I've been using YNAB for almost a year now and am a true believer. My husband and I are separating in a week and I'm trying to figure out how to get the most benefit as I continue to budget with the tool. We plan to maintain individual bank accounts, a shared bank account (used only to pay shared expenses), individual credit cards, and shared credit cards.

My current thought is to maintain two budgets:

• One budget would cover my expenses. That would include setting aside funds for half of shared expenses for kids, half of shared subscriptions, etc. This would let me realistically assess how I'm making ends meet on my reduced household income. The accounts on this budget would be a solo checking, solo savings, and my independent credit cards.
• One budget would cover shared expenses only. The accounts would be the shared checking account and the shared credit cards.

Is this set-up insane? I keep getting caught up in how I'm transferring money between the budgets/accounts. There must be a better way to do this.....

I would be so grateful for others' ideas or experiences.

I know there's a lot of confusion about credit card accounting on YNAB, but I can't find discussion of this issue: when I get cash back rewards from my credit card as statement credits, following YNAB's instructions double counts the money.

Here are the instructions: https://support.ynab.com/en_us/credit-card-rewards-and-statement-credits-a-guide-ryoRzYY0q

If I have $100 in a spending category, then spend $100 on my credit card for that category, $100 gets moved to that card's Payment (aka Available) bucket. Then I get the $10 statement credit, which per YNAB I record as Income:Ready to Assign. When I pay the credit card bill, I only pay $90, since that's the full balance, and $10 remains in Payment. So now I have $10 twice - the Income $10, and the $10 left in Payment. YNAB instructions tell me to move the $10 in payment to Income (step 5) but then I'd have $20 in Income when I should only have $10.

What should happen is for the $10 in payment to be deleted when I assign the statement credit to Income - because what's "really" happening, is that $10 I assigned to the spending category isn't needed for that category, and should return to Income.

Since I pay my credit cards off every month, I've not monitored the Payment category, and I just realized I've been accumulating hundreds of dollars in double counted money in the Payment category for several of my credit cards. So I want to confirm this really is double counted money, figure out how much it is and adjust it away, and I then I need to figure out how to handle cash back in the future. Perhaps I've missed something (I hope I have), but this seems like a serious glitch.

I am in the middle of justifying a little black Friday cheating on my YNAB (or trying to).

My sister is pregnant with her first baby. I told her I would buy something really nice ~$1,000CAD. Baby is due in April, so I have been putting aside monthly to be able to buy in February or so.

I decided to work a bunch of overtime in November to be able to take advantage of black Friday. I mean a crazy amount. I am a contractor, and get paid on the 3/4 of each month for my work up to the last Friday before the month ends (in November the 29). So I received confirmation on Friday that my net paycheque (getting paid out tomorrow) is going to be about $4,000CAD above my average.

I had only set aside $500 or so for the baby gifts so far but decided to float another $500 on my credit card, knowing my paycheque tomorrow would be waayyyy above normal.

I am a bit annoyed with myself for not thinking about black Friday earlier in the year and setting aside more money sooner, but haven't credit card floated in a while so I don't think it's the worstttttt. Anyways, I definitely feel some guilt, but also bought my sister around $1,500 worth of things she needed for baby.

For the last week I have been unable to access my budget. I’ve tried 3 different browsers with the same result. After the login screen I’m met with an endless loading screen. Anyone having this issue?

Hey guys, I’m in the middle of developing a YNAB clone because I’m a little tired of the $16 a month. But made me wonder how many of you guys are using automatic transactions synced with your bank accounts vs manual?

I’ve always leaned towards manual, cause it lets me feel in control of everything.. but seems like couples may be relying more automatic accounts?

Nothing groundbreaking, but I have appreciated the steady stream of QOL improvements to YNAB this year. Off the top of my head, we got:

• Targets overhaul
• Keyboard shortcuts
• Snoozing targets (I think this was 2023)
• Reflect/Reports on Mobile
• More readable payees via LLMs
• Covering overspending on the mobile app is easier
• Templates

Requests:

• Snoozing targets in future months
• Add keyboard shortcuts for the reconcile account flow (you can initiate the reconcile your account flow via keyboard, but can’t hit enter to get past the first dialogue confirming the balance AFAIK)
• It’s very difficult to unassign money to credit cards on the mobile app. These categories are locked on the mobile app only for some reason. On the web you can just edit the amount like any other category. This is sometimes necessary with how I redeem cashback or credit card offers that post as statement credits.

