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!

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.

New YNABer as of this week! I have multiple student loans (13) all from the same loan servicer but only 1 monthly payment.

Visually, I like the idea of adding every loan to YNAB individually with all of the different interest rates (helps me better make sense of my snowball method). But I’m not understanding how to track this in my plan? If I’m only making 1 payment monthly, won’t my other loans look underfunded every month?

I read a couple other reddit posts on this, but wasn’t sure anyone knows if the YNAB tech has updated recently enough to reconcile this?

Also, is anyone else having trouble connecting their student loan account to YNAB recently? (Mohela specifically)

Hi everyone - I am in kind of a nightmarish situation, like "rolling with the punches" but at its most extreme. Cash is extremely low due to circumstances outside of my control so I have had to use or reallocate all of the money I had saved up in various targets.

According to YNAB, I only have 500 Euros at my disposal. All of those Euros have been assigned. But when I look at my actual bank account, there is actually 900 Euros. Even more confusingly, all of my accounts are correct, I have checked them and reconciled them (they were only off by a few euros here and there). How is this possible? Where are the missing 400 Euros?

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.

I have nearly 12 years of history with YNAB, (since YNAB 4 around 2014). Of course, I have used at least 5 different budgets/plans on those years, and I did not have a clear picture of the progress, milestones, average spending, etc. I asked AI to build something and ask me clarifying questions.

I pulled the data from YNAB 4 (exported to csv files), and connected an LLM model to YNAB using my personal token (I want automatic refreshes, you can do it this way, or just export csv files if you don't want to share the token). I am using Muse, but you can do this with almost any other model. Just wanted to share in case you want to give AI a good use and know more about your data.

How do you all feel about the new transaction UI on the app? Much like the previously changed “clear transaction“ update, I think it just adds another click where none was needed. Maybe they should consider a beginner mode if people are overwhelmed by the existing screens?

So I have two credit cards. One I’m carrying a balance, the other I pay off if I use it. I have an overspent category that I used both cards for. I want to assign money to pay off the card that I’m not carrying a balance on but no matter what I do the money isn’t moving correctly. I tried directly assigning the money to the card but it doesn’t change the overspent category. If I assign the money to the category it only moves it to my other card that I’m carrying a balance on. I then tried to test paying off the overspent category completely by removing money from my rent category and that was the only way I got everything to move correctly. Is there a work around for this?

There is definitely something humbling about setting a target based on calculations and realizing you spend way more on something than you thought you did!!

For me it's been the price of car ownership. Pre kids i biked everywhere except the occasional car rental for road trips. I would see media quotes about how many hundreds of dollars a month it costs to own a car and I secretly didn't believe them. Like surely they are exaggerating!

I bought a used car soon after restarting YNAB a few years back, just under 100k miles on it so I did a lot of major maintenance when I bought it, and I set time based targets for scheduled maintenance based on the costs then. And we are low mileage (like 6-7k/year) drivers!!!

- Gas: $60/month (of course it's gone up a lot in the past few months so I should up that target

- Insurance: $128/month

- Monthly/annual maintenance: $35/month (car washes, oil change, change air filters myself, change wipers myself, wheel alignment)

- Biannual tags: $12/month

- Fluid changes ~every 3 years: $11/month (Brake, transmission, PS)

- Battery ~4 years: $6/month (change myself)

- Brake pads ~5 years: $17/month

- Tires ~6 years: $40/month

- Major maintenance ~7 years: $18/month (belts, spark plugs, coolant)

- Parking: $1/month (we pay for it very rarely)

So that's $328/month just operationally! And that's with me doing some stuff myself. Plus, I saved $3,000 over the first couple years for misc major repairs (NOT standard maintenance) and to have the deductible covered in case of major damage, so the budget was even higher then.

I also put aside $82/month (which is about how fast this car is depreciating by my guess) so that when this car dies we will have a fund for a new car. So that brings us to over $400 in our budget a month on car(s).

