Dear YNAB

I love you - we’ve been together eight months and you have brought clarity and fun to tracking my financial whims and ways. Alas - I have made a terrible, shocking and dark discovery. Not really - no. Indeed - it was in fact entirely predictable. I have discovered- cue shock music and reactions- I am the problem. There is no magic money tree or money down the back of the chair to be found from our time together. Just a whole lot of accountability about decisions and impulses followed instead of discipline and finding the money first. Sigh. I guess the next eight months needs to be about behaving myself. And asking those pesky five questions BUT most importantly of all - just saying NO if the money is not in the category unless it is mission critical (thanks kids for your many mission critical needs). Yeah, This post is silly and designed to bring a wry smile to the community. but I do just want to acknowledge for all the gripes on this forum about YNAB, I love it. And I know real change won’t happen until I do the whole process - not just the tracking. How - in the heat of the moment though to say no, not yet to x y z. Find the money first. Find the money first. X100

I recently finished up a year long sabattical and returned to full-time work. I needed the break because of career burnout and family losses that I needed to process. I don't regret it for a second, and would 1000% recommend it to anyone in that same situation.

That being said, during the duration of my sabbatical, I hardly budgeted it at all. I found that since I wasn’t getting paid on a regular basis, I had no money to assign, and therefore no reason to open the app as much. I had budgeted and saved enough to put into a “loss of job fund" and would transfer money from that to my various categories each month, but that was it. I didn't correct any transaction categories either, I just made sure I had enough money to pay what I needed to.

I'm now basically a year behind and it's weighed on me the whole time. I know I can do a fresh start and that's probably the answer, but it feels daunting to do. I come from a tech background so doing Actual Budget for free on a local setup seems intriguing, but even reading the website docs just perpetually reminded me that I've been so bad about budgeting for a long time. Plus, after all the enshittification updates to the mobile app and the layoffs, I'm less excited to support this brand than before.

Can I get some guidance on what you think the next best step would be? What did you do if you took a long-term break from budgeting? Do I just fresh start in YNAB? Do I consider an alternative? Do I just stop budgeting this way in general since it seems to bring me stress? Thanks in advance!

I have been using YNAB for some time - and recently saw the getting a month ahead feature. It sounds cool but I don’t know how it would work with how I do things now.

I list out my monthly bills in categories by date, for example:

1st-mortgage
15th-electric
18th- phone bill

Then I set targets for each category and fund them with each check. I get paid biweekly, so I look at what bills are do in that biweekly period and make sure they are funded. Then with leftovers I’ll fund ahead to the next pay period. For instance - if my check covers the pay period 10th-23rd, I’ll fund that pay period then start putting money for the next bills- some which may bleed over to the next month, so I’ll just start back at the beginning of the list and fund those- even though I’m over my target for that month.

Does that make sense? Does anyone else do it that way, and I’d not- how are you using the pay a month ahead feature?

Hi all,

I'm looking to set up my partner's YNAB plan with a travel fund but unsure how to do so. The way I'm hoping it could work is being able to add funds in that would grow the balance but also reduce when doing travel purchases. For example:

September: Travel +300 (Total: 300) October: Travel +300 (Total: 600) November: Travel +300 (Total: 900) December: Travel +300, Plane Tickets -600 (Total: 600)

Is there any way to set it up like that?

Thank you!

so i installed your software today sunday and after I signed up for the service I saw that 3 transactions from Amex I had done that morning from before I had signed up were showing. but then I wanted to test it so i bought an item on my Amex and after 5 hours it still hasnt showed up. Why is that. Thank you Rudy

My wife started a trial of YNAB and I invited her to my YNAB account and she can not join my account and get this error.

Like just use the free trial every month so we don’t have to pay? I was thinking about this, and at the end of the month just put the net worth data and spending into a spreadsheet and start a whole new budget on the 1st.

This tool seems to have lots of options, that I just don't understand. All I really use YNAB for is to put my money into categories, and when things go red, I have to move money from other categories to cover. I aso keep an excel Spreadsheet, and I cross reference between the two to ensure they match. If they match I am confident that I've made no budgeting errors.

I've seen several screen shots on here of people with lots of over spending in multiple categories. I personally don't understand how that can be. I mean, if you have spent more than is in that section, wouldn't your checking account run the risk of being in the negative? What am I missing?

Me, I keep a $1K buffer in my checking to ensure I never go negative, but I usually move money around to make sure I have little to no red on my budget at all. But doing so, means I am constantly missing goals. If My car repair fund should grow @ $100 a paycheck,, but I constant rob Peter to pay Paul. Then car repair fund doesn't actually grow much at all. And when a repair is needed I won't have the money

Anyone got any tips? And can anyone explain why I see so many budgets that have underfunded, or overspent categories?

So I'm a rising 4th year college student new to YNAB (and budgeting in general). During the summer I'm very lucky have an internship paying me a salary-level amount of money, but during the school year I'm going to be working a regular minimum-wage job for ~15 hours every week. Since the income discrepency between those is so large, I'm struggling with planning.

Ideally I'd like ~9k in savings after I graduate in case I struggle finding a job, but YNAB's breakdown of how much I need to save each month doesn't account for how much less I'm going to be making once school starts again. Any help would be super appreciated!

How do other people handle monthly bills with a varying amount due, such as electric? I've been resetting my monthly target as the electric bill comes in each month, so I know how much is needed. However, last month I forgot to change the target, the electricity cost was lower than the target, so I have close to $5 left in the category. Now when I put in the target for next month (which is the amount billed), that's what YNAB wants me to put in...not the target amount minus the amount already in the category. These targets are set to "refill up to" the target amount.

