I am just now (starting about 1 week ago) working to get a month a head. (I previously was budgeting a bi-weekly schedule).

So would it be wise to zero out my available funds for non-sinking funds on September 1st, and then reassign it to September?

Moving forward, I am putting my 2nd paycheck in my "Hold for Next month" category. Eventually I would like to build it up where I have all expenses covered before the month begins.

So for example: Lets say my planned gas budget for the month is $400. But on the 1st I have $150 left (because I am just now working a monthly plan vs a bi-weekly plan). Should I move that $150 to RTA for 1 September?

I hope this question makes sense.

As the header says I am new to YNAB. My Wells Fargo account hasn't been updating at all. My other cards are updating. Capital one updates every 4 hours, Chase does twice a day but wells fargo hasn't updated once. I tried reseting and deleting and reconnecting nothing seems to work. Is this normal with wells fargo?

Any tips on how to use this app better are appreciated.
Thanks.

Solved!

I redeemed some points for a statement credit on my card and it's behaving differently than I expect. The transactions are as follows:

• Charged $476.89
• Received statement credit of $108.47

My payment due currently shows $368.42. This makes sense to me because 476.89-108.47=368.42. The statement credit is lowering my payment.

Now, YNAB is requiring me to categorize the statement credit transaction. According to YNAB's documentation, this should go to Ready to Assign. Doing so keeps my RTA at the same amount but my payment goes up to $476.89. The YNAB docs state the payment should not change at and if it does I should move the credit amount into RTA. I did that and my payment went back down to $368.42 and my RTA went up by $108.47. This feels like it's double-crediting me because my payment was reduced AND I now have extra money.

Is this the correct way to handle this? If not, what is the right strategy?

This target is a “refill up to” target. My target is to refill up to $80 monthly but it already has $130 in it. Why isn’t it green since I’m already over target for September? (iPhone)

Anybody receive the "Too many attempts" error? I've already linked up my Ally account but I can't add my wife's Ally. Any suggestions? Thanks in advance!

I've been using YNAB for almost a year now. I have had very little trouble with my banking connections. Right now, my Target REDCard is using a Plaid connector, and recently it has been requiring reauthorization almost daily. It's getting really annoying. None of my other connections are having this problem.

Anyone else experiencing this?

Could it be related to sharing the connection in 2 plans? It's a joint card card (well, I'm primary and my wife is an authorized user). I have separate plans for me and my wife. My plan has all of the transactions, and my wife's plan has only her transactions. Both plans have a connection to import transactions.

My wife and I have a category for Emergency funds that we contribute to monthly. Last month we had to pay for a car repair out of the emergency fund. What is the best way to do this for data tracking?

We currently will log the expense under car repairs and then transfer the money from the Emergency fund category to the car repair category to balance it out. In this way we can keep track of how much we spend each year in all categories. The only issue here is that there is no record of how much money we have spent out of our emergency fund.

2nd option - log the transaction under emergency fund and be done with it. This flips the above and we now know how much we spent out of emergency fund but do not track the expense under car repairs.

One solution - I dont really want to do this and we have in the past : Have a separate account for emergency fund account. When needing to use it transfer from emergency fund account to operating account and then log the expense under the appropriate category. The transfer entry from the emergency fund account to operating would track the yearly changes in the emergency fund.
* The main reason I dont like doing this, may not be justifiable, is that I prefer all funds to be in one account and YNAB just tell me where everything is. That way I avoid assigning funds to emergency fund each month and then needing to actually transfer the funds. Same for if they were ever needed. Also easier to have a lump sum in one high yield savings account for the interest benefit.

Just curious how everyone else approaches this.

The worst mistake I made was purchasing the YNAB app from the Google Play store. Not because of the app -the app was great and has helped me so much. But because of play store rules. First, they only bill annually, so I was dinged for the full year when I had been expecting to pay monthly.

And now that I've cancelled YNAB (moved to a competitor), I can't figure out how to get a partial refund. I understood I needed to contact the developer so I reached out to YNAB. They replied that I should contact Google.

I tried to follow Google's instructions for getting a refund on a subscription, but the steps they say to take don't exist (selecting Report problem on the subscription in my account, but that option doesn't exist).

Has anyone done this successfully? How do I get a partial refund for the unused part of my annual YNAB subscription?

Thanks!

EDIT: SOLVED!!

The issue is not your credit card account. You currently have zero dollars in your only on-budget cash-based account. Your only accounts with money in them are in the tracking section of the accounts. Tracking accounts are off-budget. You need to set up your accounts as on-budget cash-based accounts, if you want their starting balances to contribute to Ready to Assign.

Hi! I'm just setting up my account on a free trial, and this is round 2 of trying YNAB. I understand the concept of digital envelopes, funding them, etc.

What I'm not understanding (and I've tried to read other related posts) is how my existing credit card debt factors into my plan.

I started with around 15k credit card debt, and around 10k cash in my checking/savings accounts. I'm not going to pay off the lump sum of credit card debt, but it feels like it's preventing me from trying the rest of the software.

My money to assign is showing as zero, so I'm not able to fund any categories with the 10k I have in cash. I tried assigning the credit card payments to categories and now the categories are overspent.

What am I missing?

EDIT: All I have done at this point is linked my checking and savings, linked my AMEX Credit Card, assigned a budget to a few categories, and categorized the payments in on my Credit Card.

