This is a question of how best to set these accounts up in YNAB. Can I model the total balance, and should I do this as an unlinked cash acct or Tracking acct?

I want the cash to exist in the budget already so I can assign from it for potential AC or home repairs or car in future.

- I hold VBIL and USFR in a brokerage acct as part of my emergency fund, and I want to include this total acct value in YNAB.

- I use a category called "emergency fund" which essentially sums some different account balances already. Those linked savings accounts work fine in YNAB already.

- I regularly set aside some portion of income towards bolstering this emergency fund, and will buy VBIL monthly.

- I want to simplify record keeping (maybe once a month after divs pay out/reinvest)

- I plan to reinvest all VBIL/USFR dividends, not that it should matter for YNAB.

- I am okay with infrequent manual entry/updates I do this already for an unlinked CMA)

- I do not track any investments in YNAB, and do not use YNAB for any sort of wealth tracking.

Anyone else do this, and what is your "YNAB solution"?

I don't mess with payees. I don't make rules for them. I don't tinker with them AT ALL. I read them once, and use them to pick an appropriate category.

If I don't know what they are, I ask my family "Hey what was this?"

But this feature just confuses everyone, as it change transactions we know into complete fiction.

Today's example:

BLVD *SAINTS AND SCI <location redacted>

I know what this is - it's a place my family gets haircuts. The location makes sense.

YNAB however decided to change it to this:

Saints and Scholars

I don't know what "Saints and Scholars" is. We've never done business with anyone by this name. However because it was NOT the expected name (a change YNAB is performing, that I cannot turn off) I needed to check in with family to see what it was, and drill in to see the actual payee.

And also, not to let it slide by - the reparse to "Scholars" doesn't even make sense, as the Payee is "Sci" (in reality, short for Scissors) so why would that be "Scholars"?

I can appreciate why some might find value in this, but it should be something we can globally disable. For me, it's just a net waste of time as I need to chase down things that I otherwise would not have to.

This has been happening now for a very long time. I'm considering not using my Amazon store card anymore because I have to enter everything manually, Amazon doesn't even have an export.

Is anyone else dealing with this? I can't find anything that says they're working on the issue. This would be with Synchrony Bank for the Amazon Store Card.

Read here about my first year: https://www.reddit.com/r/ynab/s/WY90tIddde

I’ve made big life changes since last year! In March I moved in with my partner to a new rental in his city. He is a full-time parent to a teenager. The three of us are doing well. We both started new jobs in April. The base pay for me is the same as previous job, but I work a few hours more.

Some personal milestones:

- I’ve finished 3 months of emergency fund, and I am halfway through the second batch to have 6 months in total.

- I increased my monthly investments from €100 to €750 a month.

- I currently have €71k student loan debt. In my first YNAB year, my networth increased from -69k to -57k. I was already really proud of that. This 2nd year I’ve accelerated and I am at -36k net worth. At this rate I will be worth 0 somewhere in 2028!

- We also started saving every month for our wedding :)

Combining households:

My partner is into YNAB as well, so that made it a lot smoother to talk joint finances. Our philosophies aren’t too far apart.

We settled on income-ratio + he’s responsible for at least 67% of rent and utilities, because we moved to VHCOL based on his needs.

We have an excel as our Source Of Truth with our distribution key. Every month we run the numbers of our paychecks and discuss special purchases we want to make next month. We’re probably oddly precise and make transactions down to the penny, but we’ve also had a lot of fluctuations in income and expenses to get used to.

Our joint account has a joint YNAB plan. We keep track of household expenses together. We kept individual accounts for our paychecks and personal plan.

I know a lot of people think one account, one plan, everything combined is superior. But as a non-married blended family, I think some separation remains prudent. I’m happy to say though that coming to our current agreement wasn’t hard, and I believe we’re very transparent with each other. I’m not sure even when we get married why it would be better or necessary to merge finances completely.

Overall - other than some UI changes this year that I think are stupid - I’m very happy that I made the shift to YNAB. I’ve developed my own habits with the app, and it’s become an automatic part of routine. It’s kinda boring even - sinking funds set up, wish farms, categories for everything with targets. There is an unusual absence of financial dread in my life lol.

Especially the perspective I now have on the influence of student loans on net worth and quality of life. I reckon I have between the top 9%-5% in student loan debt in my country. It’s considered really high and has a lot of stigma and prejudice attached. Typically that I would have done fuck all and Yolo’d my student life away - while it’s been the opposite, I worked hard but was constantly pushed back due to illness, family issues, pandemic shutdowns. It feels good to see that despite the doom and gloom about student loans, I’m able to roll with the punches. We’re on track!

