Not sure if I should be budgeting for these as when I do an account transfer there isn't a budget catagory option it doesn't let me select?

Hi, I'm new to YNAB and trying to set up my budget and learn how to allocate expenses. I've watched the videos and have looked on YouTube but the system is not really clicking for me. Hoping to get some easy questions answered below:

1. For recurring purchases I put on my credit card (streaming subscriptions, recurring pet food purchases, etc.) should the target date be the date my credit card bill is due, or the date the expense is charged to my credit card?

2. Once those expenses hit my credit card I should categorize them to a specific line item in my budget?

3. I am having trouble conceptualizing assigning money based on when I get paid against when bills are due. I get paid on the 7th and 22nd of the month, and have five primary expenses: 1) mortgage due 1st of month; 2) credit card #1 due 3rd of the month; 3) credit card #2 due 10th of month; 4) car payment due 28th of month; 5) car insurance due 22nd of month. How should I be allocating my funds in the budget? I have been using the paycheck on the 22nd to cover the mortgage and two credit cards and the paycheck on the 7th to cover car related expenses and any other budget categories. Does this approach make sense?

I recently opened up an investment account for some light trading I was thinking of getting into, which I funded with $100 from my checking account. Knowing that I’d need to account for that transfer in YNAB, I created a tracking account to show where the money transferred out of my checking.

However, in selecting the payee in the transaction to Transfer, YNAB is now asking for me to categorize that transfer, when it hasn’t done that in prior situations where I’ve moved money between accounts. Is this something new, or am I doing something wrong? I suppose I can just simply create an investment category, but I would like to know if a change happened that I missed!

Has anyone used YNAB to budget from the gross pay on their paycheck?

I’d like to track my withholdings/deductions into budget accounts like taxes, health insurance, and 401K as I have a couple of significant transitions ahead of me. I’m 66F, still working full time cuz I want to and thinking of moving to contracting work. As long as my health holds, I’ll likely work into my 70’s simply cuz I can :-)

But as soon as I transition from FTE to contractor, I’ll be LLC/S-Corp with Medicare. And responsible for making all tax/health insurance payments myself. (and I’m not taking SS until I’m 70)

Wondering if I can start the habits of keeping all these new buckets aligned in YNAB now or if that transition means I’ll need to add something like quickbooks.

Thoughts?

Hey there! Newbie here.

I’m trying to setup my first budget. For the past ten years, I’ve been budgeting per paycheck using an excel spreadsheet. I get paid every two weeks, so the dates are more random but the amount is always the same.

I’m used to setting aside two weeks worth of grocery money from each paycheck, but for some reason my brain can’t figure out how that’s supposed to work in YNAB. There’s only a weekly target or a monthly target.

If I do weekly, I’m afraid I’ll accidentally only fund one week and not realize that I forgot to do the second week. But a monthly target doesn’t feel granular enough?

Maybe I’m not far enough along in the process to fully understand and it will make more sense once the month rolls over. Can anyone with a similar pay schedule weigh in on how you do it?

I run my own business and have a variable income each month. I actually use YNAB to budget for all of my business expenses before taking profit for myself, but this means that I pay myself at the end of the month and don't have any income until then.

The tricky part is budgeting my day-to-day spending when I don't know what my monthly take-home will be. I can't "give my money a job" because... I don't have it yet. I put everything on a cash-back credit card and then pay it off in full each month. I don't know how to fund categories for dining out or groceries in weeks 1-2 when I won't get paid until weeks 3-4. What I've been doing is running all of my categories in the red and then funding them at the end of the month. This is not a good system, however, and I'd love to learn how to be more effective.

Does anyone have suggestions for how to handle this situation?

I feel absolutely crazy! I love YNAB but every four months or so I have to start fresh because of some random error. I’ve even been reconciling regularly and feeling confident but then something wonky happens. This time, I’ve had some issues with transfers from checking to my savings. I’m not sure where it went awry though because reconciling seemingly match. Basically:

The $ amount in the savings category where I’ve assigned money matches the $ amount in my banking app checking account! Great! But then the $ amount was too low in the YNAB savings account budget where I reconcile. It was too low by $350. I gave up, and edited the amount by +$350 - which is now in ready to assign. But…I don’t need it because those categories already match!

I’m so confused. 😵‍💫 It makes me want to give up.

