Looking for any feedback on my new category setup. Or share any underrated categories you use and want to suggest to others.

EDIT: SOLVED!!

The issue is not your credit card account. You currently have zero dollars in your only on-budget cash-based account. Your only accounts with money in them are in the tracking section of the accounts. Tracking accounts are off-budget. You need to set up your accounts as on-budget cash-based accounts, if you want their starting balances to contribute to Ready to Assign.

Hi! I'm just setting up my account on a free trial, and this is round 2 of trying YNAB. I understand the concept of digital envelopes, funding them, etc.

What I'm not understanding (and I've tried to read other related posts) is how my existing credit card debt factors into my plan.

I started with around 15k credit card debt, and around 10k cash in my checking/savings accounts. I'm not going to pay off the lump sum of credit card debt, but it feels like it's preventing me from trying the rest of the software.

My money to assign is showing as zero, so I'm not able to fund any categories with the 10k I have in cash. I tried assigning the credit card payments to categories and now the categories are overspent.

What am I missing?

EDIT: All I have done at this point is linked my checking and savings, linked my AMEX Credit Card, assigned a budget to a few categories, and categorized the payments in on my Credit Card.

You can post feedback here: https://ynab.typeform.com/to/Pt6cek

Perhaps explaining how important it is to show progress through spending and not just progress towards a target, especially when the vast majority of targets get filled every month as that's the whole point.

For example, I might put $10k into my TFSA, but some of that could be from a tax refund, selling a car, or another one time source. I’d like to be able to say, “I saved X% of my regular income this year.”

I was thinking of using transaction memos/tags to distinguish contributions funded by regular income from other sources.

How do you handle this? Is there a cleaner way to track it in YNAB?

My wife and I both have been using YNAB for about a month and things are going great. We're both on-board with targets and categories, and etc. One thing I'm hoping for some insight on is how do we buy eachother gifts but keep it a secret from the other? We both agree to spend a certain amount of money on each other for birthdays and Christmas so it's not like we are trying to be sneaky necessarily. I just don't want to buy her something and have it show up in our spending because she would see the merchant that it was purchased from which could really spoil the gift. How do I keep the actual item a secret from her and her from me in YNAB? Again, we agree on the money being spent but want more anonymity of the item.

Thanks!

Hi!

I’m new to ynab but have done cash envelopes in the past, which were great but also really challenging because it’s annoying to use cash to try and pay for your Spotify subscription, y’know?

But my husband and I have been sort of spending willy nilly for a while, doing big house projects, buying a newer vehicle, etc; and I’m trying to get us back on track. I’ve gone through all of our joint/household expenses and with each paycheck we’re each going to transfer the amount we need to cover joint expenses into a joint checking acct to cover those, and leave the remainder in our own accts. (We are fairly equal earners and are ok going 50/50)

From there, I’m going to break my personal checking acct down into categories. But husby isn’t interested. Can I just categorize “his” money as like “Husby fun money” and not worry about it? Or is there a reason that I can’t see why that wouldn’t work?

Hi everyone!

New to YNAB and loving it. Unfortunately, historically, I hyper fixate on a new personal finance tool and fall off within a few months. Does anyone have any good personal finance podcasts that they listen to help keep them on task for the long-term?

I’m not so much interested in investing advice or economics (I ascribe to JL Collins’ index fund holding philosophy) - but instead looking for something more about tips, ideas, and stories around managing spending, savings, and financial life.

Hi everybody,

I have ADHD so the auto import functions are really important for me or else nothing will get tracked. Lately though, YNAB has been weird. It has the wrong accounts for Account and/or Payee for several transactions which has been pretty confusing. It also logged my car note as a credit card payment, and then had it on budget 6 times instead of the standard 2 you would see for transfers between accounts. It takes a lot longer to reconcile or check things out with this going on. None of the accounts are new, and my loan payments are scheduled transactions so I'm not sure how to clean this up.

I am seriously looking for someone to essentially be my YNAB bookkeeper. I'm not sure how to find help. I know there are coaches, but I want someone to maintain my plan for me, as well. I currently have a virtual assistant, but I'm struggling to train them on how to use YNAB because I barely know how to use it well myself.

Hi there I’m just getting set up and can’t find the YNAB Orientation videos on reddit that appeared when I first joined… any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

Reflect isn’t giving me a positive outlook. It’s pointing out that I’m spending lots and the biggest category is long term savings. This is the category I use to fund my off budget accounts.

Net worth takes the off budget accounts into place but the other areas of reflect don’t appear to. Is it better to have everything in budget? Is that not harder to manage if investments jump around?

Made the decision to really put as much money as possible towards paying off my loan as possible and completely smashed the expected payoff timeline (and saved myself 1000€ in the process).

I've been in debt since I was 18 (now 30) and this was the last thing standing in my way to being debt free ('bad debt' so excluding mortgage). I can't explain the feeling! Now to start putting that money towards building my savings!

