign those vacation days to your "Sick Days" category group or "Personal Days" category group. You can even help further clarify by making the memo "3 new vacation days accrued, quarter three" so that you have MAX details on what that scheduled transaction is once it finally hits your "Ready to Assign" category. The level of detail here also makes things really easy to search up! If you ever want to see how you've spent all your vacation days, just type "vacation" in the search bar to pull up all those "transactions." You can also make sure no days got assigned to the wrong category by "reconciling" each account every month or every quarter. Those are just my initial thoughts on how to do it! There might be some flaws in there, but it seems like it's a good way to keep an eye on which days should be going to which category groups! 🌻 Hannah
Open a new budget or would I add a category. Opening a new budget wont affect my current? My job separates everthung so we have vacation, sick, personal, holiday. How do I set these up. I love the idea of pro time off in YNAB!
I would make a completely separate budget for PTO, since you're dealing with "hours" as currency instead of "dollars"-you don't want to get those mixed up! Within the PTO budget you can make as MANY category groups and categories as you want. Make a category group for your vacation days, you sick days, you personal days, and your holiday days. You can add separate, individual categories within each category group (i.e. in the holidays category group, a category for christmas, one for labor day, one for memorial day, etc) 🌻 Hannah
I love this idea. I have a certain amount of total PTO per year, granted on an accrual basis. When taking PTO we're allowed to be in the negative up to a point. What's the best way to both track the accruals (so I know if I'm in the red), AND have a view of the total allotment for future planning?
Oh gosh! You might need this PTO tracking budget even MORE! It's so easy to get into this "scarcity" mindset where we're afraid to use any amount of our days off, even if they're unlimited!! So I'd recommend you sit down with your planner or partner or family and just pick a few special weeks or long weekends where you'll commit to taking them off and record them in the PTO budget, otherwise you might go the whole year without ever taking any time away from work! Trust me, I've done this plennnnty of times. That "unlimited" factor definitely has a catch to it. 🌻 Hannah
This is a great video but luckily my company offers unlimited PTO. Which let’s face it, isn’t actually unlimited but I don’t have to track it. As long as you don’t abuse it. It’s not a problem
But if you get PTO balance assigned every month and it expires by the end of the year isn't that fundamentally different than a monetary budget? I'll give you an example. I had 5 days of PTO in January (the maximum that rolls over from the last year). I get another ~1.5 days per month. If I want to plan a summer vacation for 5 days and then maybe another fall vacation for 3 days, I would go in the negative. So I'll lose oversight. Bottom line: there is no real way to "save" your PTO you will need to assign it to a budget before you even have it.
All good questions! Hmmm... I have some messy, messy thoughts. Hang with me here, I'm just braindumping 😂 Initial thought: this is where the "show running balance" feature can come into handy! You can sit down at the start of the year and create scheduled transactions for all your PTO accrual (i.e. schedule an inflow for 1.5 on February 1st, schedule an inflow for 1.5 on March 1st, etc). The running balance will let you know how much you'll have come September or December, and you can plan vacations accordingly based on that information! BUT you're totally right-if a PTO "transaction" hasn't entered the budget yet, you'd need to enter those transactions into the budget *early* in order to properly assign them to the right categories. My one thought for how you could work around this: when prescheduling all the PTO accrual like I mentioned above, also add the appropriate month those days were accrued to the memo line (i.e. for the 1.5 days of PTO you've schedule for February, add "february PTO accrual days" to the memo line, as a second way to clarify which month these PTO days were accrued in. Repeat this with each accrual transaction for each month!). You could mark each of those transactions with a green flag named "Available PTO days." When it comes time to set aside future PTO days that you haven't actually accrued yet for your 5-day summer vacation or your 3 days off in the fall, you can enter those prescheduled PTO accrual transactions to the budget early, BUT swap the flag from a green flag to a red flag named something like "Future PTO Days in Use" or something along those lines. (This is also why calling out the month the days were accrued in in the memo line is important, because to enter a transaction into the budget early you have to change the date to a current or past date. The memo line outlining the month helps you keep track of which PTO days from future months have already been spoken for!) This way you still have a visual of what days are available and which future days you've already assigned to future vacations. So in your example where you start with 5 PTO days in January and accrue 1.5 more each month, you can create a "Summer Vacation" category and a "Fall Trip" category. Budget those 5 available days into your Summer Vacation category, and then bump the "September" and "October" preschedule PTO accrual transactions into the budget early. Assign them to your "Fall Trip" category and change the flag from green to read. If you look at the activity for this category, you'll easily be able to see that you assigned September and October's future PTO accrual to your fall trip and that those days are no longer available to rely on as PTO. Regarding expiring days, you can also preschedule a "zero" value transaction for mid- to late-December that reminds you to remove expired PTO days from the budget in preparation for the new year! You definitely wouldn't want to think you have more PTO days than you really do, so an end-of-the-year clean up would be a great thing to get a reminder about in your your budget! Now... again, this was all a brain dump, and proved to me that trying to track PTO on an accrual system is STILL very complicated and messy! The technique I described above also goes against YNAB's method-we never assign future money (or days) that we we don't have yet to future needs, because that makes out budget unreliable. I feel like PTO days are a liiiiittle different since it doesn't carry the same weight as money, BUT... this was my attempt to find a solution among the complicated details 😂 Now my brain hurts. I hope any of these thoughts were helpful, but I'm sure there's still quite a few loopholes in my attempt at making accrued PTO days work in the budget! Would be curious about your thoughts regarding this approach and what holes you see in this idea! Absolutely spitballin' over here 😂 🌻 Hannah
Great Idea!! I am working on creating my PTO budget - We earn time off based on hours not days - How are you setting up your number configuration based for hours? I have tried with the decimal in place and it is not calculating correctly. Thank you in advance for any assistance!
