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Good evening,

I have a couple questions. I started to set everything up and had a questions about categories. Should I just put birthdays and holidays all into one category?

Also what about money I’m spending from my recent paycheck on birthday gifts just add that to the category.

Sorry if I’m over complicating this I’m just a little confused and want to make sure I’m doing this properly.

I’d love to hear any other tips or tricks for beginners just starting out

Thank you

TL;DR: I use a main category to log transactions and various related subcategories for budgeting. The main category itself has no budget; funds are allocated from one of the subcategories once a transaction is logged. Each subcategory also has a savings goal, ensuring I have the right amount available at the right time. Is this the best approach for me if I want quick and generic reporting based on a "main category" but still enjoy the flexibility of budgeting for each subcategory without creating clutter in my budget?

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I've been using YNAB since 2018, and over the years, I’ve tried various ways of organizing my categories – from super streamlined to extremely detailed. I stuck with some of these setups for over a year, convinced that each new method was "the one." But life changes, situations evolve, and so do our budgeting needs. To keep up, I kept tweaking my categories. Then, YNAB introduced views, which meant even more rethinking.

Now, a year later, I’m realizing that “the ideal setup” might not actually exist. Still, I aim for straightforward categories that leave no room for doubt. Take car insurance, for example. Should it go under “insurance” or “car” as the classic example. To simplify things for myself and my wife, I’ve narrowed it down to four main groups:

1. Fixed Costs – predictable, recurring amounts that can’t really be reduced
2. Variable Costs – recurring but flexible, with some room to cut back if needed
3. Quality of Life (QoL) – everything that enhances our life (e.g., dining out, travel)
4. QoL details (not used to track transactions, only to budget for them)

To keep things as concise as possible in QoL, I use a maincategory f.e. called Selfcare, but I don’t budget directly in this category. Instead, I only use it to track all related transactions. I created a separate category-group QoL details where I budget for more specific needs (like wellness, fitness, mental health, etc.). When a transaction happens in Selfcare, it automatically goes red, as there’s no budget assigned there. I then cover the transaction from the appropriate subcategory in my category-group 'QoL details'.

The views feature has been a huge help in keeping this organized. I have a view for each main category showing the main category where transactions are logged and listing all subcategories used for budgeting.

Is anyone else working this way? How has it been for you? I think this could work well, but I also wonder if it might end up feeling more complicated than my previous setups. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts!

I finally took the plunge and am trying this.
It's not the most straightforward to me.

My current issue is with credit card payments.

In my banking I made an $18.63 payment from my spending account to my Mastercard. No associated charge. Just a payment.

In YNAB I moved money from 'to be assigned' to the Mastercard payment category that was automatically made when I entered the cresit card account.
It shows as available for payment on the budget page. I go to account and choose Mastercard. I hit the plus for transaction. I choose inflow, transfer:spending for payee, leave category blank (switches to category not needed) enter the amount and save. Go to budget page and it still shows $18.63 in Mastercard payment category as available to pay

Hello All! I recently transferred a credit card balance to a new card and followed the steps as outlined on the YNAB help document for balance transfers.

It's been 3 months but the new card's balance under my budget is still showing as being yellow color. What am I missing? I did a balance transfer a while back and this didn't happen.

Another note, I don't have the funding (working on paying down cards) so the amount that sits in available is from the balance transfer that I budgeted for in a different category.

hey everyone! i've been seeing posts about the next month category and wanted to implement it for myself so my income doesn't feel rolling and i can get a better sense of what i need each month. i'm having trouble figuring out how to get the process going since it's the 1st and this month i get my paychecks on the 8th and 22nd.

yesterday i made a next month category in october and moved all my funded but unused money into it. now that it's november, i move it to ready to assign? but all the categories i transferred into the next month category from now say "-$xx" and are red.

i also noticed yesterday that when i moved all the "extra" money into the next month category, my ready to assign was more in nov which also confuses me.

also, does this mean that i can't assign anything until the 22nd? so all my transactions until then will just keep making everything red/yellow?

would someone be able to help me understand the correct way to do this?

Hey everyone, I set up YNBA today (go me, happy to be here) and am currently navigating through various resources trying to figure out what would benefit me more in the long term - Creating very specific categories and subcategories (E.G. Concerts, Movies, Events each as individual Entertainment subcategories) or just one or two large categories like 'Needs' and 'Wants' with a few broad, general subcategories (Entertainment just being Entertainment). Not sure if it's based on preference? Has anyone done one, then moved to the other? Any suggestions are welcome!

UPDATE : I might’ve figured out a workaround on Ipad. After you select a category to move funds to and the slider pops up, tap on the white space to the right of the name of the category and a “done” button appears.

Is anyone else having problems moving money between categories now there’s the slider bar thingy? On my phone and ipad I can slide the thingy or enter the amount to move but then there’s nothing to click to actually do it. Am I missing something? Also, when I type a category to search while doing this it barely finds any of them now. Any ideas?

Hi fellow moneymakers and -spenders,

Money logic and YNAB logic can be like math to me - and maths like very disorienting puzzles.

I'm afraid my question is quite basic but even after watching several videos, I can't seem to find my answer.