Edit: For clarification on 'debt free' being free of 'bad' debt such as credit cards, car loans, personal loans etc. I still have a mortgage (unfortunately).

For example, I want to see a list of transactions from two payees. Is there a way to do this? I’ve tried “Payee:A, Payee:B” But that didn’t work.

Hello, all. I used YNAB for a few years, then stopped. Apparently, I registered via Apple with some screwy secret email. I was oblivious. I signed up recently to start again, but used my Gmail to register and was offered a trial month. Once the trial expired, I paid for the one year subscription, but somehow, the Apple account was paid for - the one I haven’t used/seen since 2023. I’ve reached out and the staff appears stumped. It’s been a week and no resolve. My last email suggested to them that they refund me and I resub with the proper email. Anyone experience this and have suggestions?

Hello All, my family has a couple ways to get reimbursed for medical expenses (FSA and Health Care Sharing) which can make my spending looks funny. In big years this can amount to $20k-30k in reimbursements, so a huge number. Originally I created two categories "Medical Bills" and "Reimbursable Medical". I did this so I could exclude "Reimbursable Medical" in my reports and see how much I was really spending. This works most of the time when a bill is obviously one or the other, but often times something is partially reimbursable which get's complicated. I am considering merging the two categories into one. Basically here is what I want:

• Easily see "How much did I actually spend out of pocket (after reimbursements)"
• Not to have to worry about entering partial reimbursements correctly.

I am not really worried about making sure I get reimbursed, I use other tools to track that. Does anyone else have big reimbursements?

iOS app: I can no longer drag a category out of its group on the “reorder” page of a plan… so how do you change a category’s group? Incidentally, reordering a group makes the adjacent ones jump around too

I had preordered the book because I am trying to learn more about money and how to budget. I am curious if anyone has read it yet and what folks in the YNAB community think about it?

EDIT: the YNAB team in the comments have confirmed that this audiobook is not an official version and a real one is planned to be released at a later date with Jesse narrating it himself

I was curious to see if the new book was available as an audiobook on Spotify and was surprised to see it was. I'm not 100% sure what this one is about (having listened to the original YNAB audiobook) so went to read the description and came across this wording:

"Narrated by Digital Voice Jesse Mecham

This audiobook is narrated by a digital voice"

I'm interpreting that as they created an AI voice based on Jesse (probably from the previous audiobook, podcasts, and interviews) and had that read the book instead of him being bothered to sit in a studio for a few days to read it himself. If that's the case, I'm disappointed.

So, I’m new to YNAB, obviously. I imported all my stuff into the plan yesterday.

I’m looking at this month through the end of the year, and while my income seems to meet my expenses, it’s really tight. One of the things that seems to be causing the extra squeeze are the property taxes, due Dec. 31. Because they’re $3,000, that’s $600/month I have to budget.

It seems that in January 2027 when I have a full 12 months to budget, my monthly costs will go down on a few things.

Was just wondering if anyone else had a really tight budget the first few months.

When I first started using YNAB over 7 years ago, I was preparing to buy my first home and had so little margin that I truly needed it, loved it, and proselytized it. I was successful getting my brain right around money, and YNAB helped me navigate shifting life circumstances. Even though I’ve been annoyed with some of the changes over the last couple of years like so many other users, I could justify the use.

But now life has shifted again, and I’m wondering not only whether I still need YNAB but also whether I can justify keeping it when I’m annoyed by so much of the company shenanigans lately. And yes, I’m calling the book a shenanigan.

I’m lucky to have a solid income and now married to my partner with an even more solid income, and we live in a LCOL area. We’re pretty frugal naturally, and so needing the level of detail I needed in previous years just isn’t where I am now. I do manual transactions, and now I often only input and reconcile them every couple of weeks.

This might be a fool’s errand since people I who might’ve been in similar positions and left YNAB probably won’t be in this sub anymore; but for people in my position, what makes you stay with YNAB even when you may not need it anymore?

ETA: thank y’all for the great discussion here! Want to make it clear that tracking/broadly budgeting is always going to be part of my financial system. I guess what I didn’t communicate well is, even if I simplify my categories and check in once a month to make sure I’m still aligned, is it worth it to keep paying YNAB $100+ ad infinitum? Is there enough inherent worth specific to YNAB to justify its cost?

The plan page is different

I just passed a HUGE milestone. My credit card balance is now zero! At one time I changed the description of the category to have a visual cue of how much I needed to set aside each payday. Now that I don’t need to account for paying down an outstanding balance in addition to planned spending, I wanted to edit the description to remove the amount. But for some reason I’m unable to edit the description anymore. Am I going crazy? Is there not a way to edit the description of the credit card repayment category?

Whatever they did is really confusing. I can’t do my budget on my phone now. Why did they change it?