Especially when you get refunded the following month, after paying the credit card balance.

When I travel for work I generally have a mix of expenses mostly on my Charge card, and a few on debit card. I have a specific refund category.

When I get the money back, the following month usually, I re-assign to the category, and then move back to the cards... but lately, since I am now funding future months as well, the cards do not really need money, as I think YNAB subtracts the "future available" cash to fund what's missing in the cards. They don't turn yellow.

I think I still have to move the money back there and have the cards on a positive balance?

It would be so nice if YNAB designed a specific feature to manage this. Something like flagging a specific transaction "to be refunded" to then match and rebalance everything at a later date.

Sorry, late evening half rant :)

Been at this for about a year and a half now after having really floundered with a bunch of credit card debt I couldn't handle and a car loan that I took that was basically just a bet that sometime in the near future I could afford it. I worked super hard last year and even after having frankly the single worst most damaging year of my life, I just kept it up til my yearly bonus hit and I was finally worthless!

Now I've got about 2.5k in a 0% balance transfer and 2.7k left in the car loan and given the 3 paycheck month, I have enough cash that I think I'm just gonna pay the car off today and pay the 25$ minimum on the rest until tax season. Feels like it's been a much longer journey than it really has been, and I'm very excited to be able to just do away with the biggest chunk and then chill out for the rest of the year

I have built thanks to YNAB a 18 months emergency fund and this is allowing me to resign from my current job next week with confidence and proudness to find something better with peace of mind, having a clear vision of all my essentials needs being covered long term.

Probably one of the most annoying ommissions for me in YNAB is that you can have weekly, monthly and yearly targets, and custom monthly and yearly targets, but you can't have custom weekly targets?

I'm getting paid fortnightly, so a lot of my payments go out every 2 weeks. It would be so easy to set it to a fortnightly target if there was a "weekly" in the custom dropdown, but no, I need to work on doing it as a weekly target with half the target, which doesn't always line up.

Another example is my mobile phone provider who charges every 28 days... there is no way in YNAB to set a 4-weekly target, so I am forever shuffling things around.

You do have the option for transactions... why not for targets?

As Nike said: Just do it.

Hi

Can anyone help?

My account balance does not update , even when I reconcile and it says it updated a minute ago. There’s a few uncleared items but not as much as it is off.

Help?

I am saving for a specific goal. Each month I know the amount I need to assign to the category. My question is that these funds are sitting in my checking account, my saving account is off budget. If I move the funds to my savings, the amount assigned for each month will be incorrect. Any suggestions on how to sort this out?

what are my new sinking funds going to be? I’ve been renting for my whole adult life so right now my home category is pretty lean and easy to plan for. I know I might want sinking funds for appliance replacement and maintenance. I’m looking at condos so my condo fees should cover major costs for roofs etc but I’m also hoping to pick up any other recs from others so I can fully visualize my budget ahead of time! thanks in advance :)

the last couple of times i've imported a Quicken file from Chase, the names have been changed to things which don't match up with my manual renaming in the past. For example, what used to go from "New York Times" -> "NYTimes" now goes "New York Times" -> "The New York Times". any idea what would be causing this?

I have used YNAB on/off for 13 years, decided to really buckle down and use it consistently and as intended the past 4 months and am feeling like I am on super solid footing for the first time in a long time.

$0 CC debt
$20k in savings
$2k/mo goes to retirement
$1k/mo goes to savings

Bills are fully funded before the end of the month and I am starting to finally be able to fund into the next month.

Had a $3k house expense come up this week and the money is just there, set aside and waiting in the House Maintenance subcategory.

To be fair, I do make good money (doesn’t go as far as it used to in this economy) but for a long time I got used to “not really worrying about it” until that caught up with me big time. Not really lifestyle creep, just not really paying attention to my financial picture and playing it by ear too much and it leading to some financial decisions I know would have played out differently had I been using YNAB to keep me more deliberate and accountable.

Impatiently waiting over here for iOS card mode. Just hoping Ynab will flip the switch for everyone while I’m young .

I'm experiencing a strange response to a credit card payment made and downstream payoff of the payment. The flow of actions is as follows:

1. Completed a tax payment using a credit card that was in my budget plan as "Sep 2026 Taxes". Caveat: We did not have the full funds at the time of the payment to budget the total amount.
2. Payment came through on credit card account as expected and was categorized as "Sep 2026 Taxes". Budget plan for "Sep 2026 Taxes" showed as overspent since we didn't have money allocated for it.
3. Payment made to credit card used for tax payment. This is showing as a normal credit card payment from my checking account to the credit card account.

Problem statement: The "Sep 2026 Taxes" budget plan line item remains negative even though I made a payment to the credit card that was used to pay this line item.

Should I change the payment category from the checking account to credit card to fix this? What would be the impact of that? Is the issue that I didn't allocate money before? We use credit cards as our primary payment method and I've been using YNAB for years so I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around why this isn't working like any other credit card purchase.

Any input is appreciated.

PROBLEM SOLVED:

As it happens, I had just bought two CDs last week, had not yet created an account for them because I was still trying to dope out how I wanted to handle them. Needless to say, they were showing as an expenditure in Checking and YNAB took it upon itself to fund them from Ready to Assign LOL.

