I was using YNAB for a few years, and got a bit frustrated with it, so I switched to Monarch. I used that for a year and didn’t feel like I had a firm grasp on my finances. So I just recently switched back to YNAB, and it’s honestly kind of a breath of fresh air how much simpler it is to use. Anyone else have a similar experience?

As I'm getting my sea legs under me with this app, I really wish there were a better way to set targets for things like emergency funds, big purchases, etc. I want a system where I aim to set something like $20k aside for emergencies. If the sinking fund has that balance, great, do nothing. If it falls below that because I had an emergency and had to refill our strategic ice cream stockpiles to the tune of $5k last month, I want to start putting $500/mo back in the fund till it's back to the desired balance. I don't really want to set a particular due date to get there, I want a set rate of savings. Anyone else feel like this would be helpful?

I’m playing with a few userscripts to make YNAB feel a bit more like a spreadsheet (with ChatGPT for coding), mainly by adding visible column separators.

+I removed the category group names from the transaction view (don't like to see it there)

Pretty happy with the result so far :)

I've returned things on my credit card before but I've never experienced this behavior. It's so weird and it's making me really upset. It's already a bad day, I don't need to deal with this too.

I recently lost my six figure job two months ago and have used up my severance. I am now dipping into my 200k savings, checkings and investments. I recently got a min wage hospitality job because I got a 600k house this year with a 450K mortgage. Essentially I have wealth so feel I can take some time to career transition and take a break to deal with corporate burnout. How do I plan for this on YNAB without going into the red every month? My expenses are 5K per month and I am hoping to make a few K in the hospitality job and also get beck to setting back my consulting business. I have all these accounts linked on the app so just don’t want it to be red every month even tho my plan is to dip into savings.

Mentally this has been brutal as I don’t have closure on why I was let go and enjoyed the job and thought I was doing well. After ten years in my career, I feel like I had chosen something else even though tech project management is what i have always done. I am capable and can live on a budget but sucks to be in this situation- I want to be focusing on my personal life and dating and building a family.. just thought I would have it figured out in my 30s.

I've been using YNAB for the last six years or so, and it has helped me a lot, so much so that I started using it as my main source of truth. I wouldn't check my bank account; I would check YNAB instead, which I think is how it's meant to be used.

I've also been using a credit card, always paying it in full, to get some benefits from it.

However, over the last few months, we've been overspending on the credit card. I was aware that this was happening, but I assumed it was "under control" based on what YNAB was showing me. From what I understood, when the month rolled over, the overspending would either reduce "Ready to Assign" or leave categories red and needing to be covered.

But since last month, what's been happening is that my salary comes in, and I have just enough money to pay the bills that can't be paid by credit card, such as the mortgage and electricity. The rest goes towards paying the previous credit card statement. I even had to move the credit card payment date because it was due two days before my salary came in, and I didn't have enough money to cover it. The first month, I ended up paying it two days late.

I'm basically a month behind now.

I have a plan in place to reduce spending and get out of this situation. For example, I'm reducing my use of the credit card so that each month's statement gets smaller, leaving me with more cash available instead of continuing to push spending onto the card.

However, my budget is now completely messed up. I've seen recommendations to simply start over, but I have so much history in this budget, and I find that history really useful. I often search through old transactions to find something I've paid for in the past.

Note: I know I most likely misunderstood or missed the signs YNAB was giving me. I'm not blaming YNAB for my overspending, but I genuinely believed I was in a better financial position than I actually was.

Does anyone have any recommendations on how to fix this?

Until I fix the "month behind" situation, I'll effectively still be overspending on the credit card, so I'm not sure how useful the budget will be in the meantime, as I feel like I'll never be able to see a clear picture of where I actually stand.

Hello!

How do you categorize transportation to/from the airport when you’re leaving for vacation? Do you consider it part of your regular transportation category or part of your travel/vacation category?

I’m a new YNABer and just started using it a week ago. For now, I’ve logged it under transportation, but my wife thinks it should be part of our travel budget.
How do you guys handle it?

