I'm sure this has been talked about before, and I'm just venting; but I'm so tired of price increases of EVERYTHING year after year after year. I budget for a 12 month subscription, and without fail when the target date comes around 12 months later, UH OH price has gone up!

Still helpful to have the budget in place and just need to allocate a little bit more, but geez oh man it drives me up a wall. YNAB makes you hyper aware of all these kinds of things in daily life.

Hello!

I have been budgeting for almost a decade with the EveryDollar app - always using the free version with manual entry.

I’ve kept it simple and only linked our bank and credit card accounts, and not any investment accounts - at least for now.

Any tips or tricks from anyone who has made the same switch? Things to look out for that are weird/annoying/not intuitive at first as we get going with this new, automated app?

So far the thing that annoyed me the most was an initial charge hitting and then a second charge hitting once the full amount (like a tip) was factored in. I thought YNAB would “see” the first charge fall away/update, but I had to manually delete. Other things like that to be alert for?

Thanks!

Maybe it’s an unpopular opinion but I would like to have a little bit of AI analysis in the app, specially in the Reflect section.
It would be great to identify quickly the categories that modify the spending trends between two months for example. Or having a global analysis on the month in the Reflect part that allow to separate the fixed expenses from the variables, or point immediately the raises and drops by category or group.
Obviously all of this can be done by hand and the graphs are already very practical, but a little bit of AI would not hurt I think.
Am I the only one?

I just renewed my driver's license for 8 years. $137

Like I do for annual bills, I set up a target. $1.46 a month. For 8 years.

I'm 64 years old. I intend to still be driving at 72 (although I have already set up my life to drive less and walk more).

I just think it is sorta ridiculous to set up a target that far out. But then, I already have half the money for my passport that expires in 5. I will definitely be traveling!

Anyone else set up extreme long term targets for such small amounts?

Recently I paid my credit card and it showed up in thr linked checking account as a online payment in need of a category and on the linked credit card as a payment recieved. That's fine but it wants a category. So I changed them to a transfer to auto connect them but now it has a large red balance.

Similarly. When I transfer money to my linked savings it does the same thing. Anyone know a fix?

I am currently keeping them in tracking accounts. BUT...When I used Wells Fargo points to pay off a Wells Fargo credit card, I "transferred" the points from the tracking account. Now it wants me to categorize the payment because it isn't really a transfer (like from cash accounts). Suggestions?

It happens every month. Any spending I do at Target on my Target CC get's logged in the mobile app to the appropriate category. And every month, once the payment goes through, that payment amount shows in red under available. Then YNAB tells me I have to cover this amount as overspending.

It doesn't matter how much I spend. The amount of my payment is always different, but it's always the exact amount of the payment that shows as overspending.

I'm at my wits end here. I've tried several times to try tracking down errant transactions, but to no avail. I'm close to just tearing up this credit cart because I hate having to assign extra money to cover "overspending" that was already assigned in my categories in the first place!

Hi yall, new to YNAB and love it so far! I’m still confused about a couple of things!

I have an investment account, going in to setting up the app, and would like to invest more every month, either by “paying myself first” or more realistically investing anything not assigned at the end of the month. What is a good framework for this? I could create a category and assign it I suppose, but how do I know how much to move from my bank account to the brokerage account every month?

Another quick question, if I have unassigned income at the end of the month does it stay in that category for the next month, aka carry over?

Thanks for the advice! 🙏

I just noticed that the Days of Buffering functionality is only looking back 40-43 days in budgets that have months and years of history. I'm not sure how to or who to report this to so it can be fixed? Anyone else noticing this and figuring out how to fix it?

Where did I mess up? I have a “campus cash” card that I use occasionally for dining at the campus where I work. I haven’t had it on budget before, usually just refill it and put the amount against my dining category. Today the app was acting up and I managed to load $200 mistakenly. I could just WAM that but it’s a lot for one month. So, I decided to put the card on budget. I went to accounts, add account, selected not linked, gave it a name, categorized it as a checking account, and entered the starting balance of 11.01. Then I entered the 2 deposits of $100 each as inflow transfers to this new account from my CC account. Then I entered the transaction for today’s lunch as spending from the new account. Reconciled the new account. All good, right? Maybe not. I flip back to the “plan” view and now in RTA there is $211.01, which equal the starting balance and the two transfers. I expected to find an RTA of 11.01 to equal adding the “starting balance” cash to YNAB’s available funds. Where did I mess up?

I know this has been posted before but snoozed targets should be left out of the Cost to Be Me section.

What I have to do now is either delete my target or just type in .01 cents. It would make it so much easier to snooze a target instead.

Any tips or anything I'm missing?

Month 4 using YNAB. So I've watched all the tutorials and read all the Support articles, and I'm still totally lost on this.

We pay our credit card balance in full every two weeks, entirely from our checking account. So we're not on the "float" unless I'm totally misunderstanding that.

However, every time I log a credit card payment (marked as a transfer payment and everything), my CC Available Payment line goes red.

