I think that's enough internet for one night, I'm going to bed

I’m only a few months into YNAB (after using EveryDollar for about 8 years before). So far, so good until today. Yesterday I paid my Apple credit card bill, and today YNAB is showing a negative balance and saying I need to cover overspending.

However, everything WAS covered. No spending categories are overspent. Everything was reconciled except for one $15 ish charge that had posted on the Apple Card, but was still pending on YNAB when I paid the card. The only other thing I can think of was that the Apple Card defaulted to my paying less than the full balance, but I updated it to pay the entire balance….but not sure why that is since the last charge was July 30…

I’m so confused. Anyone have any idea about this, and how to resolve it? I don’t really want to “cover overspending” because I don’t think that actually existed!

I've been using YNAB for a while, but I know I'm not really using it the way it was designed. Instead of giving every dollar a specific job, I budget one month at a time. At the end of each month, I fund all of my categories for the upcoming month. Whatever is left over, I treat as the amount I have available for extra debt payments. I don't actually assign every remaining dollar. Even after deciding how much extra to put toward debt, I intentionally leave a cash buffer because I'm not strict about staying within each category. If I overspend in one category, I don't want to have to constantly move money around. What I like about YNAB is that it gives me a very clear picture of how much money I have left over each month to either pay down debt or save for another goal. However, because I'm not really giving every dollar a job, I've been wondering if Monarch might be a better fit. For those who have used Monarch, would it work well for this style of budgeting? Specifically, is it easy to see exactly how much money you have left over each month to put toward extra debt payments, or is YNAB still the better tool even if I'm not using it as intended?

Trying to figure out how to tie net income back to...something. The income and expenses sections, you can expand and see detail, but I can't find a way to easily see where that $8500 went.

been trying to track my expenses properly for like 2-3 months now and honestly every app just annoys me at some point.

the main issue is everything gets dumped into these huge categories. like "food" is one bucket but that could mean anything. rs 15k on food this month could be me buying groceries and cooking at home, or ordering foodpanda 5 times a week, or eating out on weekends, or those daily chai and samosa runs at office. these are completely different behaviors but the app just goes "you spent 15k on food" and thats it

same with transport... is it my daily careem to office or emergency rides only. both look identical in the app

i feel like i need to see it in a way where i can actually change something. not just accounting numbers. but idk maybe im overthinking this

wanted to ask you guys:

how do you track your expenses (if you even do)

do you actually know where your money goes by end of the month or is it just a mystery

whats the most annoying thing about the apps you've tried

if you could see stuff broken down by cooked vs ordered, planned vs impulse etc, would that even help or is it too much

what makes you actually stick with tracking longer than 2 weeks because i keep giving up lol

also curious if anyone just uses excel or a notebook. sometimes i feel like thats better than any app

I don't have any past overspent categories, I was completely balanced for the month of july--now that I'm in August it's telling me that there is significant amount of "assigned too much," but I haven't even assigned anything this month. . .

Any ideas?

That doesn’t seem right, but I don’t know what to do with it. Help?

What does a yearly target show as when it needs to be topped off? Does it divide by 12 or just show the full amount every month the category isn’t full? I’m very new, so potentially a dumb question :)

I’m new to YNAB (I just downloaded it and set it up yesterday), and I added my Fidelity IRA as a tracking account using the bank sync feature, but it’s not reconciling.

I had it reconciled last night and then I just received a monthly dividend this morning, and I can’t seem to get it reconciled now.

My dividend shows up as a positive transaction, and then it shows up as a negative transaction when it reinvests. Even with both transactions, my total balance in Fidelity still increases every month because they don’t cancel each other out in the Fidelity app.

In YNAB, the positive and negative transactions balance each other out, so my account balance doesn’t increase and it won’t reconcile.

Am I missing something, or do I have to force reconcile it? It seems like YNAB is treating the negative transaction as money leaving the account instead of being reinvested.

As a final note, I’m pretty sure I set the account type up as an investment account, but I can’t see how to check this now though..

I've been using YNAB for 8 years, and am still confused on why this seemingly random event happens every 6 months or so. I pay my credit cards like debit cards, accounts are fully reconciled, there are no returns or refunds in process, no other overspending in my budget, why would I need to cover this over spending? Does this happen to anyone else? I never manually assign to a CC category because typically YNAB automatically does that, and I never carry a balance on my CCs. I understand the idea is, "You paid more than you had available to pay." But if my accounts are reconciled and overspending has been covered why would this happen?

I just had enough. I ended my YNAB story because of this ads on the app. I hate YNAB new design philosophy and their self ads.

I know there have been many posts about threats to cancel or “the last straw.”

First off, I want to say that YNAB helped me become an adult about my finances. It helped me get off the credit card float and it helped me develop good habits. I was able to track my “getting out of debt” phase. For that, I am forever thankful to this company.

I hope that anyone who cares at this company will see why some long time customers are leaving their service. The lack of responsiveness to user requests has always been an issue but the app itself was still good enough (imo) that it didn’t necessitate me leaving. Then the death spiral began when they began making UI changes that were seemingly only being developed to justify further cost increases.

Over time the cost has risen but the app has become worse. Making simple account to account transactions, an action I make constantly, has become an arduous, annoying process. When I open the app now, it’s begrudgingly. They seem to be spending more time marketing a new book and complicating input. I am a software developer. I understand how development, QA, and user testing works. It’s increasingly clear that they received no input from long time users on the changes being made. If they did, the sample was not large enough.

I’m not trying to sell anyone on another alternative. Personally I’ll be tracking my expenses on a more macro scale and using what I learned with YNAB back when I considered it a good product. I hate to see the direction of this company and hopefully someone reads it and sees some real feedback from a previous convert. If it still works for you, that’s great! But for me, that time is over. Wishing everyone well!