[edit:] the more I finagled, the worst it got. I’m going to start fresh and watch some videos about transferring between savings and checking to make sure I do things right going forward! Telling myself it’s not a big deal - I can always look back at the saved data to see how I’ve been doing.

Hi- new to YNAB and new to the group. (Crops posted to r/budget group because I accidentally posted on there on mistake first) I am having problems with reconciliation. My numbers seem to be matching maybe half the time on the cleared balances. However on closer look the discrepancy is usually equal to a charge that my bank is calling cleared but YNAB is calling pending. (Again new here so we are talking something life 5 of 10 reconciliations). Why is this happening? If I wait long enough will YNAB eventually clear it themselves or do I need to manually clear it?

TY

December isn't over yet, but enough of my spending for the year is done to reflect on what I want 2025 to look like.

I used the Income v. Expense report in the web app to look at YTD spending. I realized that this information would be easier to review if I knew what targets I'd set on those categories, so I went back through my budget and added the monthly target amount to the description, like:

• Dining Out ($108.33)

Any targets that were not set up as a monthly amount I just recalculated as if they were monthly. For example, my Dining Out target is $25/week x 52 weeks / 12 months = $108.33

Once I finished, I could easily compare my "target" to the "monthly average" in the report.

I went through each category and looked at whether my average spending was above or below my target, and then made decisions on whether or not I would make adjustments accordingly. I found a few interesting nuggets:

• My utilities have been less expensive this year compared to last, so I've adjusted those targets downward a little bit. These can be variable due to energy prices and usage, but I still have a good buffer in this space so I'm not worried about making some changes.
• I've been spending a lot more money on wardrobe items this year, more than twice what I had budgeted. I can see things that I didn't really account for, like having to use a cobbler to repair several shoes, or sending things to the dry cleaner due to wearing more of my fancy dresses to the theater. I also took real vacations this year and needed things like water shoes and swimwear/activewear. So I've adjusted this budget up about 25% to account for increased spending, but also acknowledge that I want to be very mindful in this area and keep spending in check.
• I've been taking more vacations, but need to find a happy medium between zero vacations and all the vacations (I took 6 already this year and have 1 more next week). I've doubled this budget from my 2024 target, just to acknowledge that I do want to take some vacations, I just need to manage the middle and not to the extremes.

Overall, I only had to adjust 10% of my categories, which I'm going to take as a huge win in spending based on my priorities! The new targets should end up having a net neutral impact, but I'm also expecting some pretty significant changes to my take-home pay next year. We'll see what happens with February's assignments. (Yay for being a month ahead - so I'll have some buffer to adjust to those changes!)

Anyone else doing some digging in the Reflect area? Any tips or insights to share?

Hello everybody! So I have confused myself a little bit. (Not real numbers for easy maths)

I had an unexpected car repair (-$2,000) that I used a credit card to pay off. I categorized this transaction into a category that I put money away into each month (currently at +$500) to help with these unexpected expenses. So this category is now overspent and red.

Now on my credit card, I used a balance transfer offer I had on another card to get 0% interest to pay off the repair.

So, my Car Repair Fund category in YNAB is overspent by $1,500 and I'm not sure what I need to do now to setup the new card with a payoff goal?

Hello, I created views based on mandatory deductions, annual expenses, my “Quality of life” categories, etc. Is there a way to total the sums of the collected categories in one view? In fact, I would like to know the total number of my views by nature. So I could know the total amount of annual provisions that I have put aside.

Hey YNABers,

I've been using YNAB for a few months now and so far I love it. The biggest problem I have with it is how to handle different currencies.

I have money in three different currencies, with a total of around 10 accounts. As suggested by YNAB in their documentation, I created three different budgets.

I receive my income in currency A, so this budget is the most active one, with all the day-to-day categories. I have most my savings in currency B where the categories are long term. I also have a little money in currency C but I don't touch it that much (but still have a budget for it).

Also, right now, I'm in an another country where currency D is being used, with cash payments pretty common.

So here are my problems:

1. I need to send money in currency B to my sister to pay my part on christmas gifts. Converting and sending currency A (my day-to-day money) into currency B is pretty expensive. My budget in B does not have any categories that suit the gift expenses but my budget A does.

