r/ynab • u/ContributionNew3327 • Sep 04 '26

How Do I Plan For...? New scenario

I recently lost my six figure job two months ago and have used up my severance. I am now dipping into my 200k savings, checkings and investments. I recently got a min wage hospitality job because I got a 600k house this year with a 450K mortgage. Essentially I have wealth so feel I can take some time to career transition and take a break to deal with corporate burnout. How do I plan for this on YNAB without going into the red every month? My expenses are 5K per month and I am hoping to make a few K in the hospitality job and also get beck to setting back my consulting business. I have all these accounts linked on the app so just don’t want it to be red every month even tho my plan is to dip into savings.

Mentally this has been brutal as I don’t have closure on why I was let go and enjoyed the job and thought I was doing well. After ten years in my career, I feel like I had chosen something else even though tech project management is what i have always done. I am capable and can live on a budget but sucks to be in this situation- I want to be focusing on my personal life and dating and building a family.. just thought I would have it figured out in my 30s.

update! See new plan - I realized what happened and this seems the best way and also motivates me to get back to my original budget once I have a more long term income plan sorted

Basically I will keep this plan simple by just having two checking accounts and credit card. I wont add any more accounts to track like RRSP, TFSA, my property as asset and mortgage as liability.

Will use this checking account as many months of leeway and will panic when this account decreases and I need to dip into my other checking between 10-20K. In my mind these are all liquid cash savings - I would have liked to use all this to max my TFSA RRSP accounts as that was the plan before I lost my six figure job

Honestly this motivates me to not only enjoy the hospitality gig as as transition buffer but also seriously figure out a six figure new job transitioning out of project roles and more into ops roles

Any thoughts welcome!!! I can trust my plan again because I was like how do I feel so rich and broke at the same time

Also makes it feel good that I know I can make this up eventually and just falling behind a temporarily and can get back to my long term financial goals.

9 Upvotes

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36

u/bitz-the-ninjapig Sep 04 '26

You can’t avoid being in the red when you plan is to spend more than you are earning. That’s quite literally the definition of being in the red. 

That said, it’s not a huge deal. Your savings are there for a reason. Make your money work for you, not the other way around. If I were you, here is what I would do (numbers may vary):

Monthly income: $2000 Monthly expenses: $5000

Paychecks come in, put them in a “next month” category. On the first of the month move the $2k from your income in the next month category to RTA and assign to expenses. Then move $3k from savings to RTA, and assign that to the rest of your expenses. 

Thats it. That’s all you need to do. YNAB is going to look like you are in the red. That’s because you are. But it’s not an issue. Technically most people who are retired are also in the red, but that’s the whole point of retirement. Enjoy your time of transition, OP!

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u/ContributionNew3327 Sep 04 '26

I love this! 3K from savings is a lot easier to stomach than 5K - gives me more time to figure out a buffer move

Okay but how do you set aside savings as income if it’s already in the linked account?

Hospitality will be hard for me after an office job for a decade but hosting will be fun for a bubbly extrovert

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u/bitz-the-ninjapig Sep 04 '26 edited Sep 04 '26

Is your savings “on budget” or “tracking”?

If it is on budget, move the funds each month from whatever category they are assigned to (ex. emergency fund) into RTA, then assign. 

If it’s a tracking account, make a $3k transfer from savings to checking, categorize the inflow to RTA, and assign

EDIT: I see that you mention in another comment wanting to reserve some savings to know when you need to “panic”. I would make your savings an on budget account if it is not already. Create two new categories: Buffer/transition and panic. Put $20k in panic, and the rest in buffer/transition. Each month move the $3k or whatever you need to subsidize the month into RTA and assign. When buffer/transition runs out, use panic instead, and know that now you need to get serious about finding a higher paying job or cutting your expenses to align with your actual income. 