This is now,
and the focus of my question is on the category at the top:

https://preview.redd.it/rtwrvpv96cyd1.png?width=1828&format=png&auto=webp&s=a16b55ab69c720c18bf961fa59a2f8335997bb97

A few days ago (october) I've put my left over bonus money into the next month, to try and budget ahead.

Question 1: If i fill '🍯 Salaris' with 3200 for this month AND the next. Does that mean I have 6400? I would think so (otherwise how is it budgetting ahead?) but comparing category totals with my bank account balance seem to say it doesn't work that way...

Question 2: About the screenshot below. Confused with budgetting ahead I thought I'd just retrieve all my december money and make + fill a 'next month' category in the current month. Like videos suggest. But the Ready-to-Assign money stays hanging around in december, instead of becoming available to me in November...

Perhaps this has to do with my Question 1. I do not understand it, or know how to 'retrieve' it in order to put it in Novembers 'next month'. Can someone explain?

Greatly appreciated!

https://preview.redd.it/n5w0g2xf7cyd1.png?width=1832&format=png&auto=webp&s=7490cb2614211d6ec42e6db3fc6f0e2976d5876a

Apologies if this is a dumb question, I'm brand new to YNAB as of last week and might just be confusing myself. I just created my budget a week ago for YNAB, and from my money in my bank accounts funded all my categories and put the rest into my savings and various other fun goals. Most of my bills and necessary payments were already paid for October when I started YNAB, but I still assigned the appropriate amounts to those categories in preparation for November.

This morning all my categories are orange despite having 100% funded all of them already last month. Do they not roll over, or do they and it's normal for the categories to remain orange until I begin to put in December's funds as my paychecks roll in this month? My brain interprets green as meaning everything is funded so seeing the orange is throwing me off, but if this is normal I can learn to adjust :)

Hey there.

I’ve only been using YNAB since about March of this year, so nothing wild. But I had always been living paycheck to paycheck. My bills were paid, I always had food and that was fine. It was getting irksome though to not have anything left for “fun” or true savings goals.

I’ve been in an interim role at work until they can find a new director. So the last few months I’ve had an extra 500 as a stipend for doing extra work. Before YNAB I probably would have blown that money on things like eating out. Which to be fair, nothing wrong with that necessarily. But I wanted to get ahead. With YNAB it was so freaking easy to in a sense hide that money from myself into savings categories.

This is the first month in my life I’ve had my whole budget fully funded for the entire month on the first, with about 400 left over. It’s crazy to know that my paychecks this month will pay for next months bills when originally I’d have to painfully wait for the 10th and the 25th each month to cover the bills.

Do I still stress about money? Yes, probably always will to some degree but at least I can breath again.

Thanks for reading, I just wanted to share my appreciation for this software/ideology. Finally feeling a little bit in control over my financial future :)

Hey everyone! So my fridge broke (RIP), and I talked to my landlord about it. We agreed that I'll buy a new fridge myself, and they'll reduce my rent to cover the cost of the fridge over the next few months. Basically, I pay the fridge upfront, and my rent each month is "rent - fridge cost" until we're even.

I’m wondering how to track this? Should I split it under rent or create a separate category for the fridge? Any advice for keeping things neat and not messing up my budgeting flow would be awesome. Thanks in advance! 🙏

When you started YNAB which one of these 3 did you aggressively went after.

In my case, I have a small debt that can be paid off within a year, so I'm aggressively trying to fully fund me next month ahead. With that said, I still do assign some money towards debt and True Expenses, but the % is higher towards the month ahead.

I feel I would be more in peace having that one month. At worse, if I do get hit with an emergency, for now I will use that month ahead to roll with the punches...but of course long term, I wouldn't touch that part.

So curious, when you all started YNAB, which one did you focus more on?

Hi all. I’m still new to YNAB (still actually on the trial, that’s how new) and am not sure how to best handle this situation. I set aside $200 a week for groceries with a target for every Saturday. I had to go grocery shopping yesterday instead of this Saturday so my grocery category looks overspent last month and I have extra being set aside this month. I put my groceries on a credit card and got paid today. So how do I take the $200 that it shows I need to set aside for tomorrow and apply it to last month? And make sure that my grocery category this month reflects that I’ve already spent part of my grocery allotment for tomorrow? Should I just update the transaction date to today from yesterday? I appreciate the help!

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As the title says, My girlfriend and I are attending a show in December. Her and I put $200 combined into a date fund each month. Right now if I assign the $130 from the tickets it will show as our date budget for the month of October being $320 (190 spent+130 tickets.) I understand we had to pay for the tickets now, and those need to be paid for right now, but is there a way I can make it so that our December date budget then goes down to $70?

I'm brand new to YNAB. In the past, I have always treated groceries as well as my wife's and my spending money as basically "Whatever is left after paying the bills." My income is fixed/regular, but hers varies from paycheck to paycheck. So I alter our personal spending money and our grocery budget based on how much she makes in a paycheck. If it's a small paycheck, we scrape by on spending and groceries and make do—at least the things with fixed targets that needed covered are covered.