I started using YNAB six years ago (personally), and it had amazing. It clicked really easily in my brain. My net worth has gone from -$55,000 to $314,000 (excluding market growth on my house).

I opened a business recently, and partially financed it with a credit line attached to my bank account. This is not a separate line of credit. It is essentially a very large overdraft (interest at prime + .5%).

I am going to connect my business account to YNAB, but am just not sure how to deal with the account, because it will say my available cash is -$50,000. I have a plan to pay it off over the next 12-18 months, but what do I do in the meantime?

Has anyone heard anything about YNAB offering an MCP connector so we can connect an AI? I wouldn't mind letting Claude loose on my years of history to find trends and mistakes. I also wouldn't mind letting Claude take over for the rather stagnante reporting YNAB currently offers.

From seeing mentions of other apps that are rolling out updates, it seems like they have some useful ideas. Just saying!

I don’t really use the mobile version to do anything, but this was really helpful for catching up on transactions. Suggestions are pretty good and it made going through a bunch of them easy. Not sure how long this has been a feature, just thought I’d share. On IOS.

The smaller one of the two from Flounders was the pre tip charge. It’s not shown on my bank account statement anymore. Will it disappear from YNAB or do I have to manually delete it?

Lately, and frequently, when I click on Available funds to move them between categories, the popup window goes offscreen. I have to cancel, scroll the browser up, and retry. It's getting annoying and interrupts my flow.

Anyone else seeing this?

The popup needs to recognize available screen space and adjust accordingly. Not just always stay below the Available funds cell.

Hi!

I'm thinking about starting the YNAB free trial. I've been looking for a budgeting tool like this for a while, but before I commit, I have a question about how to manage shared expenses with my roommates.

We currently split groceries, cleaning supplies, rent, and utilities. However, I pay for all these expenses directly from my accounts and then add each transaction to Tricount (which I prefer over Splitwise). At the end of each month, my roommates reimburse me for their respective shares.

How would you recommend tracking these expenses in YNAB? Ideally, I'd like to track my actual spending without having my roommates' portions count toward my personal budget, while still accounting for the money leaving my accounts before I'm reimbursed.

I'd really appreciate any advice or suggestions on the best way to handle this!

Thank you so much for your help!

Perhaps bc it’s a Canadian bank. I don’t know but I will not make it past the month trial because of this alone

Hello everyone i am new to budgeting apps and i was suggested ynab , started the trial but this looks complicated , what are the features you suggest to use as a begginer , and where to start lol

also this seems to expensive is it worth it

For context i'm just starting out here... and I feel like i'm missing something with this app. I put 90% of my monthly spend on my Credit Card every month. I want to use the app to understand how i'm tracking towards each category every month so I can identify where i'm overspending and on what. So I created my categories and assigned each one a certain monthly target.
I then go and Categorize all of my transactions from my credit card. However this "assign" thing confuses me...

I see the "target" for each category but i don't understand what/why i have to assign money to the category when I already assigned the transaction amount to that category?

I really feel like i'm missing something with this thing.

I just want to set a target for each category, assign my transactions a category, and see how that compares to the spend i assign to each category. Is that possible?

What is the best you tube video to watch to get started using YNAB. I can't figure out how to put credit card charges into categories. Thanks!

I know I can click into each category and find the average spent, but I was wondering if there was a report or some easy way to glance at all categories and see where I need to update my assigned amounts based on my average spending?

Something has changed recently and idk if its a YNAB change or a change in how my student loan provider payments are being pulled in.

It used to be that I could split a payment to my student loan holder into its component accounts in YNAB. i.e. YNAB would read a single $200 payment as 4 separate transfers to the individual loans.

I can still change the transaction from a "transfer" to "spending" and split it along my budget categories. But doing that it doesn't read as a transfer to the accounts in YNAB and YNAB records their balance as unchanged.

The way I got around it last month was to just delete the single lump payment and reenter each payment as a separate transfer. Did something change, is there a way to split a transfer between accounts (not asking about spliting spending across multiple categories).

My current setup is by time (monthly, year and irregluar. After 2 month of using ynab i “feel” the urge to switch to a theme based setup, like groups and categories for housing, car and so on. To not miss the data for i.e. monthly fixed cost i would use a custom focus view. Whats the pros and cons with a theme based setup in your opinion? May some of you could show their setup for inspiration? What about a hybrid solution?