Hmmm... I would think leaving the hours as whole numbers would be best, just might require a little more math. If you get 200 hours off a year, put 200 in your "Ready to Assign." If you decide to take off a whole day, assign 8 hours to that category (or however long your typical work day is). If you take off a whole 5 day week for a vacation, assign 40 hours to that category! I'd use the same system, just letting the whole numbers each represent an hour instead of a day. Should work just the same! 🌻 Hannah
I love this idea, but I'm struggling to get it to work better than my Excel sheet. I'm accruing 3.33 vacation hours per paycheck (6.66 hours per month) and I have about 2 days of vacation available since it's only been a month. This doesn't allow me to plan for a week long vacation I want to take in August. Any suggestions?
It can if you follow the tip to show the "Running Balance" at 2:20! You might need to enter all of your future vacation allotments as "scheduled transactions," but you can actually speed that process up a bit by "duplicating" the same transaction over and over. Here's what I'd do if I were on the web app! 1. When your next paycheck comes, create a transaction for 3.33 vacation days in your PTO budget. 2. Select that transaction, and select "duplicate" from the menu. 3. Change the date on the duplicated transaction to the date of your next expected paycheck. 4. Repeat this process as far into the future as you want, for as many future paychecks as you want (I'd assume you'd duplicate this same transaction until you reach August). 5. Click "View" by the search bar, and select "Show Running Balance." Now you should be able to see how many vacation days you will have accrued by August! This is *definitely* a bit of a workaround and a lot of clicking on your end, but ensures your calculations will be accurate and you can confidently book that vacation for August! You can also always set your PTO transaction to repeat every two weeks, though it will always only show the *next* upcoming scheduled transaction, which is why you'd need to do this little work around to see many transactions into the future. Just make sure if you follow my technique above to NOT set it to repeat since you've already entered the future transactions! Once you reach August and those pre-entered transactions have all been entered into the PTO budget, you could then set it to repeat for every two weeks, OR continue with this same technique if it's helpful to you! 🌻 Hannah
Because of the laws in my country, I get a monthly amount of PTO with 3 decimals. Like: x,xxx There's no way to have that precision in YNAB or am I missing an option?
It looks like it might be possible! Go into your "Budget Settings", and for the "Number Format" click the option that's listed as "123.456"! Lemme know if that works for you! 🌻 Hannah
@@YNABofficial Hi, Hannah!! I found that option the other day after posting my comment. Ideally though I'd like to have a comma instead of a period. Having a period in numbers is really confusing for me. (I’m European.)
Ahh! I see. I didn't realize commas were used numerically in Europe! Feel free to drop this suggestion as a feature request on this form for our developers! youneedabudget.typeform.com/to/Pt6cek?typeform-source=docs.youneedabudget.com 🌻 Hannah
Would this work if we put in the total number of hours available instead of days? Like sometimes I will only use 2 hours for a doctors appointment instead of a whole day.
If you're talking about emoji (🌻😎🏠🤨), If you're on a Mac, you can do that by pressing and holding Control + Command and then pressing Space. If you're on Windows 10 (or Windows 11 too maybe?) you can try holding down Windows and then pressing Period (.). Then just pick whichever ones you want! I'm guessing Hannah probably pastes them in when doing these screen recordings so as to not be distracting.
This doc should have everything you need to know for adding those cute little emojis to your budget! And Kristofer's right-I usually skip the adding of the emojis to save on screen time 🙃 support.youneedabudget.com/en_us/how-to-use-emoji-in-your-budget-SJTNIyQAc 🌻 Hannah
@@YNABofficial we have ppto & pto. I don’t really get the difference I use both if I need time off. But we can’t use like 5 hrs of ppto with 3 hrs pto. No mix & match. Thanks for the advice!
@@YNABofficial oh yea. I’m at Walmart. We have ppto days & pto days. I use them interchangeably bc I don’t go on vacay or anything exciting. No kids & grew up going on vacay once in 18 years.
@@YNABofficial Last I checked people from England (+rest of UK and EU) have at least 20 working days/4 weeks of annual leave (Americans usually call this PTO) plus 8 so-called "bank holidays". And people normally take this annual leave. All of it. And employers in England make sure of this.