I cannot wrap my head around how this works in YNAB. Maybe it doesn't; maybe I need to unlearn this way of thinking. But I just don't really understand how to budget something like that in this system. If I reconfigure spending money and groceries to be rigid, fixed budgets each week/month, what happens if she has a really small paycheck one payday and we can't fund that category? Is that okay? Do I just ignore the underfunded target? Because spending money is not something we really need to "make up for" in the following paycheck. If we have a small payday this time, and we need to allot ourselves less spending money; that's fine.

I don't need to make up that difference next paycheck—but YNAB thinks we do. It's just, "make do with what you have this paycheck." Next paycheck is next paycheck, and when that comes, we'll make do with whatever we have then. This doesn't seem to jive with YNAB's logic, so I guess I just need help sorting this out.

I'm getting error notifications when I try to reconnection my account, not sure what's going on.

If you make a credit card payment to pay down debt, do you need to assign money to the credit card category even though the two transfers go through?

I don't make a lot of money. I'm just going back to work after a paid medical leave, but the word 'paid' is kinda deceptive. Yes I recieved some money, but not as much as the (little) I make normally. The month before I went on leave I had to pay my car insurance deductible because I was in a minor car accident.

When YNAB says 'roll with the punches' I don't think I imagined they'd be coming fast and furious like that.

YNAB helped me sleep at night, I had money in my accounts. I had to flex my budget the hardest it's ever flexed but I made it work without missing a payment and without starving. I thought for sure I was going to have to ration my food for November but between the 'extra' paycheck this month and being already a month ahead I'm doing fine and still will be a month ahead.

Thanks YNAB.

Hi! I'm going to be laid off in January with a generous severance package, so I'm OK with this. I'm trying to see how I can answer with some confidence "How much cash do I need in 2025?"

I know there's a whole lot of nuance to this, but I'd love to have a view into what the total of "Underfunded" going forward would be, without having to actually start funding next year to open up the next months. I know I can look back at my past year and do some extrapolations there, but for planning purposes, it would be great to know at this point, what it would take to fund 2025.

Is this even possible?

Thanks!

That bittersweet day as most of my bills go out and I wave those lovely dollars (well, pounds in my case) off to do their job.

YNAB has really helped me in the recent couple of months with some unexpected expenses I couldn’t really have planned for cropped up.

Thankfully I was able to roll with the punches and review my True Expenses to cover things without needing to take a loan or put it on credit card.

Lots of yellow in my November budget, but importantly no red and no yellow with a credit card and I have the confidence that in a couple of months I should be back to green again.

https://preview.redd.it/heodnkehw8yd1.png?width=1646&format=png&auto=webp&s=59b9e86a5d4df60c7e3b3a1372c935d5697f0b1e

I've set a target for € 60,- and repeat it for each year August. Last August it was met and I paid the bill. However, I don't see it refilling up again? It should've asked me to fill it up again starting September 2024. Right? What am I missing here.

I bought a new iPhone through my cell phone carrier that is on my bill as a payment plan. I traded in my old phone and was given a $300 credit. Except when they received my iPhone what they did was give me a $200 credit towards the phone and gave me a $100 phone credit and now I only owe $3 on my November bill.

I have two questions about this in terms of YNAB. Would you create one or two categories for this? One for the phone service portion and one for the phone payment and split every payment or would you just put all of it in the phone category and just increase the goal by $30?

My other question is what is the best way to correct this in YNAB? Should I add $100 to the phone category to cover it? Or just move on and forget about it lol I know I am overcomplicating this but it is annoying me that now I feel like I am paying more for the phone than I should. lol

So I have a budget category for my Starbucks wallet as well. If I simply just input the reload transaction in my CC, it won’t reflect in my e wallet. Is there a way for the money to be transferred to my e-wallet and still reflect on my CC category?

We have ynab together with my kid. I use my login and can see my budget and hers. She has her own login and can see hers. The issue is when I go into her budget (via my login),and add a transaction in ynab to show a credit to her account. it then looks like there’s $100 there for example. However, she says when she logs in, she doesn’t see that show up in her ynab for several days. Why not?

I’m not talking about the bank transactions behind the scene and the linking. I know that takes longer. I’m wondering why she can’t see the ynab inflow transaction that I just made. This is just on the ynab end of things.

This might be a stupid question but I just want to make sure I'm thinking about this correctly. I'm using round numbers for simplicity's sake.

I have a category called Parking in which I record the parking garage fee for the days I have to go into the office. I have put a target of setting aside $100 / month.

Now my company is saying they are going to give us a parking stipend through our paycheck. So let's say I will be getting $50 / month added to my paycheck to help offset the cost of parking.

I am thinking about splitting my paycheck so that the $50 goes to the parking category, and the rest goes to Ready to Assign.

If I do this, will YNAB still prompt me to add $100 / month to my parking category? Or will the $50 in income flowing into the category result in me only having to add $50 each month to the category? I am hoping it's the latter but I'm curious if for any reason, it won't work that way.

I made some purchases today and want to account for them on ynab but they havent shown up yet in ynab. I'm new to this platform and REALLY love it and want it to work out for me but this makes me nervous.