The trick I used in the past is to create a category in budget A called "Transfer B" where I move the equivalent amount of money A that I spent in B from the gift category. This "transfer category" insures I don't overspend the equivalent money spent in B. But it does not appear as a spending as I only move money from category to category. Is there no way to link a payment from a budget to another? What do you think of this approach? Is there a way to have a spending report accross budget? Am I an overthinking freak? ahah

2. As explained earlier, I withdraw cash in currency D paying with my debit card in currency A. My budget A has a "Cash" account but it's obviously in currency A, not D. When I spend money in D using my cash, how should I register payments?

3. My income might change in the next months and I might receive money in currency C (I know my life is pretty messy). When that'll happen, how should I proceed to keep my categories and their respective amounts?

Apart from those issues, I'm interested in any advice on how to use YNAB with different currencies. My dream would be to have only one budget, with conversion handled by the app.

Happy budgeting!

Hi all, sorry for the credit card post - I've been using YNAB off and on for a while now and decided to do a clean start at the start of this month. However, I'm noticing that there are issues where my credit card balance and the payment does not match.

https://preview.redd.it/4enl8myxn78e1.png?width=2444&format=png&auto=webp&s=3cf28b56b5feff9ae76436f185abf8e3aa1b0e33

For example, you can see that my credit card starting balance was $1,305.64, and there was a payment I added for $45.00 on 12/07. My credit card statement cut on the next day, so the total payment for the cycle was $1,350.64. I've made that payment in the past couple of days, however when I try to log that in YNAB (from my checking account, with YNAB-provided credit card payee), it brings my account into the negatives.

https://preview.redd.it/q5l2j7pso78e1.png?width=2430&format=png&auto=webp&s=e40057f350a1b292275db27a9bd21823e13cf2f8

Can anyone please help me understand why this is, and what steps I need to take to fix this? I tried reaching out to YNAB support, but unfortunately it's now the weekend so I won't hear back until Monday. Thank you!

I have a variable health care expense that I don't know how to reflect in my budget. In short, I spend $225 a week on seeing a therapist. As my therapist doesn't accept insurance I pay out of pocket and submit an insurance claim myself where my plan then covers 70%. I get a reimbursement for $157 per visit. The problem is, the reimbursements are variable, and it could take up to 4 weeks to receive a check. Should I budget just $68 a week or budget the full $225? Once I get a reimbursement check how should I assign that money?

When doing a new budget, I get an Emergency category by default, do you all delete that category or keep it?

If I am assigning money in future money, wouldn't that mean the Emergency category in this case would be useless? Or can an emergency fund category serve a purpose beyond just job loss income?

I've been using YNAB for about a year and a half. I had somehow convinced myself that I was a month ahead because I've been using last month's income to pay this month's bills. When the first paycheck of the current month would came in, I'd assign it to my sinking funds so everything would be green by the end of the month.

I got a nice sized Christmas bonus this year. When I saw the amount, I thought, "What am I going to do with all that money???" So I used it to beef up some variable/discretionary spending categories (i.e. vacation) where I'd set the targets lower than ideal or rolled with the punches from in previous months. But there was still a lot left.

Then I thought, "Since it's so close to the end of the month anyway, why not start assigning to January instead of using the Next Month category?" I flipped to January and hit the "assign to underfunded" button, just to see what would happen.

EVERYTHING. TURNED. GREEN. 😱

Holy shit. THIS is what it means to be a month ahead! I could be paid zero dollars next month and never notice, because I won't have to assign a penny of anything that comes in. It can all go toward the following month.

I did not start using YNAB because I was in debt or had trouble stretching my meager income to cover my expenses, and I wasn't on the credit card float. I've always been frugal. When I found out Mint was shutting down, I decided to try YNAB because I knew people liked it. So I wasn't trying to moderate my spending. If anything, the benefit of YNAB for me is that it's made me less of a miser.

But being a month ahead feels AMAZING.

I almost feel like I cheated because it took a bonus to make it happen, but I'm trying to tell myself that wouldn't have been possible if I hadn't been carefully squirreling away bits here and there getting a day or two ahead until one extra paycheck could get me to the finish line.

I'm not sure if this counts as YNAB paying for itself, but it sure feels like it.

I have been using YNAB since YNAB4 days, and I've honestly rarely had any issues. The YNAB "brain" and my "brain" have always been a near perfect fit. BUT TARGETS!!

