#137 - Patching vs (re)Building Your Money Habits
episodePreviously titled “Patching vs Building Your Money Habits” — renamed by the publisher on Aug 31, 2026
Transcript
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How do Ben and Ernie introduce the 'patching vs building' money habits idea?
I'm Ben. And I'm Ernie. And you're listening to Budget Nerds.
You are not alone. No, you are not. Friends, welcome back to another episode. Today, we're talking about this idea of patching versus building. What does it look like when you're patching your finances versus when you are building something sustainable with your finances? It's this idea that I've been tossing around in my head lately. And Ben, I wanted to bring it to you. I mean, seriously, I brought it to you and I want us to figure this out together. We've really haven't talked much about it at all so yeah well that's what we do here is like we have an idea we kind of talk it out and figure out what we mean and we come to a good conclusion and then if it's it's really good we'll write a blog post about it and that's my hope i do want to write something because you're always bringing blog posts to the show i've never written anything but i've started writing some stuff you're you're right i'm writing stuff now so yeah now i can finally say yeah i've
this blog post about the idea.
Although I feel like nobody reads the blog whenever you're watching the thing, so maybe we have this backwards. I don't know. But that's what this is for. It's just talking out, right?
Man, I do miss Google Reader. Those were the days, right? You would just have all your blog posts every morning, go through them. Anyway, I love that. Before we get into this building versus patching idea... We've got an update from you about your categories.
Yes. Okay. I really wish I did all this before I went to my category episode, but I caught the bug, Ernie, and I started changing things. It never happens.
And for those of you that are new to the show, hey, welcome, first off. But Ben does not. He talks a lot about changing his categories, but he rarely actually does. So this is kind of a big moment.
Well, here's what it was. Okay, I got to give a shout out to a listener named Maytal who reached out to us. And I loved the way they sent this email. They were like, I think the subject line was, is this terribly rude or something like that? But they sent me a suggestion on how to reorganize my categories. Like they made new category groups. They moved things around. They separated categories. Gave me a lot to think about. It was... Dare I say, it was my favorite Budget Nerds email I've ever received. It was not rude. I told them right away. I was like, this is not rude. This is great. I love it so much. So I really appreciate it. So shout out to Maytal. Thank you for that. And it really got me thinking. And I took some of the suggestions and I made up some of my own and I made some changes.
All right. So what did you do? okay well um there's a few things uh i think i'll just talk about the the way i reorganize my groups i'm just going to go through the groups very quickly okay because you know it's a lot so uh i have a frequent i think i had a frequent category group before so i kept that but i moved some of the categories around and this is just stuff that um you go to all the time, like groceries, gas, restaurants, babysitting, sundries is in there. Right. So that's like kind of a catch all, all those categories probably could go somewhere else in this new category structure I have, but I wanted to keep them in their own group because they're just the ones I check all the time. Right.
And then I have the Ben stuff and the Katie stuff still, which I thought we talked about, but now I have a new group called family, which I really like. So it's, it's a little bit more of a themed thing going on. I have a family group which has anything related to the kids or something that affects the whole family. And this is by far the largest group. So like my kid camps. Oh yeah. I took away my childcare group because I had a childcare group for the longest time, which had like my kid camps and daycare, um, our preschool. And, uh, we have like a mother's helper thing. And I think this was really a hold back from when I had, um, a nanny and we had to do like taxes was withholding for them so we had like and i felt like it really needed to be its own group but now it's like all kind of in this family group and it kind of works so that's that's cool and then i have a home group which is like anything related to cars or home things like the pool home maintenance appliances which we talked about a lot like i have two car categories i got my car maintenance and i got car replacement right so that's all in there
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
How do Ben and Ernie introduce the 'patching vs building' money habits idea?
0:06–5:59
2
What category and budget changes did Ben make after listener feedback?
5:59–29:40
3
Why did Ben rethink his job-loss and month-ahead strategy?
29:40–55:24
4
How did a room renovation and sports analogy inspire the patching vs building concept?
55:24–1:08:44
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from Budget Nerds
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