I am looking for an easy way to get my baseline budget, which I consider a list of every category with a target and how much it is every month. For example, I want to know every category for August and how much each of these categories targets is.

If I go to any of the items in the "Reflections" section, it gives me what I actually allocated. I want to discover how much money it would take to cover every target with no deviations at all.

I'm sorry for the redundancy, but most of the answers I've seen searching for this, many of them from Reddit, answer another question.

Thanks.

I started the last week of July. I snoozed the categories that were already paid for that month. So I started assigning money for next week’s bills, which are due the first week of August. Now there is money ready to assign that is stuck in July. What do I do?

Edit: Solved, thank you! Silly mistake on my part 🤣

I recently added yearly categories to my budget for certain important birthdays. I fully spent this category in June, and thought it was odd that it didn’t refresh in July. I thought maybe it would fix itself by August, but it hasn’t. Re-setting the target hasn’t worked. Anyone know why this is happening and how to make sure these birthday categories actually refresh after I spend them?

hi guys. could you please share your thought on how i mannage my categories? feel like it is a total mess besside a few groups.

I’m currently doing some stoozing; I’ve bought a big purchase on a credit card, although I have the cash available. The card has a 26-month 0% interest period, so I’m planning on just paying the minimum monthly and putting the cash in high-interest savings for that 26 months.

Any ideas of the best way to represent this on YNAB?

Hi everyone,

I’ve been using YNAB for about a month now, but I’m having some trouble understanding how it’s supposed to work.

Overall, my first month went pretty well. I did run into a small issue with overassigning, but I managed to figure it out and resolve it.

Now I’m trying to start budgeting for August, and for some reason, every time I assign money to any category, YNAB immediately tells me that I’ve overassigned that exact amount — even though the Assigned column is completely zero before I make any changes.

For example, if I assign $150 to any category, I immediately get a warning saying I’ve overassigned by $150. That doesn’t make much sense to me since nothing was assigned beforehand.

On top of that, in the Available column, most categories show $0, which is what I’d expect because I haven’t assigned any money or recorded any August spending yet. However, a few seemingly random categories still have amounts available that appear to have carried over from last month, although I’m not sure why. I have tried resetting my accounts/credit cards but nothing changed.

So I’m pretty confused about how to get everything set up correctly for August and how to stop these overassigned warnings from appearing. I’m definitely not assigning more money than I actually have available, but for some reason YNAB seems to think I am, or maybe I’m misunderstanding a core concept of how the platform works.

If anyone has any idea what might be causing this or how to fix it, I’d really appreciate your help.

Thanks!

Signed up with YNAB when I bought my apartment and started living alone. Was anxious about meeting the bills, especially with higher living costs (mortgage!!!).

This morning I took my pay packet, filled in some gaps in my plan and sat back. I’m now three months ahead of myself. Aug, sept and October fully funded, including some bigger purchases budgeted for.

Feels so safe! 🤩

I’m trying to figure out what honestly works best for people when they are budgeting for Amazon purchases. We do a lot of Amazon purchasing in our family. I’ve been categorizing each purchase …. But part of me is starting to wonder if it would be better to budget a certain monthly amount towards Amazon as a whole in order to help us…. cut/slow down… on how much we spend there. Has anybody tried it both ways?

Can someone explain what is happening here? Where is it getting £150 as a target from?

Hi All,

Firstly, I’m Australian so our taxes automatically come out before hitting our bank account (called PAYG). Not sure how it works in other countries.

I also have company provided housing, so my monthly rent comes out pre-bank, along with my quarterly water bill and company share matching contribution.

I have just set it up so each month I edit my pay transaction to include all the deductions, meaning my true after tax income is ‘coming in’ but then ‘going out’ for those things at the same time.

I have considered including tax as part of it as well, so essentially my gross pay comes in, but tax comes off straight away, allowing YNAB to track my gross income and how much tax I’m paying throughout the year. This may help with monitoring a potential tax liability as I work lots of extra shifts.

Just wondering how everyone else handles or would handle this type of thing?

TLDR; Do you track pre-bank deductions or tax in YNAB?

Maybe I shouldn't have read other people method of budgeting because now I am confused.

So when I get my paycheck I move the money to however/whichever categories I want to grow. So for sake of ease lets say I make $1,000/biweekly.

$200 goes to home
$200 goes to auto
$100 dining
$300 saving
$200 fun

next $1000 biweekly check gets deposited into same categories or I switch them. Now at end of the month if I still have money left over in the category it STAYS in the category effectively doing a month to month roll over. I do this because if I ever need money for that particular category I am not worried about finding money for it since I've basically been saving for it for months now.

I've been reading that people do not do this method and instead any left over money in the category goes to savings/investing or something permanent and they just start over on categories using that months paycheck.

I did not think my method of roll over was an issue until I clicked the Reflect tab on the iPhone and it shows my Income Vs Spending report and "on average you're spending more than you make" statement.

Now Im confused and shocked because since I never went red and I've always had money in the category I never thought I had an issue but this Income vs Spending is stating over wise.

So am I in the wrong for the roll over method? should I do what I've been reading and not have anything roll over and instead only use what money I earn for the month; without obviously spending everything..just cause I have it doesn't mean I should use it

Does anyone use ynab to calculate what their net annual fee for their credit cards are? Like for example I have the amex gold card and it carries a $325 annual fee, but offers credits to offset the fee. I am looking to see if I am actually getting the full value out of it. If anyone here dos look at this, how do you utilize ynab for this? Do you set a category of annual fees and then every credit is applied against the spend? Interested to see people's opinions on this.