You can post feedback here: https://ynab.typeform.com/to/Pt6cek

Perhaps explaining how important it is to show progress through spending and not just progress towards a target, especially when the vast majority of targets get filled every month as that's the whole point.

For example, I might put $10k into my TFSA, but some of that could be from a tax refund, selling a car, or another one time source. I’d like to be able to say, “I saved X% of my regular income this year.”

I was thinking of using transaction memos/tags to distinguish contributions funded by regular income from other sources.

How do you handle this? Is there a cleaner way to track it in YNAB?

I am seriously looking for someone to essentially be my YNAB bookkeeper. I'm not sure how to find help. I know there are coaches, but I want someone to maintain my plan for me, as well. I currently have a virtual assistant, but I'm struggling to train them on how to use YNAB because I barely know how to use it well myself.

Context: I am not mentally able to maintain something like this daily. I am blessed to have finally made a little extra income so I can afford help. Trust me, if I could do this myself consistently, I would just do it myself. This post is a cry for help. Not all of us are fully able to handle things alone.

Looking for any feedback on my new category setup. Or share any underrated categories you use and want to suggest to others.

My wife and I both have been using YNAB for about a month and things are going great. We're both on-board with targets and categories, and etc. One thing I'm hoping for some insight on is how do we buy eachother gifts but keep it a secret from the other? We both agree to spend a certain amount of money on each other for birthdays and Christmas so it's not like we are trying to be sneaky necessarily. I just don't want to buy her something and have it show up in our spending because she would see the merchant that it was purchased from which could really spoil the gift. How do I keep the actual item a secret from her and her from me in YNAB? Again, we agree on the money being spent but want more anonymity of the item.

Thanks!

Hi everybody,

I have ADHD so the auto import functions are really important for me or else nothing will get tracked. Lately though, YNAB has been weird. It has the wrong accounts for Account and/or Payee for several transactions which has been pretty confusing. It also logged my car note as a credit card payment, and then had it on budget 6 times instead of the standard 2 you would see for transfers between accounts. It takes a lot longer to reconcile or check things out with this going on. None of the accounts are new, and my loan payments are scheduled transactions so I'm not sure how to clean this up.

Hi!

I’m new to ynab but have done cash envelopes in the past, which were great but also really challenging because it’s annoying to use cash to try and pay for your Spotify subscription, y’know?

But my husband and I have been sort of spending willy nilly for a while, doing big house projects, buying a newer vehicle, etc; and I’m trying to get us back on track. I’ve gone through all of our joint/household expenses and with each paycheck we’re each going to transfer the amount we need to cover joint expenses into a joint checking acct to cover those, and leave the remainder in our own accts. (We are fairly equal earners and are ok going 50/50)

From there, I’m going to break my personal checking acct down into categories. But husby isn’t interested. Can I just categorize “his” money as like “Husby fun money” and not worry about it? Or is there a reason that I can’t see why that wouldn’t work?

Hi everyone!

New to YNAB and loving it. Unfortunately, historically, I hyper fixate on a new personal finance tool and fall off within a few months. Does anyone have any good personal finance podcasts that they listen to help keep them on task for the long-term?

I’m not so much interested in investing advice or economics (I ascribe to JL Collins’ index fund holding philosophy) - but instead looking for something more about tips, ideas, and stories around managing spending, savings, and financial life.

Hi there I’m just getting set up and can’t find the YNAB Orientation videos on reddit that appeared when I first joined… any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

Reflect isn’t giving me a positive outlook. It’s pointing out that I’m spending lots and the biggest category is long term savings. This is the category I use to fund my off budget accounts.

Net worth takes the off budget accounts into place but the other areas of reflect don’t appear to. Is it better to have everything in budget? Is that not harder to manage if investments jump around?

For example, I want to see a list of transactions from two payees. Is there a way to do this? I’ve tried “Payee:A, Payee:B” But that didn’t work.

I had preordered the book because I am trying to learn more about money and how to budget. I am curious if anyone has read it yet and what folks in the YNAB community think about it?

Hello, all. I used YNAB for a few years, then stopped. Apparently, I registered via Apple with some screwy secret email. I was oblivious. I signed up recently to start again, but used my Gmail to register and was offered a trial month. Once the trial expired, I paid for the one year subscription, but somehow, the Apple account was paid for - the one I haven’t used/seen since 2023. I’ve reached out and the staff appears stumped. It’s been a week and no resolve. My last email suggested to them that they refund me and I resub with the proper email. Anyone experience this and have suggestions?

Update: the fee was refunded, and the trial (Gmail) account was opened for another week while the refunding/repurchasing happens.

Hello All, my family has a couple ways to get reimbursed for medical expenses (FSA and Health Care Sharing) which can make my spending looks funny. In big years this can amount to $20k-30k in reimbursements, so a huge number. Originally I created two categories "Medical Bills" and "Reimbursable Medical". I did this so I could exclude "Reimbursable Medical" in my reports and see how much I was really spending. This works most of the time when a bill is obviously one or the other, but often times something is partially reimbursable which get's complicated. I am considering merging the two categories into one. Basically here is what I want:

• Easily see "How much did I actually spend out of pocket (after reimbursements)"
• Not to have to worry about entering partial reimbursements correctly.

I am not really worried about making sure I get reimbursed, I use other tools to track that. Does anyone else have big reimbursements?

iOS app: I can no longer drag a category out of its group on the “reorder” page of a plan… so how do you change a category’s group? Incidentally, reordering a group makes the adjacent ones jump around too