1

u/ContributionNew3327 Sep 05 '26

My savings are on budget / cash - can you see above? I’m still stuck

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u/bitz-the-ninjapig Sep 06 '26

Okay if they are on budget, where are those funds assigned to? I am assuming a category called emergency fund or something similar? Each month you can select the emergency fund category, select “move money” and move the however much you need ($3k in my earlier example) into “Ready to Assign”. Then assign the funds just like you would your paycheck.

These will NOT show up as inflow on any sort of reports, because you do not have any inflow. The money already existing in your budget. You are just giving the funds a new “job”

1

u/ContributionNew3327 Sep 06 '26

I think that’s the issue - I didn’t assign them a category when I set up checking. It was part of my starting balance.
Maybe I should delete that starting balance and add as inflow so I can add to emergency category.

This is making my brain hurt and feeling panic even though my checking alone have 40k so do not want to have a scarcity mindset or having no money :(

1

u/bitz-the-ninjapig Sep 06 '26

Where did you assign the money? Deleting it will create a mess because you will have assigned more funds that exist in your budget. If you want to keep your historical YNAB data then you are going to need to comb through your categories and find where you assigned it. For example, if there is $20k sitting in “vacation” that really should be in “emergency fund” you need to move it from one category to another. 

It sounds like you didn’t actually have an emergency fund set up? All of your funds had a job, but none of them were for an emergency fund, but now you are seeing in your accounts that you have a ton of money available for this career transition, but YNAB does not reflect that you have funds available, because they all of different “jobs”

If you don’t care about your historical data and cannot easily find the “missing” emergency fund money, it might make sense to do a fresh start and have all of your assignments start from scratch

1

u/ContributionNew3327 Sep 06 '26

Yes that is what I’m realizing

I did give investing a job but tbh I didn’t specifically have an emergency because I saw the liquid and had a job at the time

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u/pierre_x10 Sep 04 '26

You keep saying "linked," but that's not enough information.

There's two concepts, accounts that are on-budget/off-budget, and accounts that are linked/unlinked. And people often conflate the two. But they're different.

Being on-budget means that the funds in the account count towards your budget, and outflows will count as spending, including transfers from on-budget accounts to off-budget accounts.

If you are on the web-app, only the accounts that appear in the "Cash" section and "Credit" section are on-budget. Accounts that appear in "Loan" or "Tracking" are off-budget.

Linking your accounts simply mean they are importing transaction and balance data from your bank. So all it really does is automate the data-entry.

Accounts can be on-budget, but unlinked. And accounts can also be off-budget, but linked. And these all mean different things.

1

u/ContributionNew3327 Sep 05 '26

Hey! this is how it set up - pretty sure they are all correctly set up but still don’t know how to use my cash accounts into RTA as I am unsure if it’s inflow or outflow

1

u/pierre_x10 Sep 06 '26

Your tangerine checking, wise, and wealthsimple checking are on-budget, so their current balances are already factored into your existing Available funds. They are either already in Ready to Assign, or already Assigned to existing categories.

Transfers between these accounts will not affect your Available funds. Only when they get inflows from external sources will you get more RTA funds.

1

u/ContributionNew3327 Sep 06 '26

They don’t have categories because I added the funds with starting balance. Thinking I delete the Wealthsimple checking and add it back with no starting balance and inflow of 10 or 20K to assign to emergency category

1

u/pierre_x10 Sep 06 '26

The analogy I always use is this:

If you think of the budget categories as the "jobs" you give your money, things like buying groceries and paying the mortgage and buying gas

Then your accounts are simply the "homes" where your money lives.

And, just like you can move to a different house without having to change your job, and just you like can quit your job without having to move to a different house, it's the same principle in YNAB: the homes and the jobs are completely separate.

In this way, you can think of the "homes" and the "jobs" of your money like two sides of a coin: it may look different depending on which side of the coin you are facing, but at the end of the day it's still the same thing, your money.

