I'm attempting to increment a counter in my User table from another model. class Count < ActiveRecord::Base belongs_to :user after_create :update_count def update_count user = User.find(self.user_id) user.increment(:count) end end So when count is created the goal would be to increment a counter column for that user. Currently it refuses to get the user after creation and I get a nil error. I'm using devise for my Users Is this the right (best practice) place to do it? I had it working in the controllers, but wanted to clean it up. I'm very inexperienced with Model callbacks.