Keyboard shortcuts and snoozing targets are my favorites. Did I miss anything? I'm curious what others think

When I was setting up YNAB, I included my emergency funds account as a budget account. Not understanding that the balance of that account would be put towards my Ready To Assign amount, I went ahead and assigned out that amount plus my chequing account balance. I thought all was right in the world but realized that I was not able to actually show money moving to and from my emergency fund this way nor did I have the true balance of my emergency fund reflected in a category given it was dispersed across my other categories. I have since moved my emergency account out into a tracking account and had to walk back all of the budget assignments that that money was used for. I had to cover those budget assignments with money from other categories meaning I had to start back at $0 for some categories that I had been funding with emergency funds money. Luckily it was only my 2nd month using YNAB so the damage wasn't too signficant.

I write all of this to say, learn from my mistake. If you want to have a category line for an emergency fund that you assign funds to and want to see money moving in and out of it to your emergency fund account, don't set it up as a budget account. Set it up as a tracking account. This might not be very clear to new ynabbers but I felt compelled to write it down to possibly save others some time during set up.

I needed to make a fresh start and I don't understand what has happened, if anything, to the money i assigned a category but haven't spent. Did it automatically go back into ready to assign? When I look at the new budget those categories are empty and I don't know if I just need to refill them or maybe unarchived the old budget, take that money out of assigned categories/put back to ready to assign, or...what? Some of those categories I wanted to continue from where I had left off?

So I’m going to All transactions under the accounts tab. I click hide reconciled, and the only transactions left are cleared loan payments dating all the way back to when I started YNAB (Feb 2024). How do I reconcile a loan? I can’t find it anywhere and the account for a loan displays differently than other accounts. Thank you

I think I'm dealing with multiple things here.

1. I'm trying to figure out why ynab is trying to get me to fund more than my credit card balance. We pay the balance every month so there's nothing hidden here. I tracked this down to credit card fraud where ynab still has the fraudulent charges, but the credit card never actually issued refunds for them, just didn't charge the balance on them.
2. But the numbers didn't add up so I went back to the months where the fraudulent charges posted and I was seeing that I owed more than I spent. Ok that makes sense, I let the category ride figuring it'd balance out. But the month shows 2x what the negative is in the fraud.

THEN, I started looking at previous months and almost ALL of them dating back several years show that we assigned more cash than we had... in various amounts. I'm very careful every month to reconcile all accounts in ynab and make sure there's no "assigned more than you had" but now there's negative numbers all over the place and I can't tell what's actually setting it off or how this happened.

It is not a financial problem and the current month is reconciled to what we have and what we need and matches our bank account/credit card (with the exception of ynab trying to overfund one credit card).

Any ideas of why this would happen?

oh shoot... is it because we attached a new credit card to the account so everything from the old credit card got jibbled up? But still, even with that, there's no blaring red categories month to month of why the "assigned more than you have" is negative.

When you assign money, do you assign money based on your current paycheck or do you assign by month? Most people, me included, would always budget per month. If you used to budget per month and now budget per check, how did you make the switch?

Right now I've assigned the entire month which put me in red. Part of me is like oh no, how am I going to afford this month? Then I remember it doesn't use any of my paychecks in December. It's difficult for me to discern the difference between per paycheck assignment vs per month. I'm trying to figure out the best way for me.

On another note: My RTA is negative, but all of the money that I've assigned has already been spent from my bank. How will it be negative if I've spent it and my real account isn't negative?

Hi all,

I was wondering if people have the same, and possibily some creative solution.

I am paid on the 21st. My main bills (rent/utilities/health insurance) are all due on dates after the 21st. I always invest a significant amount of my salary into an investment account (also always after I get paid). My rent is due the end of the month and I always easily can pay this from my salary on the 21st.

