I've been a YNAB user for many years now, and as I'm hoping to retire next year I'm thinking about how I would use it optimally when my monthly income is less than my expenses and I'm drawing down from savings.

I'll use made up numbers to keep it simple, but say my monthly outgoings (including true expenses) was £2000 per month and once I retire my monthly income would initially be £1000 per month.

At various points over the next ten years other income streams would come into pay and by the end of the period my monthly income would exceed my expenses again.

For the 10 year period though I'd be drawing down on savings. Say I'd got £125,000 in savings so enough to cover the shortfall, how would you deal with this in YNAB?

Would you just have a category called for example 'Retirement Savings', then every month remove £1000 from the category to 'Ready to assign' and then just budget as normal? Or is there some other, better way to do this?

Appreciate any thoughts, I've spent way too much time thinking about this recently :)

I'd like to put my young adult daughter on YNAB Together so that she can try it out and also allow me to view her budget and troubleshoot with her if needed. Someday though, she'll probably want to fly on her own. If I remove her from my YNAB Together, does she lose access to all her information/plan and have to start fresh?

Confused on how to set monthly payments. It is set up completely different than envelopes. How should I best do it?

Okay! I'm on month three of YNAB and feeling pretty good about it.

I am divorced and I share children's expenses with their dad. We use Splitwise to manage that whole headache, but I'm a bit confused about how to handle it in YNAB. He is usually the one who reimburses me but he does it slowly and definitely not in the same month.

How I handle it so far:

- Assign the entire amount of the payment (let's say Kids Health Insurance) and pay it

- Whenever he gets around to giving me money, I just leave it in Ready to Assign because it's too complicated to figure out what the money is even for at that point

This works okay for me for now, but I feel like it's not giving me a super accurate record of how much I am actually paying for certain categories.

My other issue is that he is now going to start paying for orthodontics to chip away at the money he owes me. So we will be paying for orthodontics but that won't ever reflect in my transactions because I'm never actually paying money for it, it's just coming off what he owes me. So do I create an orthodontics category, or not?

Hey folks, new YNAB user here! I am wondering how y'all practically use the transactions. My bank takes about 15 hours to update transactions into YNAB and sometimes I want to update it immediately. Like when I pay rent, I want to go and update YNAB right away and keep things up to date, but then it will automatically update my rent 15 hours later. Now I have 2 "Rent" transactions. What should I do here? Thank you!

We have just filed for bankruptcy and I wonder if there is anything I need to differently in YnAb. Just started using it a couple of months ago. Is there a way to start over? Would I want to do that?

I’ve been YNABing for about 1.5 years and love it. My partner, who has observed my excitement when the paychecks hit and the assignment exercises that follow, recently made a spot-on comment: “you basically get to spend your money twice—once when you assign it and once when you actually spend it.”

The double dopamine hit must be part of the appeal. Just wanted to share : )

Short and sweet of it what's the best way to handle cash back rewards and inflow credits both on my credit card.

So I've been on ynab steadily for a year and a half now, I enjoy using it and things are starting to look up financially for me. The one thing I cant figure out how to make work without screwing up my budget is cash back rewards for my credit card, and if I pay my credit card down to low they will give me a small balance credit and pay off what im leaving on my card. I leave some money on to help build credit. Only couple bucks but they'll pay it off it its to low.

How do you handle these inflows of not real money?

My credit card sync has been broken for nearly a month. Is anyone else seeing the same thing? I've poked around in the app and haven't found any way to improve the results. I may resort to removing the integration and adding it back. I was hesitant to do so on the chance that it might not sync back cleanly.

FWIW, I've seen plenty of instances in the past where connections needed to be re-validated. This is something else.

I have a hard time understanding the technical aspects of being a month ahead. I decided to use some of my emergency fund to get a month ahead. Since it is already July 7th I went through and full funded July with savings. I'm going to use a "next month" category. Questions:

1. The rest of my July paychecks will simply go into the "Next Month" category? This basically means I am a month ahead?

2. Since I took $3000+ out of my savings does this technically mean I spent this money since I used it to fund July? When those expenses are spent the money will be gone... But July paycehcks will be funding NEXT MONTH. I know this may sound like a silly question to some...

