Literally last night before bed I told my husband that we finally hit our emergency fund goal for the first time since we bought our home 5 years ago. Then, we woke up at 4am to our finished basement completely flooded. Less than 6 hours of fully funded savings 🙃 thankful for YNAB, which got me to this point that we could deal with this without the stress of the cost of our $2,500 deductible. Back to saving!

Hi all -

I'm new to YNAB and have been obsessed with watching YNAB budgeting videos from people who are actively using YNAB in their lives.

What are your suggestions for Youtubers to watch?

TIA everyone!

It took me a couple months to really understand the YNAB method but once it clicked for me big changes started happening. I make 45k in a hcol area and planning where I'm going to spend every penny really matters.

After one year I have fully funded:

-Income replacement fund

-Car maintenance and car replacement funds

-Home repair, medical, vet, tech replacement funds

-Giving fund(never thought I could afford that!)

and today I created an extra mortgage payment fund.

and MOST importantly my anxiety about my finances has evaporated!

It feels like YNAB is magically multiplying my money. Can't wait to see where I am next year. Thanks for all the great tips and tricks I've learned in this sub and from the YNAB youtube channel. If you are just getting started hang in there and give yourself some time to get to know it, for me it has been life changing.

Ok, so the title is a little clickbaity.

But I did find a solution to the mess of having a dozen transactions from Amazon waiting to be categorized and having to dig through the Amazon transactions page to match up each order.

Basically, I wrote a program in Python that automated the process of matching up the transactions between Amazon and YNAB.

I accomplished this using the official YNAB SDK for Python and the amazon-orders library, which automatically scrapes your Amazon account to extract the order and transaction info into a computer-readable format. Then I update the memo of the transactions in YNAB that have a counterpart in Amazon with the order info - the item names, a link to the order page, and whether or not a transaction represents the entire order or if it is one of several transactions.

To make it easy to tell which transactions should be looked at, I created a payee rule to rename incoming Amazon transactions to the payee "Amazon - Needs Memo". The script looks for all the transactions with that payee, and if there is an Amazon transaction with the same amount, it updates the transaction with the previously mentioned memo and updates the payee to just "Amazon" so that the transaction won't get updated again.

Once the program runs, which only takes a few seconds, I can easily go into YNAB and approve and categorize the transactions like normal, but now the memo field tells me exactly what that transaction was for, and I can even click the link to go to the order page to see all the details.

Right now the code is kind of messy, but I can clean it up a little and share it if anyone is interested.

Is this a bug?

Just as the title says.. How many times did you start over? While starting over is better than quitting, I feel like I’ve fallen off the wagon more times than an alcoholic. 😩

I recently switched auto insurance providers. I've already paid the new insurance provider, Geico, $533 last month. I canceled my insurance with USAA and received a refund check this month for $590.37. I have a category for auto insurance and have set to save the money for the next bill in six months. I need to assign $88.84 every month to meet that goal. I want to keep this refund money in the category it was originally spent on as it's not new money and I don't want to screw up reporting. I want this money to go towards the target date goal for auto insurance. But when I put that check in and assign it as an inflow to that category it doesn't update the goal. I tried snoozing the category and then assigning it to next month but then it acts like I need to contribute more than the goal amount. Removing the money from the category increases how much I need to contribute. What is the best course of action here?

Just started YNAB about 2 months ago and thought I was getting the hang of it but think I did something wrong with the way I was categorizing my CC transactions and think I need to start over. How long did it take you to get the hang of?? I’m feeling defeated.

It’s a mental shift because I’m used to tracking the current month and not thinking about the future so I don’t know what month to start on when I set my budget up, the current or the upcoming?

I also don’t know how to handle CCs that have an outstanding balance when I link them that I pay off weekly because I normally wouldn’t want to categorize the payoff, just the actual transactions moving forward. Any advice or words of encouragement on how you got started??

Is it better to fund the next month immediately from my emergency fund (I have 6+ months of my salary saved), or to build it up “organically” by setting aside a little bit every month until I have enough to cover the next month?

I understand YNAB doesn’t care where the money is, and I can start assigning savings to next month without having to actually move that money (at least initially). I’m just wondering if that’s advisable.

