The Money Mustache Community
Learning, Sharing, and Teaching => Ask a Mustachian => Topic started by: FastStache on July 10, 2013, 09:51:48 AM
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I'd like to start doing my savings based on gross income, but would to have some ideas on how people setup YNAB to capture how much they pay in.....
401k + matching
taxes
ss taxes
medical
etc.
The issue is I won't have a transaction where I can split out these items. I only see a net income check.
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did you look on the ynab forums?
I guess you could do a split category for each check. dont you get a stub?
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I'd like to start doing my savings based on gross income, but would to have some ideas on how people setup YNAB to capture how much they pay in.....
401k + matching
taxes
ss taxes
medical
etc.
The issue is I won't have a transaction where I can split out these items. I only see a net income check.
When I first started using it, I wanted to do the same. YNAB is not really set up for that though. The software is based on using your take-home pay. That said, maybe you can look at the forum to see if someone else figured out a good way to do what you want to do.
For me, I decided the net income was good enough for me.
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I've seen a few people asking this, and generally the answer is: it would be kind of hard, and it's not necessary or terribly useful.
However, off the top of my head, I imagine you could set up off-budget accounts for those (ss taxes, etc.) and set up a recurring deposits for them.
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I use YNAB, and I only track net income, not gross.
I do keep "off budget" accounts in YNAB which I update at the end of each month to reflect the current balance of my retirement accounts. This way my overall net worth total is accurate (on a month-by-month basis), but I don't need to track all of the individual transactions that occur in those off budget accounts.
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I find that the easier way to calculate savings rate with YNAB is to look at total spending for the month. That way I don't have to worry about contributions to 401k, FSA, etc.
Spending + Taxes + Savings = Gross Income (in theory).
Assuming you don't have a variable paycheck, I would expect your taxes to stay the same each paycheck (barring a change in 401k contributions, insurance, etc). Just look at a paycheck and see what your total taxes are. Then, you know all but one of the variables above. You can then plug the numbers in and get:
Savings = Gross Income - Taxes - Spending.
Savings % = (Savings/Gross Income) * 100.
So really, all you need to do is know your gross income and taxes (constant from paycheck to paycheck), and then just look at your total outflows for the month in YNAB.
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My paychecks are not constant as it varies with overtime, tuition reimbursement, awards, etc. But that would work if it were fixed.
http://www.youneedabudget.com/support/article/paycheck-deductions
This looks to be a good way to do it.
I'm hoping to use this calculate my effective tax rate, mortgage rate, pmi, etc. after I file my taxes.
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If you are only going to do this once a year, why can't you just use your last paycheck with the year to date totals?
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I use YNAB, and I only track net income, not gross.
I do keep "off budget" accounts in YNAB which I update at the end of each month to reflect the current balance of my retirement accounts. This way my overall net worth total is accurate (on a month-by-month basis), but I don't need to track all of the individual transactions that occur in those off budget accounts.
Good to know. After reading your post, I did the same so I could easily get total net worth. Thanks!
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I use YNAB, and I only track net income, not gross.
I do keep "off budget" accounts in YNAB which I update at the end of each month to reflect the current balance of my retirement accounts. This way my overall net worth total is accurate (on a month-by-month basis), but I don't need to track all of the individual transactions that occur in those off budget accounts.
Good to know. After reading your post, I did the same so I could easily get total net worth. Thanks!
I do this as well, except that I just set up scheduled deposits for my contributions and don't worry about market fluctuations.
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It is not worth the effort. As mentioned above if you really want some arbitrary number to brag about on Internet forums, you can use your total spending amount and divide it by your income. Otherwise, do your personal best to reduce your spending and save as much as possible. That's all that really matters at the end of the day.
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I've seen a few people asking this, and generally the answer is: it would be kind of hard, and it's not necessary or terribly useful.
However, off the top of my head, I imagine you could set up off-budget accounts for those (ss taxes, etc.) and set up a recurring deposits for them.
I've been using YNAB for about 1.5 years now. I have our TSPs and IRAs set up as off-budget accounts with recurring transactions for the active TSPs. The IRAs, I budget in our Savings category under Retirement and then when I move money from our checking to an IRA, I set it up as a transfer to that IRA account. At the end of each month, I add another transaction called "Gain/Loss" where I account for market fluctuations (I also add a transaction called "Monthly Interest" in our savings/checking accounts). I'm a huge nerd, so I wouldn't feel comfortable without having some tracking on our retirement investments. I can see our total retirement investments at a glance, since all of our off-budget accounts are for retirement, so the total is right there.
I do not account for taxes, social security, etc. in YNAB. When we retire, we will no longer be paying for those items (minimal taxes, and no SS, medical will be zero if DH stays in the military 20 years, etc), so I don't see the need to account for them now. I do look at them from time to time (in fact, just this week I estimated our taxes paid for the first half of the year and made some adjustments to our W-4s), but I don't track them in YNAB.