Is anyone interested in a thread for YMOYL readers?
The specific issue I have right now is that I think I have been doing my wall chart wrong for years? I have been putting our NET income (take home pay) because that’s easiest with YNAB but I’m wondering if it should be gross income or something in between.
Obviously, if I did gross income I would need to add the health insurance and other deductions as expenses. Or I could ignore health insurance but add our various paycheck savings back in as income?
So I don’t do it exactly their way, but basically I have two spreadsheets. One of them tracks mostly net income/expenses, the ‘mostly’ part meaning that I add back pre-tax 401k and HSA deductions and then lump them under ‘savings’ since that money goes into my investment accounts and if I leave my employer they go with me. Then I’ve got a second sheet that accounts for everything from gross–that one includes the net stuff plus taxes and all other paycheck deductions for things that wouldn’t go with me if I left, ex. limited FSA contributions and short term disability insurance (I have an HDHP and its only me, but if I had separate medical insurance payments it would go here too). There is a slightly fuzzy category for 401k match that I only put in gross for employer reasons, but in the end I end up with graphs that look like:
2024 net version:
12-mo running average gross version (I won’t have a just-2024 version of this until Dec):
Ignore the fact that the colors don’t quite match, I’ve never gone through to color-match between pages but generally greens are spending for me, pinks are gifts/donations, purples are savings of some form, and blues are taxes/other (also libreoffice is annoying and cash/misc is a negative number that they insist on including as non-negative).
I set up my charts to give me visibility as to my progression to covering what we wanted to have post retirement. So we had a line for projected healthcare expenses (glasses, dental, drugs) that we’d need to pay for ourselves that used to be work benefits and I kept it updated by what we were reimbursed for so I knew what it would likely be in the future.
We only looked at income when I wanted to figure out the % of savings, but it was rarely accurate because it didn’t include any bonuses (which we threw at mortgage or investments depending on my mood)
KPIs should reflect what will help you make better decisions, not what someone else developed because it helped them.
