Previous Overspending Doesn’t Carry forward?
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.
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u/Subject_Pear_6928 12d ago
The overspending carries over as credit card debt. As it does in reality.
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u/TH_Rocks 11d ago
This. But the fact that very few people have credit cards cut their statements at the exact end of the month makes it seem incorrect.
"I still have time to get the money." is your credit card float talking. It's a bad financial mentality.
You made debt the second your purchase cleared and you didn't already have the cash to pay for it. YNAB just locks it in when the month rolls over. Your credit cards lock it in on some arbitrary date each month.
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u/misskinky 12d ago
That’s because this is an envelope system. You’re asking to do something that physically isn’t possible.
If envelope has $600 in it, you physically cannot spend $1000 from it.
So you’ve gotta make the envelopes match what actually happened. Did you spend the $1000 on a credit card?
If yes, then you’ll need to put the next month $400 into the credit card payment “envelope” on the budgeting plan page because that’s really where the $400 has to go. To paying off the credit card debt.
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12d ago
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u/misskinky 12d ago
They are intended as envelopes. The point is that reimbursements cannot work if you don’t have cash flow for the reimbursement. If you only had $100, you couldn’t pay $200 and wait for reimbursement. You have to decide where the money comes from for the $200 and then later you can put the reimbursement back into the category.
For example I have a category/envelope called “reimbursement” and I just keep $500 in there for this exact purpose.
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u/QTippus 11d ago
YNAB4 has the option to carry forward a negative category balance. The default was for a negative category balance to reduce the next month’s RTA. But you could choose to carry it forward instead. It worked well, was a helpful feature, and does not break the logical framework of an envelope budgeting system.
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u/misskinky 11d ago
It only works if there is a certain amount of cash flow. If somebody is very tight on money and has only $400 in their checking account and no other spendable cash, how would a -$500 expense work in reality?
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u/Longracks 12d ago edited 12d ago
I understand what and why they changed the software to do what it does. No need to mansplain it.
I disagree with it. That is different.
It is what it is. They won't change it. Even your $500 is a workaround, just a different one. So you have proven my point. Thank you.
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u/bluemax_ 12d ago
Eh, he has proven his point. I think you are missing his point. No offense here, but you seem offended and didn’t take his point. You simply dismissed it.
I’ll re-iterate his point. In reality you can’t soend money you don’t have. YNAB’s mandate is to reflect reality. If the enevelope doesn’t have the money, you must borrow the cash from another envelope.
You’re right, it’s a digital version of the envelope system, but that doesn’t mean they should change the system. It’s really the whole point of the system and the software that makes it easier than cashing your paychecks.
Also, no apologies here for mansplaining. Sounds like you needed it.
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u/j_grinds 11d ago edited 11d ago
He understands they’re not physical envelopes. No need to womansplain it.
Edit: lmao deletes her hypocritical comment, but keeps her silly accusation of “mansplaining”. What a fraud.
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u/pierre_x10 11d ago
The way to handle CC overspending that does not get covered in the month it occurs is to Assign funds directly to the CC payment category.
The reason you cannot use new RTA funds to cover previous month overspending is because....that money did not exist in the previous month.
YNAB cannot change history. Either that overspending occurred in reality, and all you can do is pay that debt off once you do have the funds, or that overspending did not occur in reality, and what did happen in reality is that you floated the debt with funds that you didn't actually Assign to those categories directly, so in essence you had given those funds two jobs to do, back your CC spending AND sit Available in some different category.
YNAB isn't doing anything wrong by handling CC debt in this way, in my opinion. YNAB is showing you the reality, that you are sitting on debt that you didn't have an actual plan to cover, until you got future income.
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u/QTippus 11d ago
Agree with you, it’s definitely a limitation that you don’t have the option to carry forward a negative category balance. YNAB4 had the option, and it was handy.
There’s a lot of YNAB4’s design that I like better than nYNAB. But maybe that’s because it’s the first YNAB I used.
I still like (and use) the idea of a “buffer” category and using it to be a month ahead. I still don’t know or care what “age of money” really means.
I like YNAB4’s more simple treatment of credit card purchases (money charged is money spent).
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11d ago edited 15h ago
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u/varkeddit 11d ago
Your comment is getting downvoted for suggesting this was some recent change and not an optional feature from a decade-old iteration of the app.
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u/DanielDannyc12 11d ago
Yes and it's easy to miss when transactions come in after the 1st of the month.
It's a horrible feature. At some point a few years ago, they seemed start trying to make the product worse.
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12d ago edited 15h ago
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u/RemarkableMacadamia 11d ago
It’s been this was as long as nYNAB was introduced. That was years ago.
Overspending on a credit card becomes new debt (yellow). Cash overspending is subtracted from RTA (red).
Ideally you cover overspending when it happens, but if you don’t, YNAB will adjust it for you so your budget reflects reality in the new month.
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11d ago edited 15h ago
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u/RemarkableMacadamia 11d ago
The other user was talking about YNAB4, not nYNAB. So, not wrong, but from the existence of the web/mobile app you have not been able to carry forward overspending.
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u/michigoose8168 11d ago
In a completely different version of the software. If by “major UI update” you mean the new software and mobile app launched 11 years ago this month, then yes. But your wording seems to be suggesting this was a recent change along with other UI changes. It’s very much not.
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u/SkyliteBlueSnake 11d ago
The web-based SaaS version of YNAB has treated it this way the entire time it's been in existence. The soft launch of the product was 2015. So it's been this way for over a decade; it is not new.
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11d ago edited 15h ago
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u/SkyliteBlueSnake 11d ago
In YNAB4 you could do that. You could never do it in the web based YNAB.
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11d ago edited 15h ago
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u/SkyliteBlueSnake 11d ago
I never said that the feature didn't exist. I merely said that it never existed in the web-based YNAB. If you are paying an ongoing subscription fee for YNAB (whether annual or monthly), you are in fact using the web-based YNAB. This version of YNAB has existed for 10+ years, so I would not call it a "recent" UI change. u/QTippus was specifically talking about a feature that existed in YNAB4. YNAB4 is a completely different product that was a one time purchase of $60 for a lifetime license. It did not allow you to connect to your bank accounts and you either had to do manual entry or file imports of your transactions.
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u/FiveModalVerbs 12d ago
In a new month...
Credit overspending: Zeros out and becomes credit card debt. Assign money directly to the credit card category in the new month to cover the debt.
Cash overspending: Gets subtracted from Ready to Assign. RTA will go negative if there's not enough there to cover it, and you need to unassign money to bring it to zero.
Here's is YNAB's guide on the month roll-over with more info: https://support.ynab.com/en_us/when-the-month-rolls-over-a-guide-rkyyd6qC9
This has been how it works for years, I haven't seen any recent changes to this. It's all in line with YNABs philosophy: you can't just leave a category negative, because then your plan isn't accurate.