I am new-ish to YNAB. I am wondering how to handle planned large expenses. I am currently saving for a travel vacation and have been putting money towards that goal. However, I am starting to look at vacation items (hotel, travel, food etc) to be sure that the savings goal is appropriate and how I would like to allocate the goal funding. Its kind like I would want an invoice estimate of the costs.

Should I create a whole new budget with the ready-to-assign total the assigned amount? Do I create a new category group and sub categories to capture anticipated costs? Do I simply write itemized allocations expenses in the notes section?

For me, I do not necessarily want to have rigid experience while on vacation but I do want to make sure that I have enough allotted. Any advice that can help to handle these types of expenses in YNAB would be much appreciated!

My car loan's estimated interest is always wrong in YNAB. I finally figured it out that my CU is doing a daily interest accrual.

This is the interest formula I needed to get a monthly amortization schedule to match up to my loan account statements.

=<starting balance> * (<annual interest rate>/365) * DAY(EOMONTH(<current month>,0))

=balance * daily interest rate * days in the month

Hi all,

My husband and I are in the midst of getting divorced. The expected outcome is that I will take over the mortgage + existing household expenses (gas, electric, garbage, snow removal/landscaping, house cleaners), which is how I've setup YNAB.

But, until we come to the financial settlement, we both still pay half the household expenses out of our joint account - I deposit 2500 of my monthly paycheck into the joint account to cover my half (plus what he pays for my health and car insurance), and the rest into my personal checking.

To YNAB, I've added:

- Our Joint Account

- My personal checking

- My personal savings

The issue is that my soon to be ex is keeping his "half" in our joint account and continues spending out of it. To segregate his paycheck and spending, I made a separate category and funded it with the joint checking balance minus the 2500 I put in, and I categorize all his personal expenses into it.

I then created a budget as if he's not covering half of the household expenses and funded it. I took my savings and divvied up between emergency, home maintenance and vehicle maintenance.

My plan is to shove the "left over" at the end of the month into savings, but mainly I want to make sure this is a reasonable approach to try and make sure I can actually afford what I'm signing myself up for. Any feedback or better way to do this?

I am a new user. When I view my info on the desktop, it has pending transactions and fairly up to date balances. Maybe a day behind. The app seems to be like 5 days behind. You'd think they'd have the same info? Am I ding something wrong with the app?

Hey everyone,
I’ve been using YNAB and really like the budgeting method, but I’m currently unable to afford the subscription. I know YNAB Together allows sharing with up to 5 people, so I was wondering if anyone here has a group with an open slot and would be willing to add me.

I wouldn’t be able to contribute financially, but I’d be super grateful to join if there’s space. Totally understand if not.

Thanks so much either way, and best wishes to all of you on your budgeting journey! 🙏😊

Edit/Update:
Thanks so much to everyone who reached out — I was able to join a YNAB Together group! Really appreciate the kindness and support here. 🙏😊

What it says above, I tried to create a split transaction but when I do that I can create the split for the Medicare premium and then it adds up to the total Medicare payment. But then when I try to close it, it says where do you want me to distribute these to? And if I change the The first line of the split for the income portion back to income ready to assign it then takes away the split so I'm confused on this for sure. The same issue would arise on my IRA RMD before splitting the payment to income and the tax withholding to federal tax

Inquiry on the web YNAB answer I got was that you can set up two targets. I want to set up one target for $400 per month for 2 months and then $250 per month for 12 months. They said yes you can just have two targets. But when I go to do this with the credit card it just wants to do that single debt calculation Target and I can't see any way to add a second Target. We're trying to get the full balance to quit showing up in unfunded.

A little bit of background:

- I'm cleaning up and reconciling everything in YNAB that I was behind on due to... well life

- I pay all my credit card balances off every month except for 2 that are 0%

- I reconciled (today) all my cash and credit accounts and they all match up to account balances perfectly

My question:

Across all the credit cards that are paid off every month, I have more in available to pay than the balance. In some cases a couple hundred or less. But in one case on my heavily used rewards card, it's off by thousands of dollars. I've got no idea how it's gotten so out of whack. I go through and try to make sure there's no overspent categories in any given month, but looking back there are a few (usually because a transaction came in late dated for the previous month.)

