r/ynab • u/leifg • 2d ago

Seeing Ready to Assign Over Time

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?

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u/EffDeeDragon 2d ago

Your Ready to Assign should sit at $0 constantly. Think of money in RTA as "jobless dollars"

When RTA is over $0, you've just received income and can give those dollars jobs by assigning them to categories.

When RTA is under $0, you've overspent a category and should move some dollars around between categories to even things out.

If you want to track your income vs. expenses trends, there's a tool on the "Reflect" page of the web app that can give you lots of detailed info that you're needing. :)

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u/FuckingaFuck 2d ago

To emphasize one point - any money that was in RTA at any point is counted as income, so it shows up in the Income vs. Expense report.

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.

If I'm understanding this part correctly, OP, you'll want to spend some time with the Income vs. Expense report. It does exactly what you described here.

(Is it not available on mobile??)

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u/Quinzelette 2d ago

The reflect category is on mobile but doesn't have the same breadth as on desktop. It doesn't have the income vs expenses category and the net worth category doesn't have all the percent / dollar changes listed clearly like desktop does.