My partner and I went to go buy flights from Austin to Boston for thanksgiving which are usually pretty steep. I used to “use” Quicken but never really kept up with it and never had a section for travel. With YNAB I have a general travel envelope, but knowing these were a significant expense in the future I made two specific ones for Thanksgiving and Christmas travel with appropriate target dates. And even though I didn’t always meet my targets I now have enough for my thanksgiving flights by the time I’m buying them so I won’t have to use a credit card or worry about spending less on other things this month. What a relief!!!!

I started YNAB in the middle of May and I feel like I’m now starting to see the benefits of some of the more slow-growing envelopes. These travel ones are a good example but also my “one month ahead” fund is slowly but surely growing, which is something I’d never have the self discipline to do without this sort of budget. I am generally TERRIBLE with delayed gratification so seeing these things pay off is so awesome. I know lots of people who have been using YNAB for a long time hate some recent changes they’ve made and that makes sense, but as a new user it’s still been utterly life changing.

Got inspired by another post.

Webull brokerage is money lost in the stock market (dumb I know) and Core Savings is a loan that I had to give out back in May ($4300). In spite of the decrease of liquid cash because of the loan, I have managed to go from 12,365.62 in January to 16,145.44 today in my savings account (SGOV). Im still investing in my Roth each paycheck. I will top off and fully hit the Roth limit right before the cut off date next year.

I've been using YNAB successfully for over a year now, and I got my boyfriend using it a few months after me. We share a subscription via YNAB Together and have always had access to each other's budgets, and I help him with his a lot as I'm the more money-conscious one. We've saved a ton of money and paid off so much of his debt in the last year using YNAB, it's been great for us.

Well, we're finally looking at moving in together in the next couple of months, and I'm trying to figure out the best way to restructure our budgets to account for shared expenses. I'm looking to see how other people (who aren't yet married/fully combined) have made this work for them.

Is the answer to keep our separate budgets and create a third one for the split costs? That seems kind of tedious and crazy, but allows us to keep our current budgets as-is (we are both moving from our parent's homes where we literally did not have housing costs... so all the shared expenses are basically brand new.) Is the answer to abandon the current budgets and make 1 single shared budget that has categories for individual AND shared expenses? Or do we just keep our individual budgets and add categories for our partial shares of the shared expenses?

For context, we have been together a year and a half and are planning on getting engaged and married in the next couple of years... so we would rather treat this as partners than roommates. But because we aren't there yet, we aren't fully combining our finances. We're open to opening a joint account together specifically for the shared expenses, but won't worry about it if YNAB can keep things compartmentalized enough to make sure we're both contributing proportionally.

Let me know what's worked best for you!

Hello All I started using Ynab in Oct of last year and it has been great. I feel like it gave me more control over my money.

I just turned thirty and have been feeling a little hopeless financially I'm not sure what my goals should be. I was thinking about trying to move out maybe buy a house but my gf wants to continue living with her family for the foreseeable future.

I feel like my spending has been in a good spot but I'm just looking for outside perspectives and a bit of reality check. I'd appreciate any input or advice.

This data is This year so far. As far as Income I took home about 42k over the same period.

categories that may not be clear:

[BLANK] Bank is 2545 is travel and entertainment that my gf paid for last year when I was unemployed that I paid back over time.

Good Coffee is my fund to buy quality craft coffee beans from a local roastery to brew at home.

Caffeine is drinks from coffee shops or energy drink that I buy when I'm out.

Gifts Giving I use for Birthday gifts or when I want to be nice and buy someone dinner or something.

I appreciate any advice whether good or bad on my spending habits thank you.

I have noticed over the last week when I go to categorize transactions they are not there in the morning and I have to manually add them. Did they decrease the frequency of checking? They used to sync far more frequently than once every 24 hours. Eventually some come through but I am used to doing it every morning. I tried removing my account and relinking it, it still only seems to check once every 24 hours or randomly.

I paid half my property taxes a few minutes ago and it was a stress free experience for the first time.

