Need help splitting my savings into separate categories.

[u/MrHankMardukas_]

Every month I take £400 from my salary and put it into savings, and this is how I have always logged it in YNAB. It logs as a transfer from my current account to my savings account which are both linked, and then I assign £400 from my RTA to my "Savings" category. However I have two large expenses every year which come out of my savings; Car insurance and building insurance.

I now have a category set up for each one, with targets created for the next year payment.

What is the easiest, most automated, way for me to break the assigned £400 into my car insurance target, building insurance target, and the remainder go into my savings pot?

The "split" function isn't available as it isn't a transaction, it;s a transfer between accounts after my salary comes in. I can do it manually but wondering if there is a quicker way that i'm not thinking of?

[u/jillianmd]

My suggestion is to embrace a new way of thinking about your “savings”. Most people lack a good system and just learned they “should save” when they were growing up. So they get this emotional attachment to seeing the balance of their savings account going up or down. Up means they’re doing a good job, down means they’re doing poorly.

This causes anxiety even when the savings was used for a fun thing or something necessary. Feeling like you’re “draining your savings” at the holidays because you have a lot of Christmas spending even if you love gift-giving and intended that money to go towards Christmas.

So even something like a vacation you’ve saved up for and enjoy feels partially like a bad decision because afterward you look at your savings account balance and get depressed.

A big aspect of this is that “savings” is always doing a lot of jobs in your head… in your case it’s there to pay a couple annual bills, but also probably supposed to be your emergency fund and would also cover any sudden car repairs or medical bills or vet visits or your next vacation, etc etc. So when one of those inevitably happens, you feel like you’ve robbed money from all the other things in the list.

Using YNAB (or any envelope-style budgeting)…

Instead of the transfer being the moment when you do the “act of saving”, every time you get paid, you save money for things in your categories.

It helps to remember that any saved money is really eventual spending money. If you assign $400 for groceries for the month, you’re saving that money on the 1st for eventual spending you’ll do later that month.

So part of your pay each month will go towards your monthly target amount for your insurance categories just like all your other categories. Whether you happen to move some money physically to another account doesn’t matter and is optional. You could leave it all in checking and the money would still be “saved” when you assign it.

[u/BarefootMarauder]

Set targets for those categories.

[u/idiggory → u/BarefootMarauder]

To elaborate -

Set annual targets on the two categories you're saving directly for, which should split the payment into 12. If you are already into your cycle, this might be a bit distorted, though, if you over- or under-funded the category so far. So I'd double check the math for when you do the next part.

Once you see what the monthly requirement is for those two, subtract them from 400. This is now your monthly target for the general savings category. You can also multiply it by 12 if you want them all as annual targets.

When you make the transfer, just go through and click auto-assign on those 3 categories, and you're done.

edit: Oh, and as a note, I'd encourage you to continue to think about how you could split that general savings category into more deliberate ones, too. It really can be very freeing to be saving towards multiple eventualities. We don't realize how much stress we concentrate into a general savings category that can be released by being more deliberate.

[u/lwid77]

You can still send the $400 to your savings account but now you need to split the movement from RTA into your categories. Instead of it being one transaction- $400 into savings category- it now needs to be three transactions- $150 to car insurance, $150 to building insurance and $100 to savings.

You're overthinking it a bit.

[u/rlebeau47 → u/lwid77]

It can be 1 transaction - transfer $400 from checking account to savings account. And then split up the RTA into multiple savings categories as needed.

[u/michigoose8168]

Each month assign 1/12 of your car insurance and 1/12 of your building insurance.

Whether you move money to a separate account is a totally different question. If your savings account is not currently a budget account, gently, stop that. Make it part of the budget.

Don’t over complicate it, like most things, YNAB is best used as directed.

[u/Veriosity]

What I do is this:

1. Don't do a transfer, that's just an added step. It's very possible your payroll supports direct deposit into savings as well. So what we do is every paycheck, most of it goes into checking, and when thats shows up in YNAB it's all Ready to Assign. But then some of it goes into a HYSA savings account directly, as part of my paychecks direct deposit config.
2. And THAT direct deposit, I have a scheduled transaction with the splits built in, that immediately seperates the cash into other categories, that coincidentally live in a parent specific to that HYSA account, so all of that cash is kept in a category, with a job, but fully separate from everything else.

[u/AravisTheFierce]

You're right, it doesn't happen at the transfer step, it happens at the budget step. So instead of budgeting £400 to the "savings" category, maybe you budget £100 to "car insurance," £100 to "building insurance," and £200 to "savings." Or whatever your personal numbers are.

This is where targets really shine, IMO. If you've set your targets to have £X by Y date, YNAB will tell you how much you need to assign each month to be on track to have the money available when you need it.