They have become increasingly complicated and buggy for something that's supposed to be a simple calculation of "I need X$ by Xdate so how much do I need to set aside each month until then?".

Right now, I have an annual bill that is set to "fund up to $82". There's no money the category, but YNAB tells me it's half funded. At some point, I guess I assigned money to the category, but then had to move it elsewhere, leaving the category completely unfunded. YNAB disagrees. I've tried to select both options on the 'yearly' category, but it tells me the same every time. I've even deleted and reset the target. Guess what? It still thinks I'm halfway there. But there's still $0 in the category and I can't pay a bill with $0.

What gives? Why have the targets gotten so messy and impossible to use? I'd already given up on any kind of rollover functionality with the targets, and accepted I have to mostly wait a month (the weirdness around target due date and when/what YNAB consider a restart is another issue) and then delete and re-do the category each year. But even that's failed me now.

I have a category for a subscription, and since I canceled that subscription I wont need it anymore.

However I cant just delete the category, because then it will also delete it from previous months.
While Hiding is a lot better, it also has the problem of hiding the category in previous months. I am aware that they are listed in "hidden categories".

Is there a way to hide a category so it no longer shows up in the current and future months but does still show up in previous months, when it was actually needd?

My situation is that most of my bills come out at the start of the month between 1st-10th. I get paid on the 25th or earlier depending on weekends etc.

The budgeting however runs from the 1st to the 1st. I feel like it would make things easier if I could budget from 25th - 25th. That way I do my monthly budget when I get paid rather than having to wait 7 days until the 1st of the month.

Is this possible?

The system as it is feels a little weird because I have my entire salary ready to assign on the 25th. I'd like to assign it to things like mortgage right away, but if I do it looks like I'm over funding a category as it's already funded from being paid earlier in the month.

Any advice gratefully received!

How are YNABers tracking credit card rewards, points, if at all?

I've tried searching this sub for my particular problem and can't find the answer I'm looking for.

We have two car loans. One for my car, one for my husbands truck. When linking the bank they're with, they come in separately, but when I go to add the loans under bills to auto loan, it's only recognizing my husbands truck loan. Is there anyway to get around this to have both linked under auto loans?

https://preview.redd.it/awk2cz9p038e1.png?width=1077&format=png&auto=webp&s=edd23b4e82e87803bcac4197373eb966b368e164

The only work around I found was adding mine manually under bills.

I also assume that I will have the same issue when I add my student loans as I have three, two with one servicer and one with another. I'm new to using YNAB, if you have any suggestions or tools I can use to figure out what I'm doing (youtube tutorials, etc) it would be greatly appreciated!

I just don't understand the YNAB "envolope" philosophy. I can't wrap my head around the whole "only allocate what you have" idea because I spend all month saving to pay a bill or rent that is due on the 1st.

I can see the value and utility in the app, but I genuinely cannot understand how to use it properly.

Are there any YouTube channels I can watch to help me understand?

I am only in my second month of YNAB and I am trying to figure out the aspects of budgeting a month ahead .

I understand that most people use a next month category and they put the money they earned this month in there. My question is do most people wait until the new month before assigning that money? So if I assigned money to my next month category in December do most people wait until January 1st to assign it to its actual categories? Or can I assign to January while it’s still December? Also is there a reason that people move the money from the next month to ready to assign rather than just moving it from the next month category straight to it’s actual category? Thanks in advance!!

Is it possible for YNAB support to roll back an account 24 hours.

I reconciled yesterday as per every Thursday and all was sweet.

Today, chaos, all sorts of transactions as per life including one to a tracking account and this is where the error has occurred.

It seemed to show twice this morning so I deleted one, and now my checking account is out £25.

I can’t find the error and every other account still reconciles.

It’s doing my head in that I can’t find the cause and going back to yesterday would certainly help.

Edit..... Found it....

God knows how I managed to reconcile accurately yesterday but there you go.

Anyway, I transferred some money from a kids account I hold, that involves transferring it into my checking account and then onto them, I only recorded the inbound and not outbound, also £25, and therefore nothing had updated properly.

Phew, can move on now.

