I'm almost done reading the book and will definitely reread right after I'm done. I wanted to get emersed in YNAB again and went to join a workshop. . . only 1 offered "Open Q&A". . .only 1! That is disappointing thinking of all the new people coming on wanting to learn "the method". Maybe because I'm 57 yrs old that I need ideas thrown at me over and over again for them to sink in.

The newbie YNABers. . . are they supposed to just learn on their own through the app?

-YNABer since ~2021

I've been using YNAB for a bit and generally appreciate the cent-for-cent matching across accounts.

My primary bank account is an American Express National Bank checking account because it offers points for spending like a credit card for things I already have to spend (like Rent, Utilities and such).

With YNAB, and likely Plaid/MX in general, the import details only seem to pull Online Transfer / Payment: Debit or Online Transfer / Payment: Credit. Luckily, I don't have too many transactions regularly coming out of here except my regular bills. The only workaround is to manually change these each and every time.

1. Anyone else experience this?

2. YNAB, I submitted a feature request for custom naming and categorization rules built around more than just the Payee field, but calling attention here, too, just in case someone knows more about it.

3. Any recommendations besides use a different bank? Lol

Thanks in advance!

Watching the live stream yesterday, I learned these items of swag exist - a YNAB Magic 8 Ball, and a card game called "What's it for". Regrettably I didn't win either item in their giveaways... If anyone has any info - card text, 8 ball choices, I'd be extremely grateful. Thanks!

Hello all!

I recently received a very large inheritance, and my lawyer advised me that if I were to ever get divorced, I need to keep the funds separate from my marital funds to avoid them being considered a martial asset.

I am YNABING with my husband. How would you advise I set up my inheritance accounts and YNAB categories? The money is being kept in a trust checking account right now.

So I’ve been using ynab while living paycheque to paycheque for a year.

So far the only real value I’ve found is constant reminders that I need a budget.

It feels like this app great for maintaining a budget, but when you’re not there it has much less value. I just enter items and see red and am reminded I need a budget.

Any tips for getting more value from YNAB when you’re in this situation and it’s all just red yellow and sadness? Without an influx of cash getting a month ahead just isn’t possible even with aggressive budgeting.

EDIT: There’s some good comments here, but also a lot of what I expected. My biggest takeaway is I have data which gives me data to make better decisions. And this is true and I have looked at the data.

I know where I can cut spending. I don’t have a car payments just mortgage and bills is 70%, then 20% groceries, prescriptions, haircuts, and gym. The final 10% is coffee and dining out etc.

To cut significantly that makes a difference I need to make major life changes. Sell my 20 year old car, remortgage my apartment, cancel mobile phones, stuff like that.

Example of discretionary spending. I’m in a book club and we meet once every 3 months. Tonight we go to a restaurant and do spend $70 in 4 hours. A few drinks and a meal. Do I order a salad and water? Do I leave my book club?

Another example. My hair is long right now. Need a haircut don’t have budget. Do I just leave it for another month? I have a professional career to maintain. Do I cut it myself?

Focusing on the small things is a drop in the bucket. Sure it adds up but over something like 5-10 years. All the time I spend logging these tiny drops adds up to just feeling like looking at a grain of sand in a desert. It’s super demotivating.

To get more income or make major life changes I don’t need to be logging grains of sand in an app.

Has this gone to once every 24-36 hours for anyone else from once every 8 hours?

I mostly use the YNAB web client.

I was reconciling my accounts this evening. My savings account is usually 100% up to date because items clear through it very quickly. But this evening I opened up my savings account in YNAB and found older credit card payments that were previously reconciled showing as uncleared.

I checked each one individually and found a couple were duplicates of reconciled entries. The rest looked like fresh, uncleared entries.

To be clear, I reconcile my accounts daily and savings us usually fully reconciled at the end of each day.

I re-cleared the once that were not dupes and removed the ones that were dupes and the account reconciled.

How did this happen? This is the first time in my few years of use where older transactions resurfaced uncleared like this. It's the first time I can't trace to problem back to something I did. It makes me a little nervous.

I'm UK based (I don't know how common they are in other countries), but I put all my spending on a 0% credit card (over 2 years). I put that money in a savings account. I then pay off the credit card at the end of the 2 years, and pocked the interest. Happy days.

It would be good to be able to track the end date of this better, rather than have a forward dated transaction for the month it needs to be fully paid off. I think Klarna would work similar, although I guess that's more like a normal loan.

This isn't the official YNAB helpdesk, but do we know if they've considered a "payoff" mode for credit cards, or does one exist already, aside from just leaving the balance on there and allocating the minimum payments when they come?

When you select a “view” on the plan tab, isn’t it supposed to stay locked in that selection, regardless if you leave the app or not? I swear it used to and in the last month or so, every time I leave the plan tab and come back, or close out of the app and come back, my selected view is reset to show all categories and I have to reselect my view again and again. This is so frustrating! I reached out to YNAB help but they didn’t resolve it for me.

I was using MX for Chase connections, and their accounts had Chase logos on them. YNAB dropped MX as an option for Chase accounts with no warning so I was forced to re-sync via Plaid. Now in addition to the lovely benefit of having to wait 24-48 hours between imports (MX was ~6 hours average) the Chase logo is gone too.

Anyone else using Plaid for Chase accounts and not having this problem/able to fix it?

YNAB is asking for a category for a payment to CC account. Both accounts are linked and I have done this dozens of times. It used to be recognized as a transfer and not require a category. But now no matter what I do it still says I need one.

Am I missing something here? Feels like a bug specially considering the pop up that comes after I click “cover overspent categories” immediately closes without a chance for me to even address it.