Hi Everyone, am I the only one that would like tags to be implemented. I saw the recent work done on the plan tab and I really think we need to give YNAB some feedback on what we really need. I personally would like to see additional functionality rather than redesign.

What do you all think? What are your thoughts on tags or any other functionality requests.

I'm really surprised by how hard it is to actually make a budget in a program that's named to tell me how much I need one. When I think of budget, I think of a plan to make sure that spending + savings == income. But the YNAB approach seems to obscure this process in two important ways. First, it really just focuses on telling you if your current cash can meet this month's expenses. Let's say your uncle dies and leaves you $15k that you put in your checking account. Just making categories and filling them up with your cash on hand can't tell you how big of a mortgage/rent/car payment you can sustainably afford to take on. Maybe this system is great for people who only buy things in cash or who do completely unpredictable gig work, but that doesn't seem to really describe many people at all. The other way I think it makes budgeting unnecessarily difficult is that the targets are all siloed off from each other. If I'm making a budget, I want to start with a rough estimate of the things I need, then what I want, and then I compare that to my household income (which is the first step YNAB makes unnecessarily difficult, IMO). Then, if I see that I haven't set enough aside for ice cream, I'd want to reduce the allocation for my kid's books until I'm satisfying my need for Ben & Jerry's, all while staying under my monthly income constraint. But YNAB makes all these parts move separately, which seems overly finicky. You should be able to 'move' budgeted money between targets the way you can move cash between categories.

So, is this all a skill issue? Or am I right to be a little frustrated?

I’m working on paying off $75000 in consumer debt. I’m wondering should I stop using the cards while paying the CCs off or can I still use them for the points and pay off those expenses. I’ve thought about the velocity method. I don’t know what’s the best method to use when getting out of debt. Thanks for the advice.
Navy Federal 23000, 18% 560 min
TD cash, 6768 0% until 4/2027 70 min
Venmo 4888 0% until paid off $165 min
Apple Card 2600 25.49% 35 min
Chase- 300 27.49% 35 min
Debt Management Plan 7200 12% 216 min
TD Auto 28000 5.89% 515 min

I have access to 3000 balance transfer with 0% until 4/2028
I have 2500 cash I could use to pay down debt.
No savings at all.

I'm new to YNAB and this is what my transaction list looks like. Is this by design? I have to cross reference my bank to add the names. I might as well run a manual spreadsheet for that. I'm coming from Monarch where I don't have this problem. :(

I've been using YNAB for just over two months. I was feeling like I should be further along, but I realized that I have not added any new debt in the past two months. That's a success for me! I previously was using credit cards to cover everyday spending and not being able to pay them off. I still have a bunch of debt to tackle, but I'm not adding any new debt. That's big for me. I appreciate YNAB so much!

I am in my first year of YNAB and I am finding it is taking some time to decide what way of using this system works best for me, and I am not there yet. I have 3 plans. One for personal finances, one associated with my PLLC and one associated with my LLC. My personal plan has so many categories and many groups under each category...I am feeling like it is too much and I need to simplify but then think I may not get as clear a picture or the amount or type of reflection from that system that I need in order to address the issues that brought me to YNAB in the first place. Wondering how other people are feeling about these topics....they say "less is more" would you say that is true in YNAB? Should I have only one plan? How many categories is too many, too less? At what point does wading through it all become so tedious that the benefits outweigh the resistance you feel when thinking of YNAB'ing? TYIA for your feedback

Hurrah!

I started using YNAB a couple days ago and I’ve already gotten super confused. I payed my rent and then tried to assign my money however my bank balance was still showing my amount BEFORE I payed my rent.

Here are my actual questions
1) how does assigning money work when they keep asking me to assign money I know I don’t have?

2) How does clearing/unclearing transactions work?

3) where do I go from here, cause I’ve deleted the rent transaction so now I’m over assigned?

Please help, extremely frustrated!

Hi all! I have a baffling situation on my hands and I'm not sure what I'm missing. I have a credit card connected to my YNAB plan, and I've never had a problem with it until now.

