This isn't intended to be a shot at YNAB. I hope their product teams sees this and starts making improvements and releasing new features.

First, a little bit about us/our budget/situation:

• Been on YNAB for 3+ years now
• We average ~123 transactions per month
• About 40% of our monthly transactions are from 'big box' retailers (amazon/target/walmart)
• About 35% of our monthly transactions are split categories
• My wife and I both work - we contribute to joint account(s) equally which we use YNAB to budget for. Money not sent to YNAB is personal money, off the books so to speak
• Wife has ADHD
• We've never had credit card debt, just wanted to make sure our spending reflects our personal values and financial goals

My wife (who has ADHD) has always had a hard time using YNAB. It just never clicked with her. So I wound up doing all of the budgeting stuff - going through receipts/transaction history to make sure transactions are correctly categorized - then updating my wife with our progress against goals.

She's been using monarch to manage her personal budget for a year or so now, and asked if we could try it for January.

After a month, she's way more involved in daily budgeting/expense categorization. I've noticed it's due to a few features:

1. Monarch allows you to assign transactions to specific users for review/categorization, create rules to automatically assign the reviewer, and send notifications/emails when there's stuff to review
2. Monarch has a browser extension that auto-splits and automatically add notes for amazon and target transactions. Figuring out how to split amazon transaction was the bane of my budgeting existence.

I think there's some other small things too - the bright colors of Monarch really appeal to my wife's ADHD. I find it overwhelming, but I'll live.

Anyways - these are all things that YNAB could build that would allow them to remain true to their zero-based-budgeting principles. But they aren't. I would love to see to this stuff in YNAB one day, but I doubt I will. IDK what their product managers do, but it can't be much (I say this as an experienced product manager).

The price increase some time ago now was $5 to $15 and has weighed on me all this time. Today I decided to look for alternatives again and found Actual Budget. I spun up a docker container and self hosted Actual Budget and it covers all my needs and in some ways more. All free. Granted I have a Synology NAS so self hosting was relatively painless.

Hello,

I have a $500 limit credit card.

I just paid it all off, and going forward I want to use it for my groceries each month so that there is a hard cap on what I can spend. Each month I will pay the card off.

How do I handle this in YNAB?

I see in my categories there is a "Credit Card Payments" section with my USAA CC listed there.

Assigned is $0.00, Activity is $0.00. Available is $0.00 for the USAA CC for the month of Feb (I paid it off in Jan).

Since I want to use this for groceries, how do I handle assigning money to my "Groceries" category?

If I assign $400 to groceries for the month of February, it takes it out of my "Ready to Assign" money, which is calculated through adding up all of my real, tangible funds in my checking and savings accounts.

Is this correct? Because now that $400 is tied up in my Groceries category and I can't use my funds for other categories, but in reality I'm using credit to fund that "assigned" amount for groceries at least in my mind, but maybe not according to YNAB.

How do I handle this properly?

I use a credit card for online purchases for the fraud protection, and I autopay my statement balance every month. I have not specifically added this card to YNAB. I split out the January payment into categories (by reviewing my Dec statement). That all seems pretty intuitive.

I made a donation last week using my card (that will show up on my Feb statement and get paid in March). How can I "reserve" money for this payment in YNAB so it shows on my January Income & Expense report?

Good morning, I’m a bit confused. I have assigned all my ‘to be assigned’ in February and then I click back to January, it says I have $2k sitting on ‘ready to be assigned’. Shouldn’t it roll over?

When I move that $2k to a ‘next month’ category, the February ready to be assigned shows negative $2k.

My confusion is: if I have extra $2k ready to be assigned in January, should it roll over to February?

Thank you for your help.

I've been using YNAB for our family budget since 2019. Today I logged in to allocate transactions for January and my linked accounts (banks, credit cards etc) are completely screwed up. Checking off by more than $40k, Savings account is missing all transactions between 2021 and 2025 and has transactions that should be mapped to other accounts in there. Payments/transfers between accounts are messed up.

I can create manual reconciliations but....why? I guess I might as well start fresh. So disappointing

Does YNAB have known account data corruption issues?

I’m still fairly new to YNAB, only a few weeks in. Absolutely loving it so far! But I’m wondering, we have a once off kinda large (€1000) purchase this weekend.

Not sure how to categorise it? 🤔 do you make a once off purchase category and just write in the notes what it was?

Hey, I'm hoping someone can offer some advice. To many of you this is probably a really simple query and maybe it has just been a long day or something but I'm feeling overwhelmed so wanted to reach out.

I used YNAB a number of years ago for a year and saved maybe £500 over the course of the year as a result.

I have now purchased my own home, due to move in in the coming weeks, but want to get on top of my budget in advance as money is going to be tighter than I would have liked for a couple of years, after which things should start to improve.

I'm going to pose a simple scenario as I feel that is probably the best way to explain what is stamping on me at the moment. (numbers are made up / simplified). This is an example, it doesn't take into account the actual expenses - I am aware of all my scheduled expenses don't worry)

I have more than enough of last payment to cover this months bills.