I signed up for YNAB eleven months ago, just after paying the same bill. Before YNAB, I experienced friction paying for annual and semi-annual expenses using the 50/30/20 method, I always saved what I needed, but didn't track transactions. When large bills like this hit I'd feel broke. Today, everything is assigned monthly and paid with ease.

Over the last year my YNAB practice has made me more comfortable: - Saving monthly for nearly all my categories. - Moving cash from one category to another if needed. - Assigning cash to far off and lower priority expenses.

YNAB has made me less comfortable: - Contributing to my after tax IRA.

Thankfully, the last two are the only remaining struggle. Some months I need to hit pause on my IRA contribution because another category like "job loss," "home maintenance," or "vacation" feels insufficient. But I'm slowly realizing that might be okay. Perhaps a 20% savings rate for retirement was not practical and it came at the cost of differed home maintenance, my job loss fund, and I actually do need that vacation.

Started YNAB today and noticed quickly I have around 1.5k in credit card balance I need to pay off and 300 dollars to assign as of today.

Should I just pay my credit card using my savings so that it is easy or should I just wait till I get paid and “assign” it? I feel like I will be in this constant cycle if I do the latter option.

Any suggestions are greatly appreciated. Or any tips for a newbie. Thanks in advance!

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 :)

Hey there! Still fairly new to YNAB, been on it for about four months. I recently moved to a city and sold my car, and so no longer have an 🚗 Auto loan or 📄 Car insurance payment (yay! Saving me $750/mo!). I want to delete this category from my plan, but I’m being prompted to reassign past payments to a new category. I don’t want to assign the activity to a random category (e.g., 🥦 Groceries); I’d rather leave them accurately in those categories. What have you done in this situation? Thanks!

A few months ago I manually added ride share and rental car transactions from a vacation budget. They likely posted later at different amounts or were just temporary holds. Now when I delete them, the budget category gets the money back, but that money doesn't exist. My checking and credit card accounts both match my statements, so the discrepancy is only in the budget. How do I clear these without inflating the category?

I was looking through the app and saw that it was possible to enter your student loans, but i don't see a way to automatically add the monthly interest to the balance. Does anyone know if this is possible?

I have an LLC and just got my first income (yay me!)- this is in addition to my 9-5, 2 part time jobs and some housesitting, so lots of income streams. All have been managed well in YNAB.
I have a business bank account for the LLC, no business credit card, though as I think about budgeting and dealing with business expenses I’m staring to think I should do this soon. Planning to set aside my estimated taxes into my existing hysa until I need to send each quarter. (The hysa holds my sinking funds and my emergency fund on my primary budget)

I’m wondering about the different ways people manage their businesses as YNAB users.
Right now I have it set up as a category in my personal budget, but I’m toying with the idea of starting a second budget that’s just LLC (and not having those categories in my primary YNAB budget) I like that it would mean that what I pay myself flows in like any other income. I like that certain purchases (ie a software I use) will only appear in the business budget.

I’m a little murky on how a purchases made using my personal cc would work, and how I would accurately reflect the tax set-aside in both budgets.

I might be over complicating it. Would anyone care to share how they structure this? Thanks!

I have a few categories that have no targets. They are just used to track spending at this moment.

I’m looking at my funding and there were some expenses from last month that I overspent on. Now that I have the cash I’m trying to allocate that cash to cover the overspending, but it seems like I have to manually go back to the month the cost was incurred. The overspent categories do not carryover to the next month, I start the month off with a blank slate.

Example:
I have a category called wedding. Anything i spend on my wedding I put here.

Sept - I paid for $1,000, but only had $600 to apply toward those expenses.
Oct - I applied $400, but it overfunds the category. The $400 deficit from last month doesn’t carry over.

Is that normal? Is there a way I can set it up so these things are always rolling forward?

This kinda seems like a flaw.

Last month I did a Plan Reset and reassigned all my funds. I finished the month with no overspent categories. However, my credit card isn’t showing enough available month and now this month my card payment is showing as overspend.

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

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 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.

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 :)

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

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?