How do you plan your one-time expenses then? Say... if you think you'd like to buy a new furniture, or travel overseas. Curious to see how everyone else plans their budget.
I find it so hard to wrap my head around this method lol. First it's something that is supposed to track things down to cents, but at the same time you're not. I googled to catch a glimpse of it, I see it has budget by month, but without dates - how are you ensuring you have your money ready at the right times of the month? Say, it's all budgeted to 0, but next month/budget, you have a lot of expenses coming in early but inflow would be at the end of the month? Does your budget sheet tell you how much you need to ready for the next month?

Oh actually yes, that's exactly what I do too, in this spreadsheet. Ending balance needs to be more than the next month's total expenses, else you get a red alert. Didn't think about that trick part but I guess now I can +1 month when I tell people how many months of savings I have haha.

Well the idea of YNAB as I understand it, is to have every penny working on something, be it your (future) expenses, or investments. Setting aside some placeholder pot of money sounds counterintuitive especially if you set up multiple of them, but then they're not actually being used in that exact category... It's like later on you need to do a mental math that the RM 6000 you're about to spend on the travel, was already paid for by your past 1 year savings into the Fun Pot.

For my method, though, you can plan out your future travel by simply plotting that RM 6000 on June 2022, and then see the summary telling you how your budget would look like, all the way from now to the end of that year (strictly speaking you'd need 2 sheets for this example as of my post now, but yes, there is cross-sheet linking feature already).

So, I'm starting to understand more now why is it so difficult to convince someone to change their ways of managing their finances, if they already have a system: because the process is so different, it's hard to adapt! I definitely would not want to use that app 😂