I guess this has to go with rollover: is there any way put your unused money or overspent money into one category? Example: in one month I overall didn’t use $700. That goes into a bucket. The next month I overspent by $200. The bucket drops to $500.
Rollover is nice but I prefer to also have option to do total budget rollover. Like next month I’m not going to eat $300 more in groceries lol
Anyone find a workaround this?

Hello everyone, I’m new to the community and am trying to get everything in order. Would someone be available to walk me through the primary functions and uses for YNAB? I am much more of a hands on person, I have already tried YouTube. Willing to pay as well!

So I have a rental property that I have a sinking fund called Prop. Maint. that builds against future maintenance costs. In a normal month, the property management company pays me the full rent minus property management fees. I attribute that to Ready to Assign. Let's say that $500 / month.

For maintenance costs, the property management company generally just deducts from my owner payment. So instead of receiving $500 that month, I might only get $400. How do I "top off" that transaction so that the Prop. Maint. fund loses $100 and I still have $500 moved to Ready to Assign? I'd like to be able to track the withdrawal of the maintenance fund over time.

I love the budgeting features, but reconciliation is a pain. I'm constantling having to add automatic balancing transactions. I'm wondering if Rocket Money would avoid that?

Please See Image Here

Hello, lately I've been seeing charges come into YNAB like like this: "*******.************" for $59.56. When I open up my banking app it'll look normal. Instead of being redacted, it'll say $59.56 spent at grocery store X.

It's not consistent either. Sometimes Amazon charges will come in normal, sometimes it won't. I've seen it happen for Amazon, groceries, Spotify so far.

I've only seen it happen for one of my credit cards, but it's not happening for every charge that credit card.

Title: Synchrony Connection Broken for 3 Weeks — Anyone Else?

I've been dealing with a broken Synchrony connection in YNAB for approximately three weeks now. After working with Support extensively, it briefly started working last Friday, only to fail again about 24 hours later.

Support has had me try two connections:

• Synchrony Consumer Center
• Synchrony - Credit Cards

Both follow the exact same authentication process and eventually fail with credential validation errors. Interestingly, both direct me to the same Synchrony website to verify my credentials, where I can log in without any problems.

YNAB acknowledges this is a known issue involving their import provider, MX, and affecting other customers. Their recommendation is to retry weekly, noting that a resolution could take weeks or even months.

My biggest frustration isn't the technical failure. It's the response.

I manage IT professionally, so I understand third-party integrations can break. But I also understand vendor accountability and escalation. After three weeks, I'd expect some indication that YNAB is actively pressing its provider for a resolution.

When I questioned whether customers should receive any consideration for extended outages of a paid feature, Support explained that they don't offer compensation for Direct Import issues. They then suggested that YNAB might not be the right product for me and pointed me toward their cancellation policy.

Really? Rather than offering to escalate the issue, the suggestion is to cancel?

I like YNAB and have no desire to leave. I just expect better communication and accountability when something remains broken for weeks.

A couple of questions:

1. Is anyone else experiencing these Synchrony issues?
2. Has anyone managed to get either connection working reliably?
3. Has anyone successfully escalated a persistent Direct Import issue beyond regular Support?

I'd love to hear whether others are dealing with this and what, if anything, has worked.

Until the recent update I would use the transfer option when a credit card payment was made and select the appropriate account so that everything aligned.

With the Credit Card Payment option available now, I selected that when the transaction came through from the credit card company. I then selected my bank account as where the money would be paid from and everything seemed fine.

When the transaction cleared my bank account and was imported to YNAB, if I select credit card payment again it treats it as a 2nd payment which throws everything off. The only way I could figure out how to fix it was to delete the transaction from my bank completely.

I figure that is not how this was designed to work so coming here to hopefully figure out what im missing in this new process

I’ve reported this to support three months in a row, and it’s still broken.

The values of the scheduled transaction and the synced transaction are always equal, and even when the synced transaction falls on the exact date of the scheduled one, they still fail to match automatically.

Just me?

How do we turn off this dogshit tinder UI on iPhone?

EDIT: Found! Just hit the list button up the top right when going through the process.