My feeling is the following: If I get one-month ahead I will have the investment amount/rent sitting in my Bank account waiting for almost a month. Not sure how to handle this. Should I (i) leave the investments budget/rent empty and just pay it first thing when receiving salary, (ii) change my investing date, or (iii) else?

So. Many. Split. Transactions. This is the only group that would understand.

Firstly, I hope nabber isn’t a discriminatory slur.

As I start my journey I understand I will need a full month to set a better budget after seeing habits and then several months to set an extremely realistic budget.

With that being said, when you allocate money to a savings category… do you instantly move that money to a specified account? My next plan is to open a high yield savings and keep next to minimum in my bill paying and daily spending sister savings accounts to maximize the potential of my money. Is this the way?

My personal computer has been bugging me for a while. It’s old and slow and I hate using it, but I’ve been putting off replacing it. I’m about to close on a new house so I’ve had a hard time mentally about spending the money on something that feels unnecessary. But I love to have spreadsheets and lists related to the new house and it’s been hard on my existing crappy computer. But on Black Friday I saw a great deal on a laptop, so I checked my “New Tech” category that gets a little bit of funding each month and sure enough I already had enough to cover the computer. Such an amazing feeling to know I can make the purchase (despite also having another major purchase on the horizon) and not have to worry about it!

Hi all,

I have a reimbursement category in my budget.

In this, I have been inputting expenses for the last few months. This month, I have been reimbursed. When I input my reimbursement to this category, the balance is much higher than I expected it to be, I expected it to zero out (or be very close to zero) however it's almost as high as the amount I recieved.

Please let me know what I have been doing wrong

I’ve had my credit card linked to my account for about 4 years, and it’s always synced perfectly. I usually reconcile at the end of each month.

Today, I logged in to check November, and now it’s over $2,000 out of balance.

The weird thing is, all the transactions since my last reconciliation (October ’24) look legit, and they definitely don’t add up to $2K. I’m also pretty diligent about reconciling, so I would’ve caught something like this last month.

I unlinked/relinked the account, but no love.

Could this be a bug?

I'm a bit disappointed there were no coupon codes or discounts available to customers on CyberMonday. Overall, at $100/year, YNAB is definitely not the value proposition it once was.

I recently came into a larger sum of money (150K), and I cannot figure out how to add it to my budget or how to track what I do with the money. I'd love any and all suggestions on how to do so.

Goals with the Money:

- I'm setting aside a small portion as my fun money - I've already planned a trip and have a couple things in mind that I'd like to spend the money on, guilt free.. about 5K

- Another portion will go towards paying off debt.. about 18K

- The rest, I'd like to use as income replacement. I'm going to take this opportunity to take some time off my corporate job to dedicate towards my side business. I've been doing it on/off for a few years, but I'd love to do it full time while also spending time at home with my young children before they get older.

Question:

How should I add this to my account?

The "fun money" and debt repayment are easy. For the Income Replacement, my plan is to invest the money in my TSFA, and HYSAs. I'm only going to be taking money out to top off the income I'm receiving from my small business, so the amounts will change every month. Should I add the total as a tracked account and then transfer a "paycheque" over to my account as Ready to Spend? I'm thinking to do this on YNAB but not physically transfer unless I need to, as some of my income before went towards debt repayment/savings.

Sorry if I sound like I'm all over the place. I am!

Heya folks, I need a hand. I've been using YNAB since February, but I had a very difficult time coming to terms with how it manages money after switching over from Mint, especially how it handles payments to credit cards.

I'm concerned that my CC tracking is unsalvageably messed up, and while I've tried to fix it, I haven't gotten to a solution that I trust.

As per the image below:

https://preview.redd.it/kicf5lqmnk4e1.png?width=2289&format=png&auto=webp&s=ef829a74cee9c9aec28630575d38d79f4ba47e16

My cleared balance is correct, and my working balance is prety close to correct, pending a fetch of my most recent transactions.

however, as you can see, YNAB thinks I have $5362 set aside for payment, which I definitely do not.

I can just unassign $5289.91 from the card, but naturally that affects the total assignment calculation at the top of the month.