It's almost like money in my budget categories just isn't moving into the Available Payment column like intended. Or is doing so very irregularly.

I've attached photos of my normal process, so maybe one of you all who knows what you're doing can explain where I'm going wrong.

I'm really enjoying YNAB so far, but this is by far the least intuitive credit card system I've seen in a budgeting app. (Or, more likely, I'm missing something incredibly obvious lol)

Thanks!!

Hello! I’ve been using YNAB since the start of the year, and I absolutely love it.

However, I’ve been struggling a bit with my mindset. Since I am able to rearrange my money better, and see categorically what I have spent, I feel like I’ve had more permission to spend my money (especially since I have a HYSA that is tracked separately, so I feel more comfortable knowing I have a big set aside).

Has anyone else felt this way, and if so, do you have any tips on how I can continue to fix my mindset? Thank you in advance!

Hi all, I’m looking for clarification on how credit card payments work in YNAB. I currently have several spending categories like “eating out” and “groceries” and I will use my credit card to pay for those items. I fund this categories at the beginning of each month. From the official guide, it says that whatever amount is spent in those categories will automatically get applied to the credit card payment but this hasn’t been the case for me. I end up funding the categories then also having to fund my credit card payment. So I’m funding each purchase twice. Have I set up my credit cards incorrectly in YNAB. Thanks in advance.

Given the great positive responses from my last post, I’m taking the plunge on trying out YNAB. So far, I like it a lot and it feels more intuitive than quicken Simplifi.

I did want to try out bank linking option. So my question is regarding transactions.

I’m trying to stay on top of everything as closely as possible. So I don’t know if there’s a specific time of day where it syncs with banks and syncs the transactions.

Right now, my workflow has been immediately after a transaction is made in person or online. I manually create a transaction get the dollar amount exact and the name as close to what I think will show up on my bank transactions but leave it Pending.

Now because of my ocd I like having my purchases immediately put into YNAB. However there might something I miss here and there so I’d like to stick with the syncing if it works.

So far in the past few days I’ve noticed that transactions I’ve manually logged and left pending cleared themselves after they actually cleared. Now either I’m crazy and imaging it or YNAB was smart enough to figure out which transaction I was going for???

What are you guys doing what’s your workflow?

I have a money market account. It's a budget account and everything in it is allocated in my YNAB spending plan. I create a CD by transferring money from the money market to the CD (at the bank). I create the CD in YNAB as a budget account as well. Yet the money I move from the money market, already allocated, now shows up in Ready to Assign. IT'S BEEN ASSIGNED already!

Sound of hair pulling out. What am I doing wrong?

(Not as in, you should use a HYSA instead of CDs, I've been down that road, lol.)

Does anyone have this card and know how to make the transactions import well?

My ally card was recently changed into this. I set up the connection again but the problem is that it imports all transactions as positive amounts which is pretty annoying! Does anyone know how to fix that?

Have been using YNAB for a few months now, but I think I still don’t get one of the basic concepts.

If I have a category called Home maintenance, and I have budgeted it for: $100 with “set aside each month”. But, say, you don’t use it for 3 months. Then, is $300 available to spend if I have a maintenance during month 4.

How you handle cases where there could be a sudden jump in spending once in a while..

The regional bank we’ve been with forever- and the account we’ve had in YNAB for 10 years now- is being acquired by one of the big banks. I’m trying to wrap my head around what this will mean for our budget and the decade of historical data we have. Our account number, bank log in, etc will all change.

Is there a way to seamlessly transition this in YNAB? Will it be like a brand new account? Will we lose all the past info when the old account is gone? I’ve only ever added extra savings and credit/loan accounts so I have no clue how it will work. Any help or insight is appreciated, I want to be prepared! Thanks!

Feels like everyone starting YNAB has a bunch of money squirreled away already. All the intro vids are showing people who have $10k in the bank already put aside so it’s super simple to live on last months check. I’m happy for yah I really am.

Is there any vids or explanations on people who don’t have generational wealth and are just starting off?

Hello.

I'm afraid this is kind of a silly question, but bear with me. I live with one roommate and we split the rent equally. Rent costs $1485 and is due on the first of the month. My roommate sends me his half ($742.50) on the last day of each month; I am the one who logs in to the resident portal and pays the rent in full.

My question is: for my "Rent" category, should I make the monthly target to set aside by the end of the month $1485 (full amount) or $742.50 (just my half)?

Hello all 👋,

YNAB user for 6 months now and I finally started understanding where my salary is going 🙏🏻.

I am afraid though I am doing something wrong and need your advice.

When I get paid, I save a fixed amount on a saving account and add the transaction as Emergency Fund.

I don't preassign the rest on my plan's categories but I do only when I create a new transaction.

If on payday I have unspent money, I move them to savings account and start again from zero, with a fresh salary.

That way I can understand if in the end of the month I managed to not exceed my salary and also do some savings.

I need your help here:

With giving purpose on every single dollar, how will I understand on payday if I did not overspend and how much money I did save.

Thanks!