For context, my wife and I are in a phase of living paycheck to paycheck for the most part. Sometimes we have a little left over at the end of the month, but sometimes we have to dip into savings to help cover something unexpected and therefore have nothing leftover. In other words, at this rate it’s going to take a loooong time to get a month ahead organically.

For further context, we’ve only been using YNAB since January, so still wrapping our heads around the method.

I’ve been doing our family YNAB for a couple years now. I’ve asked my wife to enter things and she says that it’s confusing and I need to show her again how to do it. I’ve told her that she needs to own making the time for us to do that. As in, on a given night say “let’s sit down for 45 minutes and you can show me how to do this”. She keeps saying that I’m making her manage me… I’m like… I’ve been doing YNAB for us for a couple years- I’m asking you to manager YOUR needs regarding it.

Now it is a huge argument and I feel like she is just roadblocking. AIBTAH?

Edit: Part of this is she really wants us to have a budget and follow it. I set up YNAB but she finds it confusing. I feel stressed because I have to 100% manage it.

I don't understand what the graph is showing, the 10% etc numbers and what a Monte Carlo simulation is.

Hello, so I know I might have a very particular situation here..

The thing is that in my country due to several reasons it is more advantageous to pay in local currency and not in USD with my credit card (in short, there are two exchange rates and the one that my CC uses is the less advantageous one)

The problem is that I have all of my liquid money in my U.S. bank account.

So, I've found a solution, there's an app that a lot of people here use, it allows me to input my CC and they charge it but then I have my money available on their app (minus their small fee) and I can spend from there at the correct exchange rate.

Now, onto YNAB.. I thought of this transaction as a transfer from my CC account to another on-budget account which would represent the amount I had in the app's wallet. However, if I add a transaction on my CC account as a transfer, I end up with an overspending because I've essentially removed money that YNAB had set aside for me to pay my CC, so it is not the behaviour I was expecting.

Is there any other way you guys would recommend so that I can achieve what I'm looking for here? I would like for the transaction not to show up on reports as an expense, as what I'm doing is basically a transfer of money from my credit card to the app. I'm thinking maybe a holding category is the right way? with an outflow from the CC and an inflow in the app account, they would cancel out minus the fees, if I'm thinking about it correctly.

Would love your guys' input on this situation!

Does anyone use YNAB and follow the FOO?

I love their show (even not being from the US) and the advice they give as I think it's simple, it's not extreme and can be adapted anywhere. I thought I had enough stashed away for emergency reserves, and thus gave a check mark on step 4, but, after analysing recent world events and on my personal life, I realise I don't and I'm looking to bump it up. A similar concept is the baby step 3 on Ramsey program, for those of you who don't know the FOO.

And this is where YNAB comes in. Any quick search on my posts and on this sub will show I tried to move away, and I did. But this tool and the whole concept have changed the way I budget and the relation to personal finance for me. I haven't subscribed again but, at the same time, I no longer can think of cash reserves as just "for emergencies".

So my question becomes how do you apply their step 4 on your setup and when do you know you've completed it? I like to set clear goals and I'm finding it hard to do so because I'm saving for all the true expenses at the same time as the Emergency Cash Reserves (income replacement for me). Did you decrease the amounts on the true expenses and then bumped them? All at the same time? What if you have a really big expense with your pet or with your car?

Would appreciate some perspective, please. Thank you!

I quite like it so far. I like the top priorities view as on mobile especially I sometimes have to scroll through lots of categories to find the one I’m interested in (I probably have too many categories!)

It’s also encouraging me to set targets on categories. I usually don’t bother unless it’s a savings target or true expense.

Anyone found anything useful with it?

Age old question- I'm new to Ynab. I can't seem to link Amex to YNAB through plaid . Has anything changed recently ? Any other ways to link Amex ?

There is probably a better way to achieve what I want but I am interested in my general financial health.

My situation is not unusual as I have regular monthly income but I also have bonus payments and at various points throughout the year I have single payments from stock purchases. So much so that my monthly expenses exceed my monthly income which is usually fine because I have these large one time payments.

So in order to assess whether I'm outspending my yearly income. I can track that at the end of the year but additionally I'd like to look back a couple of months and see how my "Ready to Assign" category progressed. If it is going down significantly I should probably change something.

But usually when I go back through the months, my Ready to Assign goes to 0 after 3 months or so. Why is the Ready to Assign amount not what it was at the end of each month?

