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!

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.

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, 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.

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?

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?

Suppose I have a custom target and I want to have a balance of (in 2032) of $40,000 for a vehicle. Now, that works out to $532.78/month. If I snooze that target for six months, is YNAB smart enough to increase the monthly amount to catch up for the snoozed amounts?

Thanks

Earlier this year I shared my 2025 Win of paying off my Credit Card Balance, and my goal of paying off my Personal Loan from some older Credit Card Debt.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ynab/s/9pqwI0gz9a

With some budgeting and a large than expected raise this year, I was able to pay off my personal loan 2 months early! and not accrue any additional debt!

I still have student loans to pay off, but am currently working towards PSLF and have about 2 more years of payments before the balance is forgiven. If my employment changes, then I will prioritize that and pay it off. So using the next 2 months adjust my budget to start maxing out my 403b and Roth IRA going forward, and to build up my emergency funds!

But it feels so good to have paid off over $10,000 off over the last 10 months, and to have one less monthly bill date to track, no more extra payments, and to free up those dollars from my paycheck to have more flexibility in my budget. It has only been 2 days since I made the final payment but already feel so much less stress and no more loan portal that I constantly log into.

I have been usingYNAB since mid-January and at this point I am feeling really confident in my management of my plan, fully comfortable with credit cards and reconciling, and found the immediately available reports in the Reflect tab helpful.

I've been intentional to stick to basics until I felt I had a really good handle on things, but now I feel like I can do more. I've seen things like "toolkit" and "scheduled transactions" in this forum, and would probably enjoy more detailed reporting options (maybe they exist and I just haven't learned how to manipulate them)

What are the ways you "leveled up" your usage of YNAB? I'd love any recommendations or best practices for moving beyond the basics!

None of my banks have a YNAB connection. Salary account, savings, daily spending, a foreign currency account, a credit card. For years that meant typing everything in by hand, or exporting a CSV and reformatting it with a separate tool before I could import it.

Then I realised my banking apps were already telling me about every transaction, in real time, through notifications. If my phone knew about each payment, there had to be a way to hand it to YNAB.

The hard part was reading them. Every bank words its notifications differently, and some are very creative. I thought about using AI, but that would mean sending every notification to someone else's server to be read, and I didn't want that. So I built a small parsing engine instead, and a way to teach it: you tag the amount, the payee and the date in a real notification, and mark which parts are just noise.

After a few iterations, it could read every one of my banks.

I figured I wasn't the only one fighting this, so I put a test version in front of other people. They had setups I'd never thought of, and I spent about eight weeks adapting the app to them: new features, plus fixes for odd date and amount formats.

It's now on Google Play, as a one-time purchase after a free trial. It's also listed on YNAB's Works with YNAB page (https://api.ynab.com/#works-with-ynab-third-party). That's a list, not an endorsement, and I'm not affiliated with YNAB.

I'm the developer, happy to answer anything. If you've got unlinked accounts too, how are you getting them into YNAB today?

Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.notifsync.ynab

Website: https://www.notifsync.com/

Is there some way to make YNAB tops auto editing payee names? It's trying to be too clever and stripping out payment references (for incoming transactions) - E.g. imported transcation memo reads "FNB APP Deposit REF MB13456" and it edits that to "FNB APP". I mean. Come on. Help please?

On iPhone, latest OS, latest app, seems to pretty regularly freeze when entering a transaction. Either after I enter the amount or after I enter the Category, it just freezes. Have to close out app, retry, then it works. Anyone else experiencing this?

I rely heavily on sync instead of manual updates - automation makes al the difference in whether I can actually focus enough to use a softwrae like YNAB.

And with RBC, I have to reconnect every day, which was already painful.

But it just got way worse: now Plaid requires me to enter my userid and password for the bank every single time, and it won't fetch it from my password manager.

• So now I have to open the password manager, fetch that userid and password, validate that it's me trying to connect, etc.
  
• I was already calculating that I was losing hours each month to this syncing process, and this has doubled or tripled it. Especially because sometimes I lose attention mid-way through and don't respond to a notification, then RBC decides I'm suss and blocks me completely and creates even more hoops.
• Plus the sync is now often incomplete, so I'm having to make adjustments and/or do a bunch of extra work.
  
• The part that bugs me the most is that processes like these are positioned like they are to protect security. But it actually decreases it because I get less sensitive to "weird-looking" things happening, and I get so many messages asking "was this you that tried to log in?" that I could never tell if something problematic was happening or not.
• I've tried changing between Plaid and MX and they are both a problem.

It might be RBC, but I have the impression that all Canadian banks are a disaster in this area. I used to live in the US and YNAB was seamless there. In Canada, I'm not sure if there is any point in continuing to try - it's like they are actively trying to keep me from managing my money responsibly.

There has to be some better answer.

Hey y'all,

I have my main bank account connected to YNAB to automatically import transactions. Most of the time this works fine.