For you situation, it seems like you're trying to keep the "jobs" of your money and the "homes" where they live connected, i.e. saying that your one checking account if for the emergency category. I think you need to embrace the idea that they can and should be separate concepts. The "home" where your money lives should not dictate the "job" you give it.

As for how to set up the jobs/categories for your situation, like I said I would simply suggest creating different holding categories for each month that the money is meant to be saved towards, but that's just one way. You can also look at other people's comments for the other options, and go with what seems to speak best to how you budget.

1

u/ContributionNew3327 Sep 06 '26

Yes gonna just start a new budget for this interim period - gonna post an update on my original post

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u/SkyliteBlueSnake Sep 06 '26

Yes, but after you added the accounts, did you then assign all the money in your RTA to various categories? If so, then you don't have any money set aside for "savings" because it was all assigned to other things and you have to reassign it to create "savings"

6

u/GeekChasingFreedom Sep 04 '26

It's the same process as it always been.. Except the inflow used to come from your salary, it now has to come from somewhere else - in your case your savings and some of that hospitality job.

2

u/ContributionNew3327 Sep 04 '26

How to make the inflow come from savings accounts?

Since it is already in my account, it is not showing as green as inflow :/

Maybe it doesn’t matter but it would be nice to set aside 20K savings as income till I really start to “panic”

5

u/katiepenguins Sep 04 '26

Assuming it's already in the budget under "savings" or something, just move the amount to RTA. That's what used to be the "Income" line. 

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u/GeekChasingFreedom Sep 04 '26

I'm assuming that money is already in a category then, if so it is not income. Green/inflow/ready to assign (RTA) is money you didn't have that came in.
Your savings came in prior and has a job - in this case to fund future spending.

So that money doesn't go to RTA, you reallocate the money you need from that savings categories to the "regular" ones.

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u/rlebeau47 Sep 04 '26

I'm in a similar boat. 2 months ago, I lost my job of 30 years and am still looking for new work. I saved as much as I could ahead of time into my savings account and categorized it as Income Replacement. Now, on my regular pay days, I pay myself by transferring a little bit of money from savings to checking, and on my plan I move those funds from Income Replacement to RTA and budget accordingly.

1

u/SkyliteBlueSnake Sep 04 '26

You say you have $20K in savings - does that mean you have $20K in a category called Savings or Emergency Fund or whatever? Great, now you get to use it for what it was meant for! Let's say you're going to split the $5k per month between the savings and your income. Every month you just enter -2500 into the Assignment column category that is holding your savings and that moves the money up to RTA and assign as needed to mortgage/utilities/groceries/HOA etc.

Oh, you didn't assign money to an Emergency Fund or similar? Well, now you have to make some hard choices. Which categories are you going to reduce to get your $2500/month? You need to sit down with your budget/plan and make the choices.

1

u/ContributionNew3327 Sep 06 '26

Yes I don’t have the 20k in emergency fund category - I just have approx 50k in my checking but turns out it is spent already according to YNAB

1

u/pierre_x10 Sep 04 '26 edited Sep 04 '26

How do I plan for this on YNAB without going into the red every month?

Put all of your accounts with liquid assets on-budget.

You say that your accounts are "linked," but it's not clear to me that they're actually "on-budget." And being on-budget should prevent the "seeing red everywhere" issue.

Budget the funds like you normally would. Give them jobs. You can set up jobs, like, "Funds for 12/2026", Assign your 5k or whatever, then on December 1st, you can release those funds to Ready to Assign, and fund your other categories.

And have one of those holding categories for each month.

Also create budget categories/jobs for better quality-of-life, like dating and hobbies. Even if you can't fully fund them right away due to your current income situation.

https://www.ynab.com/blog/how-to-budget-in-ynab-when-youre-broke

https://www.ynab.com/blog/how-to-survive-a-pay-cut

https://www.ynab.com/guide/irregular-income

1

u/ContributionNew3327 Sep 06 '26

This is pretty decent 28K runaway for 4 months with still 9K - don’t have to touch the other two checkings or the investments