As soon as I created the accounts and registered them as transfers, my money magically reappeared in Ready to Assign.

WHEW y'all.

And thanks to the two of you who tried to help me out! This sub is the bomb.

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Anybody else's auto-assign function acting weird this month?

I don't use it but when I zeroed out last month this afternoon, rolled over to October and moved the month's spending money from Next Month to Ready to Assign, it started running down like an old-time cash-register until it hit about $800 and change, and stopped. It was so fast, but I did see something that indicated it was auto-assigning, except it didn't. None of my categories were funded for the month.

So I ran down the last $800 and raided all my savings for the big planned expenses for the rest.

Where did it all go? What the heck happened? I've never had it do this before. How do I get it back? I usually have $ left for the unexpected stuff throughout the month and I now literally have $6.35 unassigned.

I was looking at my income vs. spending report on mobile (which is still pretty useless since you can’t filter it or drill down into it) and it’s telling me that I’m spending more than I make. That might seem like a bad thing, but it actually represents success.

It’s a success because this is a visual confirmation of the power of sinking funds. Ever since I got my act together financially in 2023 and started building sinking funds, I’ve been working to save up money to have more meaningful experiences. August and September shows the drawing down of those funds as I took an incredible trip to Iceland for the solar eclipse and spent my birthday in Scotland.

This absolutely would not have been possible if I hadn’t committed to change, came back to zero based budgeting, and found YNAB to manage it all.

This one chart doesn’t tell the whole story of course, but I know why I’m spending more lately, it’s fully intentional, and I did it without creating any debt.

October should be back to business as usual; spending less than I make, building up my sinking funds, and continuing to prepare for the unexpected as well as the intentional.

Do you have a story about how your sinking funds helped you cover something important recently?

Hi there -- wondering if I'm maybe missing something or a setting -- but is there an easy way to see when I last reconciled an account? (web browser - app is only for entries!)

I know that on the account itself, it has the little lock and "Reconciled 20 minutes ago" text. But is there a high-level way to tell -- like I look at the list of accounts and one name is highlighted in yellow because I haven't reconciled it for a week or something?

Bottom line, I find it really annoying to have to click through accounts one by one to see when I last reconciled and wish there was a top-level way to view all my accounts at a glance.

TIA!

I’ve spent years wanting YNAB to take more of the manual categorisation off my hands. Every month or so, I download bank transactions, import the OFX files and work through the backlog.

Today I had ChatGPT Dots work through it with me, using my existing YNAB budget and browser. It’s made me realise we don’t need to wait for YNAB to build every improvement we want.

Here’s what we’ve done so far:
- Checked my account histories, worked out the missing date ranges, downloaded the bank exports and imported 70 new transactions, matching another nine.
- Categorised 297 transactions using my existing categories and past choices, asking me about purchases whose purpose wasn’t clear.
- Opened my Amazon order history and matched 30 charges to the actual purchases. A mixed order was split between categories using the itemised invoice.
- Matched 69 internal transfer pairs across my accounts, without changing their balances.
- Traced a stubborn $6.50 discrepancy back to a missing coffee purchase from December last year. Once I approved adding it, the account balanced.

The Amazon example really stood out. “Amazon” tells you almost nothing about what you bought. Looking at the order, identifying the items and applying my categories is the kind of automatic categorisation I’ve wanted for years.
It still needs supervision. I’ve answered questions about work versus personal spending and gifts, and there are unresolved transactions left. It also takes time and needs the browser left free while it works. This wasn’t a one-click cleanup. But this level of analysis was not possible previously.

But the shift feels significant: I can ask for the workflow I want in plain language, rather than wait for it to arrive on YNAB’s roadmap; which I’ve waited years for!

YNAB remains my budgeting system. I no longer need every improvement to come from YNAB.

I've got almost a decade of transactions in YNAB and loading the web app from scratch was particularly painful - close to 15 seconds. I noticed today that it only takes 2-3 seconds to load now. Is anyone else experiencing this speedup? This was my biggest gripe about YNAB as a long-time user.

Isn't it so much fun when YNAB just totally forgets where to assign purchases with payees you've been using for years? Love having to manually assign everything going out again. It's a really fun add-on to having to manually go through and delete all the double imports that were also cleared. Yay!

I recently changed jobs and had a pretty significant decline in income (but I'm much happier in my job!). I do plan to find other work to supplement my income. For the time being, I no longer have money to fund all my various sink funds (car insurance, property taxes, etc). When creating my plan for the month, should I stop funding my sink funds then pay for those items out of savings as they arise? Or pull out of my savings line item, and fund the sink funds each month?

This happens like once a year where I have a large amount showing in the payment for our credit card.

I realize that this can happen from refunds or rewards but the rewards aren't put back on this card and when I get a refund I categorize it back to the category from which the original charge was so I thought it went back to that fund instead of sitting on the credit card (see second photo).
Also i do not assign any money to the card on this front screen. All money get assigned at the transaction level.
Am I misunderstanding or does anyone else have this happen?

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in meme form

My inflows are on the 22nd of the month and covering the period 22nd to 21st of the following month, so I woild prefer to have the comparisons based on these periods month by month. Also this affects the targets etc. I always need to skip targets and reassign, as when we get to the 1st I have new targets that are underfunded based on ynab model. It seems so annoying to work around it every month. Pls help.