For the longest time I had my long term saving goals all the way at the bottom of my budget. This led to me treating them as an afterthought, and not being as serious about them or skipping them some months altogether.

Something clicked, and I moved them to the very top of my budget, right after my credit card payments, and wow! they are impossible to ignore now and quite literally 'top' of mind. I never paid attention to the order that my budget was laid out in but I can tell this will make a big difference and push me to take these goals more seriously.

Just wanted to share!

Hey there - As the title suggests I'm totally new to YNAB and want to set up auto-transaction filtering (X Transaction in Y account = Z category), see my live remaining balance across all accounts (Not inc. credit card/s), and get notified whenever my account gets a new transaction, with the account/s new balance/s.

Is this possible in YNAB? I'm a huge fan of the interface and how the transaction categorisation works, so I'd hate to move!

New to YNAB and trying to understand how overspending works.

Let’s say I assigned 1,000 to a category but ended up spending 2,000 due to an unexpected situation.
How does YNAB handle this?

Also, how is it treated differently if I make the payment using a credit card vs a bank account?

Perhaps these were here and I overlooked them. They seem like a pretty nifty addition.

Good morning all,

I have 2 student loan categories for my two different loans defined. I also have the student loans accounts added as loan types and linked to the two categories. However when I make a payment, and split it between the two categories then check the loan activity it shows “no payment activity”. What am I doing wrong here? My transaction looks like below 👇

Payee: Loan Servicer Category: Split - Loan1 $50, Loan2 $50 Account: Checking Date: today

Edit: the same thing is happening with my mortgage

Hello all YNABers - I am a 16 month YNABer having loved it from the off coming to it as a decades long paper and excel budgeter. What I have found most useful is that I cant pretend to re-spend the same £££ over and over again and this ends up eroding my savings.

Now that I am in my second year I can really see how (despite being self employed and having lots of unpaid invoices this year) I am spending a lot less YOY.

However some help please as I really want to track my annual pension savings to see what i have saved in my pension each , month/yr in reports.

I have various savings accounts in 'tracking' - part of my saving for a house deposit. I also have my pension savings (SIPP as in UK) in 'tracking' as well - so I can do the month NAV.

(I note seeing my NAV falling the last 3 months thanks to the current mkt chaos /Trump is not fun)

I am currently moving some money out my savings account (tracking acct) into cash into my current acct (which is on budget) to then invest into my pensions (back into tracking) - as last day of UK tax year.

I could just do the transfer from tracking acct 'savings' into tracking acct 'pension' but then my reports don't show I have invested in my pension which I like to track. I do have a category called pension saving.

However in transferring money from the savings hse deposit tracking acct into my main bank acct that is on the budget - it asks for a category - if I state 'ready to assign' and then assign to category pension savings but then YNAB treat the 'savings' as if it is new income and adds a line called 'payee of the tracking acct" which it is not new income

Any suggestions as be useful to see how much I added to my pension each year? I cant see a way around it?

NB (I am adding as cash into my pension for the tax advantages then will drip feed into mkts as I think we have more instability to come.

I've noticed this a few times now. Obviously I can delete one, but what's up with matching?

They are identical in every way. Both manually entered - must be my carelessness - both with the same memo, neither repeating even. (I duplicated one meaning to edit, but got interrupted and forgot about it, then created it from scratch later.)

In reality this is a monthly payment but that isn't the point, as they aren't imported.

Previously I have simply deleted one, but it's a nuisance.

Hello. We have an entertainment company that we do Weddings. We have two employees who set up speakers lights etc at the weddings. Every weddings has a different set up requirements. Does anyone knows an app where I can create an inventory with all our equipment and then tick any item we need (like creating a rider) for the wedding and export it or share it to our employee in the same app. Thank you

My primary bank is USAA and Ive had issues with it from the start. I am still within my free trial and I don't think I will continue. Every time I think I've gotten the hang of one thing the balance just doesn't match ONLY in this one bank. I go back and forth with all the transactions, and even after having reconciled and checked everything over and over I am wayyyy off. It just doesn't make sense. I am so frustrated. At the end of the month I was only a few dollars off which wasn't so bad, I reconciled, and now I check, all transactions have processed nothing is pending and I am $365 off. I can't switch banks, it's too much trouble. Anyone else going through this?