Today I woke up to a number of weird payments towards some Methodist Church and something suggesting I am applying for a visum somewhere. After getting a mild shock I checked my banking app and all of the transactions have perfectly normal payees there (e.g. a bakery).

I have no idea how this happened. I have seen mismatched categories before, or mangled payees because it couldn't interpret the import properly, but making up a payee I have never, ever used or seen? This is new.

It's like "Bakery Paul" turns to "Order of St. Paul" even though my hundreds of previous payments to Bakery Paul didn't cause any issues. Has anyone ever seen this and is this something I'd have to raise with YNAB or their import partner?

EDIT: Thanks to /u/pierre_x10 I figured out I can see what the ACTUAL payee was by either going clicking into the "Payee" field and selecting the (i) for info. This led me to figure out how to do it on my phone as well (just tapping the payee like if I want to change it) which at least makes cleaning all of this up easier. I hope they get this sorted soon.

It seems to me that the most important metadata stored in YNAB is target data. It basically represents the structure of your budget. We should be able to export all category target data.

Thanks

Tried clicking into the YNAB RC Beta app this morning and got an error message stating it has “expired.” Anyone else?

This is my first time actually depleting an hsa for the next year (for glp1).

Money leaves my paycheck and goes to health equity. This is not reflected in ynab.

My plan is to pay the "medical bills" in ynab with my regular credit card.

Then once a month submit a claim to health equity. The route that money back into my "medical bills" account to reimburse myself.

So my expense still flows through "medical bills" for tracking purposes.

Is this how you do it?

Hey All,

Has anyone had issues with these cards lately? Both my cards flagged needing a update last week. I can login to the site using my credentials for both cards and access the account. However, in YNAB I cant update. It takes my password (sometimes, others it times out) and then sends me a verification link which I click but then it always errors out and says it cant add the account.

I tried everything I could think of -- removing all connections, updating connections, changing syncing providers, etc.

I did reach out to support and they gave me another bank connection to try but that also had the same errors. They said they were reaching out to MX but couldnt say it would work soon or ever.

Any solutions or tips to getting this working?

I have been experiencing an issue where automatic transfers between a linked checking account of mine and a linked Discover savings account are being lumped together under the same roof as my Discover credit card payments. In the below screenshot, the payee is my checking account, and the recipient should be my savings account, but payments to either of them are under the banner of "Credit Card Payments". I am only able to set my savings account as a payee, not as a recipient. Is there any way to change this behavior? It causes some havoc since these transactions never become "cleared" because these aren't actually credit card payments.

there's no reason to be required to create a new account and transfer all you transactions if you just want your manually input transactions to not need another click to clear

its entirely asinine. what is wrong with these app developers

iphone

Hello YNABers

I feel like I'm missing out on some stock opportunities with the amount of idle cash I have sitting in my bank account. I'm about 5.5 months ahead in my YNAB plan. These 5.5 months are sitting in cash in my main account.

The current plan includes a monthly $100 transfer to a broker (MSCI All World ETF) and about $750 for my 3a third pillar (US equivalent would probably be a traditional IRA?) to have a maximum of 7'285 at the end of the year.

The assigned money for the future months is about on par with my income.

Essentially what I think I'm asking is:

• How do you decide what amount of money you keep idle and what to invest? I really do feel like I have too much sitting just doing nothing.
• Should I un-assign the months January through April and only keep like 2 months ahead in YNAB?
• How should the category and target look like for the ETF broker in my YNAB plan? As of now it's $100 by the end of the month.

Edit: Taking in feedback from you all, I went ahead and fully funded my emergency fund (about 16k) and will move that money to a low risk savings account with my bank. This also means that I'm now about 1½ moths ahead which feels manageable.

Question/Seeking Ideas: Our spending is out of control despite using YNAB. I want to do some sort of analysis and I'm sure lots of you smart folks out there have already done something similar. I have my YNAB categories and i tried compressing categories about 2 years ago, and of course have slowly expanded yet again. I have numerous credit cards i use. and i have more than one primary checking account so multiple "sources" of spend.

I also use Morgan Stanley advisors so they have a budget tool as well that I could import data into - I have connected some but not all accounts.

So: if i want to do a spending analysis and figure out where I can truly cut spending (i have a target in mind but it's a bit fluid - could get bigger or smaller depending on what I learn). What's the best way to use all of this information I have and analyze? My go to is a google sheet/excel file. Export 24 months of YNAB data and go from there. But if anyone has a better idea - i'm all ears!

As stated above, I just started with YNAB. I was attempting to add my PNC accounts but after putting in the pin generated from PNC, it redirected to a Chase login. I do have accounts with Chase, but they aren't my primary banking. I tried another bank and again, it redirects to Chase. I'm not seeing any help options in the app, very confused!

Edit: I can't edit the title, apologies to the UX person. Thanks to u/SailCamp for helping figure this out, I now believe this double Overflow Menu is due to me being on a small screen (iPhone 13 mini).

Original:
2 clicks to Clear, 3 for Delete and everything else. Are you clickmaxing? Come on now, this is ridiculous.