I'm going to be the dumb one here. I've tried many times to budget and never successfully. Is there anyone out there that will help me make a budget? I've tried mint.com, everydollar, and now @mysterious-tomato-10057 has me using YNAB. What am I doing wrong?

Hi! Can you post more info, like: 1. Why do you want to budget? What are you looking to get out of it? 2. What parts of budgeting have you struggled with in the past?

Id also add, what is your main goal of the budget?

Thanks for responding. 1. Im not sure I understand your first part, but what I'm trying to get out of is the monthly sit down wondering where is my money going? The looking at the bills and some times having excess and sometimes having not enough. Not really knowing what my life costs etc etc etc. Every month is the same story. What is my true financial status? Am I broke? Am I rich? Etc. 2. I'm not sure the difference between the answer to the above question and this one.

Have you set up your YNAB yet? I think once you categorize all your expenses in there, you'll have a really good picture of where you're holding. Happy to schedule a call to go over it with you. Also happy to hear what other recommendations others have.

I think it should be noted that "how much my life costs?" is a tricky question. Are we talking about what you're current spending habits costs or bare necessities etc Even if you know for certain what your current lifestyle costs this year it can change in the near future for many reasons.

To rephrase my 2nd question: what haven't you been successful with? Categorizing expenses at a set cadence? Restricting your spending so it fits within the budget? Understanding what you should change as a result of what you learn from budgeting? Making sense of the numbers you see in those platforms? Something else?

@steep-dog-55906 i know i'm late to this party...but can you provide more details? What do you mean by " looking at my monthly cash flow on average over a few years?" how do you go about that? also how do you handle building up savings?

@green-dusk-60018 the question I had for myself wasn't "how can I save more" since my spending was mostly ok. It was more "how much money do I actually have left over, to either spend on things I haven't spent on before, or invest, or maybe I don't have left over money and I do need to save more." To answer that question, I looked at the data I have. Every month when I pay my bills, I make a Google sheet which just details how much money came in (and calcs maaser), how much goes out broken down only by who I pay (ie by credit card and utilities, not by budget category), and tells me how much to put into savings or take out from savings. I recently aggregated this all into one sheet, so I can track things like cc spending over time, but more specifically, over the past 24 months, how much did I put into savings vs how much did I take out. (I typically only transfer to or from my savings account this once a month.) Looking at that average helped me understand my typical cash flow.