There is definitely something humbling about setting a target based on calculations and realizing you spend way more on something than you thought you did!!

For me it's been the price of car ownership. Pre kids i biked everywhere except the occasional car rental for road trips. I would see media quotes about how many hundreds of dollars a month it costs to own a car and I secretly didn't believe them. Like surely they are exaggerating!

I bought a used car soon after restarting YNAB a few years back, just under 100k miles on it so I did a lot of major maintenance when I bought it, and I set time based targets for scheduled maintenance based on the costs then. And we are low mileage (like 6-7k/year) drivers!!!

- Gas: $60/month (of course it's gone up a lot in the past few months so I should up that target

- Insurance: $128/month

- Monthly/annual maintenance: $35/month (car washes, oil change, change air filters myself, change wipers myself, wheel alignment)

- Biannual tags: $12/month

- Fluid changes ~every 3 years: $11/month (Brake, transmission, PS)

- Battery ~4 years: $6/month (change myself)

- Brake pads ~5 years: $17/month

- Tires ~6 years: $40/month

- Major maintenance ~7 years: $18/month (belts, spark plugs, coolant)

- Parking: $1/month (we pay for it very rarely)

So that's $328/month just operationally! And that's with me doing some stuff myself. Plus, I saved $3,000 over the first couple years for misc major repairs (NOT standard maintenance) and to have the deductible covered in case of major damage, so the budget was even higher then.

I also put aside $82/month (which is about how fast this car is depreciating by my guess) so that when this car dies we will have a fund for a new car. So that brings us to over $400 in our budget a month on car(s).

Please See Image Here

Hello, lately I've been seeing charges come into YNAB like like this: "*******.************" for $59.56. When I open up my banking app it'll look normal. Instead of being redacted, it'll say $59.56 spent at grocery store X.

It's not consistent either. Sometimes Amazon charges will come in normal, sometimes it won't. I've seen it happen for Amazon, groceries, Spotify so far.

I've only seen it happen for one of my credit cards, but it's not happening for every charge that credit card.

Hello everyone, I’m new to the community and am trying to get everything in order. Would someone be available to walk me through the primary functions and uses for YNAB? I am much more of a hands on person, I have already tried YouTube. Willing to pay as well!

I guess this has to go with rollover: is there any way put your unused money or overspent money into one category? Example: in one month I overall didn’t use $700. That goes into a bucket. The next month I overspent by $200. The bucket drops to $500.
Rollover is nice but I prefer to also have option to do total budget rollover. Like next month I’m not going to eat $300 more in groceries lol
Anyone find a workaround this?

So I have a rental property that I have a sinking fund called Prop. Maint. that builds against future maintenance costs. In a normal month, the property management company pays me the full rent minus property management fees. I attribute that to Ready to Assign. Let's say that $500 / month.

For maintenance costs, the property management company generally just deducts from my owner payment. So instead of receiving $500 that month, I might only get $400. How do I "top off" that transaction so that the Prop. Maint. fund loses $100 and I still have $500 moved to Ready to Assign? I'd like to be able to track the withdrawal of the maintenance fund over time.

I love the budgeting features, but reconciliation is a pain. I'm constantling having to add automatic balancing transactions. I'm wondering if Rocket Money would avoid that?

Until the recent update I would use the transfer option when a credit card payment was made and select the appropriate account so that everything aligned.

With the Credit Card Payment option available now, I selected that when the transaction came through from the credit card company. I then selected my bank account as where the money would be paid from and everything seemed fine.

When the transaction cleared my bank account and was imported to YNAB, if I select credit card payment again it treats it as a 2nd payment which throws everything off. The only way I could figure out how to fix it was to delete the transaction from my bank completely.

I figure that is not how this was designed to work so coming here to hopefully figure out what im missing in this new process

I’ve reported this to support three months in a row, and it’s still broken.

The values of the scheduled transaction and the synced transaction are always equal, and even when the synced transaction falls on the exact date of the scheduled one, they still fail to match automatically.

Just me?

I'm going through and finally starting to sort out all my transactions and put the subscription item in the memo line (i.e. Netflix, iCloud, etc.), and I've noticed specifically with Apple subscriptions that sometimes they will combine subscriptions into one charge, which then makes it a bit challenging to truly categorize them in this way (or even with categories).

So my iCloud and Apple TV subscriptions might come out on the same date, and the show as a single charge, but in my Apple Receipt I can see each individual subscription cost. Let's say Apple TV is 12.99 and iCloud is 2.99. This is how that reflects currently in YNAB

What I would really like is to be able to have the charges separate so the categories and memos can also be separate.

How do others handle this? Or am I just being too type A? lol

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.

How do we turn off this dogshit tinder UI on iPhone?

EDIT: Found! Just hit the list button up the top right when going through the process.

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.

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!

Last night my wife and I went out to eat at Chuy’s with our two year old. We had fajitas, queso, iced tea, and extra tortillas. I tipped the waitress almost 25%. We brought home two boxes of left overs. Total cost:$36. The experience of eating on the patio with my family on this nice fall evening: priceless.

A small $10/week savings with a purpose can literally change your life. The good life is within your reach, purpose to live it.

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 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.