We had all of our credit cards set to auto pay the statement balance. I had changed one of our cards to only the minimum and we used it to purchase our Christmas presents, knowing we would be able to pay it off in 2-3 months. You can imagine our surprise when the statement balance of $1,200 was pulled from our account instead of the minimum payment of $30.
After this, we spent a long time on the phone with the credit card company who after sending us back and forth a couple of times told us that we could not be sent back the difference until after a 30 day processing period. So we pulled money from ALL sinking funds to cover the difference because neither me nor my husband want to spend another couple of hours being passed back and forth again when we did have the money in sinking funds to cover it.
Now this does mean that my sinking funds will be taking more to fill each month as I have to make up the deficit. This is where I am SUPER grateful to have found YNAB and the ease with which it was able to change my monthly funding goals to cover everything.
I also changed how we are funding future months. Funding each category a little at a time was driving me crazy so I just made a category under Bills for “Next Month’s Funding” and put in the title the MINIMUM number we need to fund our bills, sinking funds, and minimum debt payments. At the end of each month I will send this balance to “To Be Budgeted” and send all the money to where it needs to go.
We also took away our Emergency Fund. It keeps getting stolen from for things that are not emergencies so we will be using a credit card for our emergency fund. Paying interest on something will definitely make me decide whether it’s a true emergency or not.
In other news, thanks to the blunder with the credit card company’s system, we are ahead of schedule on debt payoff AND our payoff numbers for January look awesome so far!
Here’s to hitting the year strong!
