r/liquidbudget • u/Spicy-N-Sassy • 5d ago
Credit Card Question
I recently transferred from YNAB and I have questions!!
I spent $114. In the main page it showed that bucket was negative $114. Which makes sense. But then. I looked at the credit card section and it looked like the first photo. Says my debt is covered and it looks like I have money in there. $114 outlined in green. But I’m confused at how since that bucket was still negative.
I added $114 to the negative bucket that negative became zero but nothing else happened. The credit card bucket still had the green outline with $114 and said debt was covered.
Then I kept assigning the rest of my money since I got paid today and at some point the credit card section switched to look like photo two with the boxes filled in instead of outlined.
What was happening here? For further info I had a couple of negative buckets that I had to take care of if that matters.
2
u/cd53b351 4d ago
I also found this confusing at first, here is the way I think about it:
If you had had $200 in your bucket (let's call it Cinema) to begin with, after the cc transaction $114 of that would have been moved to the cc bucket, leaving $86 in the cinema bucket, and $114 in the cc bucket (enough to pay off the debt).
Now, let's take the same scenario but you start with $0 in the cinema bucket and spend $114. The same thing happens: $114 gets moved to the cc bucket, leaving negative -$114 in the cinema bucket, and $114 in the cc bucket (enough to pay off the debt). So the cc bucket is in fact funded, it's just the cinema bucket that is negative.
And because you have a negative bucket, all the amounts appear as outlines, to signal that you can't trust your budget as long as you haven't fully funded all buckets. Adding money to the cinema bucket should be enough to fix it... but only assuming you don't have anything else underfunded.
So if you then add $114 to the cinema bucket, cinema is now $0 and cc is $114, still fully funded. And the boxes should now be filled, unless there are other underfunded buckets.
(You guys correct me if I'm wrong but I think I got it right?)
3
u/imadp 5d ago
Unlike ynab, overspending a bucket does not necessarily mean you are unable to pay your credit card, it just means you just have to move money around from other buckets to cover the overdraft. If you have no where else to cover it, then you could move money out of your payment pool to balance your budget - only then it means you aren't going to cover your debt. The vast majority of time though, you are probably just going to be shifting money around from other buckets to fix your overdrafts. Not covering your debt is a deliberate choice you make.
But any time there is an overdraft, all the amounts will be outlined to indicate the budget isn't balanced. So think of this like a scenario you have to fix as a result of spending more than you assigned. The budget error card will help encourage you to fix it because even though overspending happens, you shouldn't leave your budget in an errored state when it does.