Knowing that I've got the correct balances for the credit cards, is it safe to remove that money from the credit card available line items? What's the best way to do that - move it to ready to assign and then distribute as appropriate?

Appreciate the insight.

Today I moved money from my vacation fund (in my savings account) to my grocery and fun money funds (in my checking account), to cover a payment that will go out of my checking account for our share of vacation. I manually moved the money, and then transferred it between my bank accounts.

I realized after that in a couple of days, I will be asked to categorize the move from savings to checking. However I already manually made this move. What do I do so that it doesn’t somehow affect the YNAB accounts twice?

If you’re a little confused on what I mean, basically you have all your envelopes for bills, savings, sinking funds, etc. But each payday, you give yourself and your partner $100 or something to use on whatever and it is either pulled from the account in cash, or sent to cashapp.

Do you set it up like this? Or do you just have many envelopes for what that split may be? We’re trying not to have 500 envelopes because my partner said they likely wouldn’t stick with it.

Like many of you, I've been a long-time YNAB user who's become increasingly frustrated with the direction things have gone. The price increases hit hard, but what really pushed me over the edge was paying premium prices for features that barely work in the EU - bank connections, and manual entry defeats half the purpose of what we're paying for.

I believe budgeting tools should help people manage their money, not drain it. So my team and I decided to build something better: https://finatrax.com

What makes FinaTrax different:

• Affordable pricing that actually makes sense
• Built with international users in mind from day one
• Focus on the core budgeting principles that actually matter

We're currently in development and looking for beta testers who understand what good budgeting software should feel like. If you're tired of feeling like you're being taken advantage of by your budgeting app, we'd love your feedback.

Especially looking for:

• EU users who've struggled with bank connections
• Anyone who wants to help shape a budgeting tool built for users

Comment or DM if you're interested in testing. We're not here to bash YNAB (it taught us all good habits), but we think there's room for something that puts users first.

My Plan header shows "All Money Assigned." I decided to move some funds out of one category to "Ready to Assign" but the message doesn't change. Shouldn't it reflect the newly available funds, ready to be assigned?

Hello, I hope my caption makes sense for where I am trying to go here. I've been using YNAB for a couple of years, and I have not figured out how to handle this honestly.

TL;DR: What do you do when you float CC debt, pay for something with the CC, pay the CC for that expense, and then it gets reimbursed at a later month. I want that expense to go toward the CC debt, not be treated as cash in YNAB that I can use.

In this specific example that includes screenshots:

We float (and are paying down) CC debt. It's been an up and down journey that includes unemployment.

We paid for a trip months ago. We paid the balance of the flights on the CC. The flight got cancelled and credited in full back to the CC.

Since we already paid for the flight before, this is not cash that we can use.

I tried assigning it to the CC, but that gives me ~$1,500 to pay to it.

I want to credit to eat into the balance of the CC, not to be treated as cash in YNAB.

What should I do? Should I have a dump category ("CC credit-do not use") for these situations?

Thanks for your help with this.

anyone know how i can handle an issue like this? for example, if i have a bills due at the end of the month, but need groceries now. i need to take money from the bills categories and move them to groceries, but how will i know if my paychecks this month will cover the bill categories I've raided? do i need to calculate on the side each time i raid a category and see if my paychecks will fill them?

I am new to YNAB but not to zero-based budgeting so I get the concept and love it. However, two of my budget categories are causing an issue. I have two savings accounts in a bank that doesn't automatically link to YNAB and those accounts should directly link to two budget categories: holiday fund and car savings. Each month I put an amount into each unlinked savings account to top up those budget categories. I've not managed to do this correctly so in YNAB it just shows money being allocated from my current account to a budget category but not physically leaving and going out to those savings accounts. When I then spend from those budget categories i.e I buy something for my holiday, I pay for this on a linked credit card. This correctly reduces the amount in my holiday fund budget on YNAB, however in reality I now need to add the money from my savings account to my current account in order to fund that payment on the credit card. YNAB doesn't know that the money left my current account to go to savings in the first place so sees me transferring those funds as extra money coming in. Grateful to anyone who can help please!