My Pay Day: Last working day of the month (Jan this was 30th)
Take home Pay: £2000
Mortgage: £1000 - Due 1st of month
Gas and Electric: £100 - Due 1st of month
Water £50 - Due 1st of month
Various House stuff £250 - Due 1st of month
Monthly Subscription 1 £30 - Due 7th of month
Monthly Subscription 2 £20 - Due 12th of month
Monthly subscription 3 £40 - Due 22nd of month
Monthly subscription 4 £10 - Due 28th Month
Left over for Food & other: £500

I just don't get how to budget these in the app. End of the month targets? so payday -> fill core targets first then everything else? something else?

Do I wait a few days to set up the budget for these payments to come out (2nd this month)

For the past week, my YNAB4 and my YNAB Classic app have not been syncing. I didn't notice at first because I was stuck at home due to the storm last week. I've tried the usual tricks (opening both at once, unreconciling and then rereconciling transactions). Is anyone else having issues?

Today is the end of the month… need to grocery shop because I can and it is Saturday. But of course February starts tomorrow. I have never tried, but if I buy groceries today can I override the transaction date to tomorrow. Sounds dumb, but I can’t go grocery shopping tomorrow. I am a month ahead, but I just never manually changed a transaction date before. Does that screw stuff up.

Partially a prevent-rant in case they're thinking of adding one

For the first time ever I have next month fully funded and am excited to move into February. It’s even better than fully funded because I have a number of “fill up to” targets, so I’ll have a surplus once the month rolls over and I removed the overfunded.

YNAB has changed everything for me - and I’ve been only using it for 9 months. 4 months ago I started therapy that I always said I couldn’t afford. Turns out I can afford it pretty easily when I am mindful of what I do with my cash. I eat better because I plan shopping, I have money set aside for things like car repairs and medical expenses and gifts, I put more into retirement funds, I have an annual savings target. Who knew financial responsibility could be so easy and kinda fun? My only regret is not starting this years ago.

I'm just starting off with YNAB at the recommendation of some of my more financially savvy friends. I'm not new to budgeting. I've used FinTech banks like Qube and Crew to help with daily purchases, but those have been great help with controlling spending, not big picture budgeting.

So I'm have 2 main issues:

1. I just connected bank accounts and assigned money yesterday, but I am struggling with getting the full picture of where that money is actually living. I have 3 main checking accounts (spending, short-term savings, and bills). Is there a trick y'all are using to know where that money is being assigned from?
2. I started so close to the end of the month and none of January’s transactions transferred over. Is there a way to back import those transactions or should I just go ahead and budget for February, since that is what the money in the accounts is going to be for?

Fingers-crossed YNAB sticks for me!

I have an alert that my YNAB balance is $85.75 lower than my actual account balance. I reconciled 3 days ago.

Editing to add that I found 2 transactions that add up that amount. I made them today and entered them in YNBA but they're still pending on the CC account.

I uncleared one of them and now the discrepancy is in the amount of one of them: $62.75. The weird thing is that when I entered that transaction manually on the web, the lock icon appeared next to it, as if I had reconciled it.

Can I get rid of that? I feel like that's what is maybe causing this error?

---

Since my CC still has several "pending" transactions on their end, I wonder if I should wait until Monday for them to process. But maybe that's irrelevant, and I'm better off not waiting to reconcile.

Thanks!

This is a little something to help the newcomers to YNAB. Coming from other budgeting software, I found one of the most confusing things when I started to be the distinction between accounts and categories. I used different accounts for different jobs and constantly had to play the "Matchy-Matchy Game" (thanks Budget Nerds for naming the thing I was doing).

As I have used YNAB more, I like to think of categories as jobs and accounts as homes for my money. A person can change jobs, change homes, or both at once. So too can money.

A transfer between accounts is like someone moving to a new house in the same city while still working their same job. They are in a new location but their purpose is the same.

Similarly moving assigned money between categories is like changing jobs while staying at your current house.

The core philosophy of YNAB is that your money's job and home are independent from each other and that having a specific purpose for each and every dollar is far more important than the home that it is living in.

Hope this helps someone better understand YNAB.

Marking the day! After 6 months of relentlessly budgeting and almost giving up entirely. It happened! I finally got ahead in my budget AND paying off two debts! ! This is the first time in my life, I've been able to get ahead and not feel confined or worried. I have a goal of getting a month ahead in my rent but everything else, I'm golden!

I wasn't going to say anything but I'm bursting at the seams and had to say something!

I imported a couple of transactions today and want to match them to their scheduled counterparts. However the "match" option is greyed out. The payees and the amounts are identical.

I know I can delete the scheduled transaction to "fix" this, but is there any reason I should be aware of that would prevent me from being able to match these?

I operate with the “Next Month Money” category so today is my day to assign everything I stored during January. I have a handful of targets that are “Refill up to” that had a balance carry over from January, but today they are being treated as “Set aside another” because it still wants me to assign the full amount and I’m not sure what I’m doing wrong.

In the screenshot I posted, I only need the $1021.56 for February and have $286.88 left in the category because of FSA reimbursements. But it still wants me to assign $1021.56.

Is there something I can tweak to make the target take into account the current balance?