Categories with negative Balance

[darthbob]

I'm looking for a feature. Maybe it exists and I didn't find it or there is another way to do it; if not, consider this a feature request ;)

I have a category "Computer Games" and every month I budget 10$ and it accumulates and then I have enough money to buy something and everything is fine....

Now let's say I have just emptied my savings for computer games and now there is a sale for this game that I wanted to buy anyway but the sale is now and not in three month when my budget would allow for it. So I buy the game anyway and overspent in the games category.

Now this money is missing for my next month's budget. So I copy the budget values from last month and since I have less budget available this month I put less into long-term savings (this is where all my excess money goes each month).

This is obviously bad, so I fix it by manually entering -20$ (10$ budget minus the amount I overspent last month) for games so that the budget is back to its usual size and my long-term savings don't suffer from this "emergency" purchase. Next month it will be -10$, after that 0$, and then I'm back to saving 10$ per month.

However, this is annoying. I would rather have a way to specify that for this particular category, every overspending is carried over to the next month as a negative balance for this category, instead of being deducted from the overall budget.

Don't get me wrong, this should not be the default behavior. It wouldn't make much sense for food or household expenses. What I am looking for is to give myself a credit which does not mess up my entire budgeting, but instead allows to set up a budget to pay it back (to myself).

[cokebottle]

Click the red number in the overspent category and you can change the behavior to do exactly what you want.

To be safe, only do this for categories where you expect to be reimbursed soon, and only if you are not living on the edge since your other category balances are not actually reliable anymore as long as one category is overspent.

[darthbob]

Indeed. Thanks a lot. I wonder what else I can click to activate some hidden feature ^^

[Mendacious Calamity]

If you want/need to spend in a category that doesn't have enough money to fund the purchase the only choice you should give yourself is:

1) don't make the purchase

or

2) apply one of the 4 Rules Of YNAB - 'roll with the punches'. Lower the amount in one of your other budget categories, something you haven't spent yet or have accrued over a few months, and then add that money to the Games category to fund your purchase.

If you make a habit of leaving red category debts all over the place and just ignoring them or slowly re-funding them every month while continuing to spend as normal, you're doing it wrong.

You can indeed roll over a spend debt as cokebottle says, but this is not really for wiggling out of dealing with an overspend, more for keeping the occasional overspend away from the 'Available to budget' figure.

Using it because you've run out of money but still 'want' something is dangerous. Not advisable!