I use linked accounts and many of my transactions automatically categorize, which is great. YNAB forces me to approve, obviously, which is a great nudge to make sure the transactions are categorized correctly. But sometimes I might be looking over my budget and the spending looks surprising, and I want to quickly look at the transactions that have been categorized in a particular category to see if there's an error somewhere.

For example, my grocery category is overspent and I think, 'huh, strange, I wonder how that happened, what are the transactions in grocery?" Then I have to go over to my transactions and do a search for is: grocery. I know it seems trivial but for a very distractable brain, it's not impossible that by the time in the transactions page I've already forgotten why I was there.

Is there a way to do that without going into accounts and doing a search? I would think that while in the budget I could click on something to that could let me quickly see the transactions labeled with a particular category.

Honestly the fact that YNAB doesn't make this obvious makes me wonder if I'm missing something in The System...YNAB works partly by training me to think differently about budgeting. Do they not WANT me to easily see the spending when looking at the budget? If that's the case, why not?

Thank you!

Hi ya'll!

So I am 23 and looking to buy a house by the time I'm 30 (July 2031). Right now I only make 23 an hour, so not a lot, but I currently have 4,000 in a "If I Lose My Job" Savings account, which would cover about 1.5-2 months of expenses.

So here's my question. Realistically, if I lost my job I would just move back in with my parents until I could find a new one, atleast for the next couple of years while my siblings are still in college. Therefore I don't really know how much I want to contribute to my"If I Lose My Job" fund. I'd like to focus more on chipping away at my house savings account (the current goal I have is 76,400, as I assume I won't be making 23 forever).

And, of course, I could use my Down Payment savings for an emergency. It's all going into one big savings account anyway (just divided on YNAB which is great - no need for 15 separate savings accounts!)

So if you were in my shoes, wwyd? Focus more on the down-payment? Split it more 50/50? Focus more on the emergency savings?

PS. I do also have an "Other Emergency" fund that is fully funded. This came to fruition when I broke my computer last year and wanted a separate fund for when things break or other, none job realted/smaller things happen.

Thank you guys!

# Fortnightly Categories Thread!

Please use this thread every other week to discuss and receive critique on your YNAB categories! You can reply as a top-level comment with a **screenshot** or a **bulleted list** of your categories. If you choose a bulleted list, you can use nesting as follows (where `↵` is Enter, and `░` is a space):

* Parent 1↵

░░░░* Child 1.1↵

░░░░* Child 1.2↵

* Parent 2↵

░░░░* Child 2.1↵

░░░░* Child 2.2↵

Which will show up as the below on most browsers:

* Parent 1

* Child 1.1

* Child 1.2

* Parent 2

* Child 2.1

* Child 2.2

For more information, read [Reddit Comment Formatting](https://www.reddit.com/r/raerth/comments/cw70q/reddit_comment_formatting/) by /u/raerth.

####Want a link to previous discussions? [Check out this page](https://www.reddit.com/r/ynab/search?q=title%3Afortnightly+author%3Aautomoderator&sort=new&restrict_sr=on)!

Wondering if anyone has a brokerage account on budget (as opposed to having one as a tracking account?) If you do, what’s the reasoning and/or what are you planning on using the money for?

Thanks ahead of time for any help you can provide.

How would you suggest I approach this issue?

I'd like an average $350/month for travel expenses.

Some months might cost $1,000 and some months might cost $0.

How should I:

1. Set the target... Monthly? Annual? What amount?

2. Handle the start of each month when I set aside $350? Where would the last $350 go from the prior month of I didn't use it?

Thank you for clarity!

Ynab is pretty dang confusing (or maybe I'm just an idiot)

I categorize every transaction for my credit card with a budget line item. I also pay off my credit card every month. Yet, I still have a red, negative number for the "available" column of my credit card. None of my budget lines are underfunded. I never assign money directly on the credit card line, because my understanding is that the available number should update automatically as I assign numbers to various budget lines. I'm only seeing this with one credit card. Other cards are correctly showing green available numbers.

How can I troubleshoot this? I'm tempted to just assign the amount in red directly to the credit card. But if I'm otherwise doing my budgeting correctly, I worry that I'll end up with an excess amount of available funds assigned to the credit card doing nothing.

Should I wait until the month turns over and then assign money to the credit card if it doesn't balance out? Just curious on how others handle this. I bothers me to have a negative available amount when I have all my budget lines funded.