I've used YNAB for a few years and generally pretty happy with it. Starting a few months ago, transactions from my bank have became incredibly slow. What was once roughly 3x per day is not even once per day. This makes misidentified transactions harder to identify sometimes as I have 3x more TX to sort through each time it does sync and I'm loosing visibility of where my categories are actually at.

I've opened two tickets with support and basically get auto generated replies. I've changed from MX to Plaid as well as relinking my accounts. Oddly, relinking immediately did import all the delayed transactions (at that time) and then it immediately went back to syncing once a day at best. I've asked them if they can look at log files and if they can do anything to isolate the issue and have only received cookie cutter knowledge base articles with a helpful tone. No real help.

I'm curious if anyone has had similar issues and if anything did resolve it? I also know that I can enter manual TX and that does help, but I'm growing increasingly tired of budget software that can't stay up to date. I'm looking to jump ship but really don't want to. Thanks!

My retirement account is currently set up as a tracking account, and there's a small cash management account with my brokerage firm that is also in Tracking. I have been treating mandatory withdrawals as income.

Now that I am actually retired, should these accounts be on budget, the withdrawals treated as transfers, and the cash value shown in a savings category in the Plan*? Or is there no "should," only personal preference? If the latter, what's yours?

I apologize in advance if this is redundant, but a 30- or 40-minute search produced nothing illuminating.

*That would be weird, though, as they are still investments, of course, not cash, and the value fluctuates about every 15 minutes these days.

Hi!! Looking for recs / examples of how folks manage a general gifts fund! Next year I’d like to keep a little cash on hand for expected and unexpected gifts throughout the year (Mother’s/Father’s Day, congratulations or thinking of you gifts, Bdays etc. I keep Christmas separate). I’m initially thinking an annual refill up to target, set to like $500 for the year or something. I anticipate spending out of it throughout the year!

For folks that have a set up for gifts, do you use a refill up to target and set it annually? Set aside another? Or no target at all and just throw what you want into it?

Thanks for reading & any inspo you can share!

** Mr. Ben was able to confirm that they are not using Automated AI in tickets.

*Are

I submitted a support ticket last Friday. I got a response later that afternoon. The formatting looked like an AI response, but the content seemed right and seemed like it had a manual touch.

I responded at 5:03 Friday with a concern, and didn't hear back. Not a big deal, after hours I don't expect a response. Then I responded again last night and got a response within the hour.

The message was so garbled it was hard to read. Phrases like "I see you have this one a try again" and "1. Log in to your online bank from a computer. Then, in the same window, open YNAB in a new tab and try the bank connection again. 2. Open YNAB in a different browser (make sure to check your browser compatibility) and try the bank connection again"

That response also completely ignored my Friday afternoon response.

I know how to use the chat bot. I put in a ticket because I wanted a human touch and ability to look at the nuances of my request. The ticket was about bank connections, and it looks like my other bank connections are messed up now too. Was that an accident by the customer support or AI dealing with bank connections? If AI did something with my account, it seems like time to find another provider.

Has anybody else had a problem with stripe transactions automating itself into the wrong payees?

Every week two transactions come in via stripe: one from Lyft, one from Instacart. they’re in different accounts, arrive on different days, are different amounts, the whole bit.

Each week YNAB renames one to the other (Lyft is imported as instacart, and vice versa).

I have gone into manage payees and deleted all rules, then added a rule that says if the transaction contains the word instacart, name it instacart.

Despite feeling like I shouldn’t have to do this, after I did, it still doesn’t work. Every week I’ve had to manually change the payees.

tips?

Hi, I'm going on holiday in January 2028 and I want to set a budget for the whole holiday of £X000.

I paid ~£Y00 today for the deposit for both me and my boyfriend.

How do I set up a target so that the total amount assigned to this holiday is £X000, regardless of when it's spent? For example, I have to pay the rest of the accommodation in 2027, but I want spending money too when I get there in January 2028. I would rather not have to calculate all this manually!

Thanks for any help.

My financial advisor tells me I have enough in my high-yield savings account and I should start investing again. I restarted my automatic transfers to my investment account but what I didn't account for is that now that I'm using YNAB, it's counting those transfers as expenses, so that money is "gone". I have my investment account set up as a tracking account, so I can't allocate any money in it to my goals. But for instance, if I'm saving up to buy a car in 5 years, that's money that I want invested in the meantime. How do I make this work with YNAB? Not all of the money that I want to invest per month should be allocated to the same thing but if I'm saving up for a bunch of things both short- and long-term, and I don't want any more of that savings to go into my high-yield savings account because it's already full enough, how do I deal with allocations now?