No-Spend Challenge Week #2– A Few Hangups & a YNAB Tip

We’re halfway through our September No-Spend Month Challenge.  I’m excited to hear how it’s going for you.  Is it going by fast or is the month dragging on?  Strangely enough, for me it’s a little of both.

So far we’ve kept our rules of only buying gas and paying regular bills.  The one exception I made in the beginning was to buy some new shoes for my second grader who runs cross country.

Last week I told you that I bought seven pairs of running shoes for my daughter so that she could try them on at home rather than drag all four kids to the store after school. My plan was to keep one pair and return the other six. Unfortunately there were a few complications.

On Tuesday morning, my husband got a call from our Chase credit card asking about some suspected fraud. There was a pending charge for $813 from a Christian snowboarding charity. They denied the charge because they suspected fraud, but they had to cancel our credit cards and overnight us new ones. They told us to make sure to change any recurring payments to the new credit card number as soon as we got it. Ugh.

As I was thinking through any pending charges or recurring payments, I realized that we had some returns to make. Thankfully they said that returns wouldn’t be a problem (just no new charges), but I wanted to take care of the returns as soon as possible just to be sure.

The first return went fine, though I felt a little weird explaining the credit card to the clerk when she asked me to swipe my card to put the charges back onto my card.  She said it would work to swipe the new card since it was linked to the same account.  It seemed to work fine.

There was a hangup with the second return. The associate went to scan the barcode at the bottom of the receipt only to find that the original clerk must have torn the receipt tape prematurely as the receipt was coming out. The necessary info from the bottom of the receipt wasn’t there to be able to put the return amount back on my credit card. Ugh.

They could only give me store credit. If it had been a store where I wouldn’t use store credit, I would have pressed the issue, but since I know in the next couple months I will use the store credit, I just chalked it up to an inconvenience.

So I got my money back; it just wasn’t in the form that I wanted.

Lesson learned: Double check that your entire receipt is intact before leaving the store with a purchase you might want to return. Or use cash.

YNAB Tip

For those of you who use YNAB and are curious how I handle getting a refund as store credit in YNAB, I’ll explain. Of course you have some options, but this is what I did:

First I added a new budget account and named it Store Gift Card.  The starting balance should be zero, the account type is cash, and it should be on budget (not off).

Then I went into the original transaction and changed the category from “clothing” to “split (multiple categories).”  When you say you want to split a receipt you’ll get three new lines (you can click the red minus sign on one of them since we only need two extra lines).

In the first new line (the second one down), I put the category as “Everyday Expenses: Clothing” and put the price of the shoes.

In the second, I clicked the drop down menu under transfer (just to the left of category) and chose the gift card account I had just created.  I put the remaining balance on the gift card.  The “amount remaining to assign” at the bottom should be zero.

Why do I bother making a gift card account in my budget?  By creating a spending account for this store credit, I ensure that the spending of this money happens within the budget.  If I didn’t create this account, then I would surely spend it as free money.  That might be fine for a gift card you earn from Swagbucks or credit card reward points, but in this case, the money came out of my budget when I originally spent it.  If I just pocket the store credit, then that leaves the cost of 5 pairs of shoes in my budget spending, instead of one.