Managing Vacation Transactions
The Jesse Mecham Show
YNAB
4.7 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 17 July 2023
⏱️ 6 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
It's peak vacation season, so Ben and Ernie are comparing notes on handling the vacation budget in the moment. One the one hand, you want vacation to be vacation -- a time to unplug, be in the present moment, engaged with your family and friends. On the other hand, waiting until the end of the trip to categorize all your transactions can be overwhelming! Ben and Ernie share their approach to managing the transaction log without going crazy or burying your face in your phone the whole trip.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, YNABbers. My name is Ben with another episode of the YNAB podcast where we teach |
| 0:10.8 | you four rules to help you stop living paycheck to paycheck, get out of debt and save more |
| 0:16.2 | money. Ernie, it's summertime. Let's talk about vacations. Let's talk about how to budget |
| 0:22.0 | when you're on vacation. What does that look like? I just went on vacation. So this is |
| 0:27.5 | something that I was thinking about during vacation because I'm that kind of budget nerd. But |
| 0:33.8 | yeah, how do you maintain the budget while you're on a trip because there's so much spending going |
| 0:40.8 | on every single day? And I've done it a couple different ways. I have waited until the end of |
| 0:47.9 | the trip to do all my importing and categorizing of transactions, but man, that was overwhelming. |
| 0:55.0 | Yeah. And I just I could not do that again. And I guess you could with the bulk edit options, |
| 1:04.2 | you could take those 50, 75 transactions from the trip from vacation and just categorize them |
| 1:11.1 | and one click to that trip's vacation category. I'll tell you Ernie, that's exactly what I do. I |
| 1:18.9 | wait till the end of my vacation. And you know, I have for little kids. So I haven't been doing any |
| 1:25.8 | very large vacations for very long, mostly like weekend trips. So it might be different hours if I |
| 1:32.6 | were gone for a long time. But I don't usually reconcile while I'm on vacation. I just take |
| 1:39.5 | everything at the end of the end of the weekend trip or whatever it is. And I don't actually use the |
| 1:45.7 | bulk editing feature I should because that would be a lot quicker. But I'll just go through it. I'll |
| 1:50.3 | just categorize it all. And actually, I put a hashtag in the memo describing the vacation. So if |
| 1:55.8 | everyone has searched it, I can search that. And yeah, it all just goes to one category. So it's |
| 2:01.9 | pretty quick and easy, but I don't have to think about it while I'm actually on vacation. And it's |
| 2:06.8 | kind of it's kind of fun. I feel like I'm rolling the dice a little bit early because you know, |
| 2:12.0 | you estimate how much you need for a vacation, but you never really know for sure. And so I will |
| 2:18.6 | categorize everything and then I'll look and see if I've overspent that category. And usually, |
... |
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