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How to deal with temporary categories? (self.ynab)

submitted 11 months ago by ghostzero to c/ynab

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Hi everyone! I am planning a short vacation in the upcoming months and for that, I wanted to add a category group and a few categories (travel, food, accommodation, etc). But then I started thinking about what to do with these categories once the trip is over and I don't need them anymore.

Since I haven't done this myself yet, I was wondering how people deal with these types of temporary categories? Rename? Or put it all in a more generic "travel" or "next big expense" category?

I'd rather not simply hide them forever, as this could feel a bit messy over time :)

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

My take:

I don't want to have my normal spending statistics messed up by vacation spending (food, going out, etc).
I do like to see how much I've spent on travel overall.
When I'm out, I don't want to think about categorizing expenses (especially if I'm somewhere where I'm using mostly cash). Vacation is for vacation, not for stressing out about categories.

That's how I feel anyway, so how I do it is:

I have a category group for Travel.
When I have a new trip coming up, I create a new category for it and fund that.
During the trip itself, I charge everything to that category.
Once I get back and transactions have settled, I add something to the memo of the transactions (e.g. #2023-10-my-trip), then I delete the category and move all those transactions to a generic Travel category.

This way, I can still differentiate between trips if I want to go back and look, but I also get to see an overall view of my travel spending (without cluttering my everyday categories).

Pretty painless, works well for me.

[–] ghostzero 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Yeah I mentioned this more or less in another comment but this is currently my preferred approach as well 👍

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

Nice! Yeah I've been doing this for about a year, and I've been really happy with it. Minimal overhead, but I don't lose any information (and I don't have a mess of hidden categories at the end).

[–] PlutoniumAcid 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Isn't it a pain to go back and edit every single transaction?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Nah, adding the hashtag to the memo takes a couple minutes at most. I think that YNAB toolkit will do this for you too, but I've never used it so I can't say definitively.

Then when you delete the category, it'll ask you where you want to move your transactions, so that part is easy.