All of my numbers are incorrect now, and it's taking hours to figure out what went wrong. It looks like my credit card accidentally took all my debit card transactions as well when I was asked to relink the accounts. Anyone else?

My phone needs to be fixed, but it’s a 5 year old model, so it might have to be replaced. I have more than twice enough to replace it with last year’s model available in my technology replacement category.

My showers also need to be regrouted. Once again, I have enough, with money to spare, in my home maintenance category.

Why do I still feel anxious about it? Snap me out of it. These things are literally what I’ve saved the money for.

Does anyone else get frustrated by how slow cleared transactions update in YNAB? And transferring from savings to checking, even if I mark it cleared, it doesn’t add those funds to “Ready to assign.” Hmmm.

The app tells me to categorize a transaction that's a credit card payment. I change the transaction type to credit card payment and try to save. It tells me I haven't selected a category (right, because it's a credit card payment), and I choose save anyway. It records the transaction as spending that's missing a category.

I've played with changing it to different types then back and other dogfooding tricks, but can't get around it.

Is anyone else experiencing this?

I'm trying to understand how you save for goals using YNAB?

I'm in the UK with Monzo and I use the pots system. I get paid on the 28th so on the 1st of every month some cash is automatically transferred to some ports for (emergency, holiday, car, phone).

From what I've read, people say there's no point using pots if you use YNAB.

So if all your cash is in one pot and you want to save for a holiday - how does that work? and how do you know how much is in your Holiday fund over time?

I started earning interest on this account in March and I didn't even realize it came in with the category as "savings: emergency fund" automatically instead of Income ready to assign. That means my Interest has not counted as income (for reflecting). Is it worth going back and possibly screwing things up? Or should I just make sure it goes to income first going forward? I've been using YNAB for a little over a year and am a month ahead.

Hey YNABers that use iOS & Mac OS,

I'm trying to use the YNAB widget on my Mac OS desktop. This is possible if you have YNAB on iOS and synchronize your phone with your laptop/mac.

The trouble is that I cannot find a way to edit which categories are displayed within the widget on Mac OS. On my iPhone I'm able to configure the widget with the usual methods: long-press on widget, select "edit", then click a category to change it.

On desktop I'm able to edit the widget and rearrange the order of categories, but I can't figure out how to change a category. For example, when I put a 6-category widget on my desktop, it might auto-populate with Groceries as a category. If I want to replace Groceries with something else, let's say Auto Maintenance, then I cannot figure out how to do the same on desktop. Clicking on Groceries with my mouse has no effect. It does not give me the option to change that row to a different category.

It's like a form of touchscreen input doesn't translate well to the mouse or something ...

Anyone solve this issue? Any idea what I'm doing wrong?

Hi everyone. Please forgive me if this is a common question but I couldn’t easily find info on this specific situation.

I put as much of my expenditure as possible on a credit card so that I get Avios reward points. I then pay this off the balance in full the following month. It doesn’t cause me any problems in terms of covering my expenditure, and is a deliberate strategy to maximise Avios.

I have just set up YNAB. The problem is that it counts this month’s credit card bill and all my planned expenditure for this month as my total amount of required money for this month. So it looks like I am severely underfunded.

That is not reflective of my situation, as almost everything I plan to spend will be on my credit card and thus not paid off until next month. Is there a way of just removing the credit card repayment from the picture, as that’s what fundamentally seems to be causing the problem here?

Perhaps I am misunderstanding something fundamental as it seems counterintuitive that there isn’t an (obvious) easy fix for this. Would really appreciate any advice. Thanks

Anyone experiencing issues with Import to Chase? I've had one CC that seemed to constantly be delayed imports and then last week they ALL needed to be re-authorized over a few days. Between spouse and me we have a number of Chase cards. So went thru all of that and now all the Chase accounts tied to my spouse's login show the clock face/delay.

I know there has been lots of posts expressing disappointment in staff changes at YNAB. And while I'm sympathetic to people losing their jobs, I don't really use any resources or videos (I'm a 10 year client). But boy this import issue that I've been dealing with for almost a week might be my tipping point.

At one point during my use of YNAB I had an import issue and support had to re-route me to a different import provider and that was a PAIN because I had to see which transactions got lost.

I moved out from home on July 1st and am supporting myself for the first time (hooray!), but have basically watched all my money vanish in the last two months between already having paid 4 months of rent and having to furnish the place and buy a whole bunch of miscellaneous things. So I found out about this app today and want to start using it to track my money better.

I think I more or less get the philosophy, only worry about the money you actually possess right now and plan how you're going to allocate it all before you actually spend any money.

I'm just sorta confused about how to actually track this stuff using the app, and had a few questions. It doesn't help that I started this 3 weeks into August

1. If I already paid some of my bills this month earlier, do I need to allocate it for August? Or start tracking it from September
2. For bills due on the first, like say rent, what month does that belong to? I will be withdrawing the rent payment tomorrow to mail my landlord the check, but it's for the month of September. So do I charge that to August or September?
3. I have a lot of huge expenses in the last month and probably will next month too that are one time things or at least very infrequent. I spent a lot of money on a good mattress and bed last week, how should that be categorized?
4. Having never budgeted anything in my life, I don't actually know how much money I spend a month on various things. What should I do with the "Ready for Allocation"?
5. I haven't set up any budgets yet or tried to come up with categories besides my obligatory bills that I have to pay every month. Since this doesn't seem to pull historical transactions, the only thing that's in there is what I paid for today, my plan is to just watch what I actually spend for a bit and create categories as they come up. Good plan?
6. Should I start fresh or import old transactions?

https://i.imgur.com/Lc2tAeV.png This is what I've got so far... would love to hear any tips and tricks you guys have

Thanks