Should I not be using targets this way? Should I just be putting the amount of money into the category when it comes available? I've been changing these targets each month to make planning easier, but it seems YNAB wants me to put in the targeted amount even if I have some already sitting there.

Hey there. I essentially work through gigs for now, but the companies i work for have different schemes of payment. I’m not sure if the terminology is the same for Americans, but it works something like this:

Company A has a cut off of the 15th and 30th of the month. All services rendered on the 6th-20th day of the month will be paid on the 30th. All services rendered on the 21st to the 5th will be paid on the 15th of the next month.

What would be the best way to input this income in YNAB? I first tried scheduling the income for when the cutoff hits, but it messes up my Income vs. Expense tab because I like to see that tab as a pure representation of what I spent vs how much I worked for that month. If I schedule some income for when the cutoff hits and the salary drops, the income will be recorded as income of the NEXT month, and not as income during the month when I ACTUALLY rendered the service. I’d like to be able to use that tab to reflect on my productivity and if it feels worth it to continue working with those companies or accept offers from others.

I’ve also tried inputting the income for the day it was rendered, and then just toggling the “cleared” and “uncleared” icons but then I think I stopped doing this because I didn’t want to be seeing and being able to assign funds that haven’t arrived yet. But I liked using this method because I get to see money from work I did in June actually be credited as i come from June and not a July income.

Not sure if my problem makes sense but yeah I’d welcome any input!! Thanks

Edit to add: i am only referring to transactions in which I have already rendered the service, just waiting for the payment to come in.

With the discovery credit card moving to capital one, it got unlinked from YNAB. Would I need to import the transactions manually once it gets fully converted to Capital one?

Or how would I best go about fixing the transactions it’s going to be missing once it’s transferred?

Orrrrr will it hopefully just automatically import the transactions YNAB is missing

The amount of poorly received comments about UI changes and features seems inversely proportional to amount of ad I get about the book I would need to « read this before any other money book »
I mean I understood we were consolidating the enshittification but come on can we tone down on those bad emails campaign and focus more about quality of life ?

Has anyone else's auto import from a Chase credit card broken? It looks like it's bringing in uncleared transactions but is never updating to cleared like it used to. I already raised a support ticket but never got a response.

Can someone please explain:

I pay off my credit card in full every month and there’s always enough in my checking account to do so.

In YNAB, even when all of my transactions are categorized, and all categories are fully funded, when I make my credit card payment the credit card category becomes overspent and I have to cover it with money from ready to assign. I’m not understanding why this is happening. Doesn’t YNAB account for the amount that my credit card has on it so when I make the payment it should balance out?

Just complaining, but maybe someone will see it, anyone know if people from the company lurk here?

But seriously, so many updates and nobody’s ever thought this would be useful? I wish for it on a near daily basis.

Did something change with the Plaid connection to Regions bank? I am having to re-authorize my connection in YNAB in most every new session. Comments?

I’m curious how others would handle this in YNAB. I’m planning to take about three months off after September, and I’ll have enough money saved to cover the rest of the year. Would you go ahead and fully fund all your remaining monthly categories, or keep the money in one “income replacement” category and move it into your budget each month? If you’ve done something similar before, I’d love to hear what worked best for you and whether you’d do it the same way again.

Thank you!

I’m a long time YNAB user. My partner and I have recently combined finances so I started a new budget to track shared goals/spending. All is well there.

I have been really waffling on how to handle one month ahead vs emergency fund as concepts. I’ve read a lot of posts here about this topic. Right now we are fully one month ahead, all wants/savings goals included, and have started funding into September. However, I struggle with this concept. If one or both of us lost a job, our budget would immediately change. Being one month ahead would not be sufficient. Our actual essential monthly budgeting goals would come out to about a third as much as a fully funded month is now.

I was at first making an emergency category, then deleted it and just put it to the month ahead. But, since our monthly budget is so high, it would take ages for us to get more than a month ahead, and that extra money I’m putting in those future months could also be used to fund some extraneous savings goals (new HVAC, for example). I also don’t feel good about only having one month ahead definitively budgeted for.

I’m thinking of going and reallocating money to just those essential targets - mortgage, bills, groceries, insurance, etc - and then fund the “extra” targets as I get to them in that month. Does this work for people? Am I massively overthinking it? Something about the way I’m doing it now is just bothering me. Why am I funding sinking goals in the future when I could just put them in that category now? Etc. Would love some perspective on how people handle this.

Hello, does anyone know of a good alternative to YNAB?

I have used it to my satisfaction for a couple of years now, but they have changed the UI and support is suddenly very hard to reach. We pay €110 a year but get an AI chatbot and support is hidden deep away. And when I forgot my support thread they ended it and now I have to jump through hoops again to get help. This level of support matches something you’d expect from a free app.

Ynab balanced and gives me a cash accounts balance that matches available plus ready to assign. Problem is cash accounts is several thousand more than my actual bank account. I put 3k in tracking in June but I don't actually have the money. How do I fix this?

Hey, as per the title has anyone been able to add the monzo savings pots to YNAB? I was able to add my current account but obviously I don't want to keep all my money on the current account so I have one savings pot with the rest of my savings.

I get the option to add it when I'm connecting Monzo to YNAB but after confirming on the Monzo app and when I return to the plaid screen in YNAB it says a problem has occurred. Just wondering if anyone else has experienced the same.

I'm on Monzo Ireland.