I've never felt confident in my understanding of how to manage these systems in YNAB, they're deeply counterintuitive to me. I've read the documentation, and I think I understand, essentially, how I'm supposed to manage my cards - only assigning money to the card when I'm making a payment above and beyond the funded spending on it.

I just don't understand what I need to do to bring my assignments back in line without creating a problem somewhere else in the app.

Here's my dilemma: I have two credit cards issued by the same bank and I pay both cards out of the same checking account. I use auto-import for all three accounts. Occasionally, YNAB will import a payment transaction for card A, but link it to card B. So if I made a $1000 payment to card A, YNAB will import the transaction from my checking account and created a matching transaction for card B. Then a day or two later when YNAB imports the payment from card A, it creates another matching transaction for my checking account. The end result is that my YNAB account balances are off - my checking account has 2x the payment amount debited and card B erroneously has the payment amount credited.

Unfortunately, the autopay transactions show up on my checking account statement only as "Autopay to <bank name>". Is there any way for me to keep this from happening, possibly with a date filter of some sort? The statement cycles for my two cards are about two weeks apart, so the payment for one will always come earlier than for the other.

I understand it more as a "digital envelope" system than an actual accounting software, but I'm starting up a small business and since I already have a YNAB account, would making a budget for my business work in YNAB?

Anyone have any experience with this?

Hey all, I've been a YNAB user for a while, and I've been wanting to rework the behavior of some of my targets. I'm looking for a way to set aside a certain amount each month towards a category, up to a certain total value, regardless of how much I spend in a given month. For example, I like to set aside $50 a month for one of my hobbies, even though my monthly spend can be anywhere from $0 to an occasional couple hundred bucks. I don't want to just use the set aside feature, as I can end up accumulating too much in that category, and being able to limit that category to say $500 would be ideal.

As far as I can tell, none of the target types seem oriented towards this type of behavior, but does anyone here know a workaround or way to play with the recurrence/due dates to make this happen? It seems like a simple enough of a use case that it should be do able. I'm a month ahead, so I usually just use the auto-assign to assign my money each month, and would love for whatever solution I end up with to work with that.

when my bank transaction comes in and there isn't manually inputted record it auto categorizes it. however, this is a problem if I didn't make the purchase myself. for example, if my wife makes a purchase and doesn't enter it into ynab, the bank will try to Auto categorize it and it's sometimes wrong. it's hard for me to find these to fix because they already have a category on them. I don't know if the bank put the category on there or if my wife put it on there. I know there's a payee option to not auto categorize, but I have to go through every payee to do that, which is impossible. Especially for new payees. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

I am reading up on this and kinda feel like it applies to me. I carry very very little debt. All I have is a 10,000 auto loan that I’m planned out to pay off in 2 years. I typically use my credit card like a debit card and pay it in full at the end of the month. But technically I do need my paychecks to pay it off. I pay my cards the first of every month.

Would I be better off just paying my monthly expenses from my savings this month and then not use my credit card until I’m a month ahead?

I just started with YNAB and it keeps telling me I’ve assigned money I don’t have. I’m assuming that’s why? This app seems like it’ll be really helpful but it’s a huge learning curve. Thank you

I’ve been using YNAB for six months now and I really like it. My only trouble is when viewing income versus expense. It has my kids 529 and brokerage as expense. These two accounts are tracking not budget cause I don’t want these to be apart of budget. This really skews the final expense number of the month. How can I fix this?

A close friends mom passed away yesterday and a friend is trying to raise money from our (broke) group of friends so he doesn't have to worry so much about immediately jumping into one of his many jobs he works.

I've had $150 piling up between my donation and gift categories, and could feel confident about immediately giving it all to him. It's not much, but it's something, and I could do it without taking on any stress of moving money from my own needs.

Grateful for this app and the care it allows me to show to myself and my community. I really do think that this app can be in part a social safety net in the society we wish to create.

I don’t like to overcomplicate my budget so I just have one “spending money” category and this encompasses all of my discretionary spend. But I still want to be able to reflect and see exactly what things my money is going to. Is there a way to categorize within a single category. for example if I put a payee as “shopping” or “restaurant” but have it take money from “spending money” will it still show me that i spent x on certain things