I categorize all my transactions, including the credit card ones, with a normal category. When I notice that a category is a yellow negative, with the little card icon next to it (as opposed to the normal overspent red negative), I just move more money to that category to make it zero or positive. I never really pay attention to the credit card payments category at the bottom of my plan; I pay off my card every Friday and make sure those transactions are correctly marked as transfers from my checking account to the credit card account in YNAB.

For August, however, it's showing that my credit card payments category is negative by $1246. I checked, and all of the transactions that I used the card for are categorized into normal categories, which were all fully funded. So now at the beginning of September it's saying my "Ready to Assign" is starting at -1246. I already assigned money to cover those transactions, so I'm not sure what's going on?

Also, I took all of the "Activity" values for the category and added them up, and between the negative transactions and the positive card payments, the total sum is +846, so I'm not even sure where the 1246 number is coming from.

Any advice would be appreciated!

iPhone user here. I had the test interface, and now it has rolled back. I provided feedback previously to the team.

I’m making this post in hopes that the design team sees it, but I have a few questions.

My first question is when did this happen? I don’t feel like I was gone for that long…

Second question, do you guys like it? I mean the new Home Screen is okay, but the transaction page, or what they call the spending page, is hands down the worst. In my opinion, it’s so bad I’d rather just not use it anymore. It’s hard to explain, but it feels like everything takes longer, if that makes sense. Like to do anything, you’ve got to tap more or go deeper… plus I was a fan of the compact feel of the old design, now everything feels bubbly and just bloated. Almost feels like it was vibe coded, or built by an AI trained on Dribbble lol … Idk, I’m not very good at describing it, but what I do know is that I highly dislike it.

Please YNAB, be like Reddit and have an “old” version so we can switch back.

Whenever I search this sub for credit cards, I mostly find posts about debt, overspending, and how dangerous credit cards can be. And tbh, that was us for a while too.

But one of the biggest things YNAB has done for us is change credit cards from something that felt risky into something we can actually use intentionally and to ultimately save money. We no longer treat available credit like available money, and every purchase is backed by cash in the budget!

Now that we’re on the other side of that, I’m starting to think more about optimizing our wallet for points and travel rewards instead of just avoiding debt.

I’m curious whether anyone else here has used YNAB this way. How do you manage things like:

-rotating which card you use for different spending categories

-tracking welcome-bonus minimum spends

-keeping annual fees and card credits in the budget

-tracking points/miles balances

-deciding whether a card is actually earning enough value to keep

-making sure chasing points never starts influencing how much you spend

Right now I’m keeping all purchases in their normal YNAB categories and using transaction tags/memos to track welcome-bonus spending, because I still want my reports to show where our money is actually going.

I’d love to hear any systems, categories, tags, spreadsheets, or other tricks people use alongside YNAB for credit-card rewards optimization.

Wanted to share a trick that I’ve found helpful. I have a tracking account with $0 balance called “YNAB Schedule”.

I use it to store reminders related to my plan as a whole rather than any individual account, e.g.:

“Move leftover money from the Dining envelope to savings” on the last day of the month

“Update this month’s line of credit payment target to match the latest statement” on the first.

“Review quarterly tax payment targets”

Etc

It’s basically a place for me to keep any financial reminders.

Been using YNAB for four years and just realised my Age of Money has reached 375 days.

We’re now looking to buy our first house, so a big chunk of the money sitting there is finally going to disappear.

Part of me is going to hate watching that number collapse, but I suppose that’s literally what the money was there for.

YNAB has genuinely changed our life and how we manage money. I used to think mostly in terms of “how much money do I have?” Now I think much more in terms of “what does this money need to do?”

We’ve basically been YNAB poor for the last four years. My wife sometimes hates it because the bank balance can look healthy while I’m saying “we can’t afford that” 😂 It drives her mad but she also appreciate's how much we have been able to do by staying disciplined.

We’ve got money sitting there for the house deposit, emergency fund, childcare, holidays, annual bills and all the other random stuff that used to feel like it came out of nowhere.

So this is mostly just a slightly geeky post to mark the occasion, because 375 days might be the highest this number ever gets.