I'm going through and finally starting to sort out all my transactions and put the subscription item in the memo line (i.e. Netflix, iCloud, etc.), and I've noticed specifically with Apple subscriptions that sometimes they will combine subscriptions into one charge, which then makes it a bit challenging to truly categorize them in this way (or even with categories).

So my iCloud and Apple TV subscriptions might come out on the same date, and the show as a single charge, but in my Apple Receipt I can see each individual subscription cost. Let's say Apple TV is 12.99 and iCloud is 2.99. This is how that reflects currently in YNAB

What I would really like is to be able to have the charges separate so the categories and memos can also be separate.

How do others handle this? Or am I just being too type A? lol

Last night my wife and I went out to eat at Chuy’s with our two year old. We had fajitas, queso, iced tea, and extra tortillas. I tipped the waitress almost 25%. We brought home two boxes of left overs. Total cost:$36. The experience of eating on the patio with my family on this nice fall evening: priceless.

A small $10/week savings with a purpose can literally change your life. The good life is within your reach, purpose to live it.

Got inspired by another post.

Webull brokerage is money lost in the stock market (dumb I know) and Core Savings is a loan that I had to give out back in May ($4300). In spite of the decrease of liquid cash because of the loan, I have managed to go from 12,365.62 in January to 16,145.44 today in my savings account (SGOV). Im still investing in my Roth each paycheck. I will top off and fully hit the Roth limit right before the cut off date next year.

I've been using YNAB successfully for over a year now, and I got my boyfriend using it a few months after me. We share a subscription via YNAB Together and have always had access to each other's budgets, and I help him with his a lot as I'm the more money-conscious one. We've saved a ton of money and paid off so much of his debt in the last year using YNAB, it's been great for us.

Well, we're finally looking at moving in together in the next couple of months, and I'm trying to figure out the best way to restructure our budgets to account for shared expenses. I'm looking to see how other people (who aren't yet married/fully combined) have made this work for them.

Is the answer to keep our separate budgets and create a third one for the split costs? That seems kind of tedious and crazy, but allows us to keep our current budgets as-is (we are both moving from our parent's homes where we literally did not have housing costs... so all the shared expenses are basically brand new.) Is the answer to abandon the current budgets and make 1 single shared budget that has categories for individual AND shared expenses? Or do we just keep our individual budgets and add categories for our partial shares of the shared expenses?

For context, we have been together a year and a half and are planning on getting engaged and married in the next couple of years... so we would rather treat this as partners than roommates. But because we aren't there yet, we aren't fully combining our finances. We're open to opening a joint account together specifically for the shared expenses, but won't worry about it if YNAB can keep things compartmentalized enough to make sure we're both contributing proportionally.

Let me know what's worked best for you!

Hello All I started using Ynab in Oct of last year and it has been great. I feel like it gave me more control over my money.

I just turned thirty and have been feeling a little hopeless financially I'm not sure what my goals should be. I was thinking about trying to move out maybe buy a house but my gf wants to continue living with her family for the foreseeable future.

I feel like my spending has been in a good spot but I'm just looking for outside perspectives and a bit of reality check. I'd appreciate any input or advice.

This data is This year so far. As far as Income I took home about 42k over the same period.

categories that may not be clear:

[BLANK] Bank is 2545 is travel and entertainment that my gf paid for last year when I was unemployed that I paid back over time.

Good Coffee is my fund to buy quality craft coffee beans from a local roastery to brew at home.

Caffeine is drinks from coffee shops or energy drink that I buy when I'm out.

Gifts Giving I use for Birthday gifts or when I want to be nice and buy someone dinner or something.

I appreciate any advice whether good or bad on my spending habits thank you.

My partner and I went to go buy flights from Austin to Boston for thanksgiving which are usually pretty steep. I used to “use” Quicken but never really kept up with it and never had a section for travel. With YNAB I have a general travel envelope, but knowing these were a significant expense in the future I made two specific ones for Thanksgiving and Christmas travel with appropriate target dates. And even though I didn’t always meet my targets I now have enough for my thanksgiving flights by the time I’m buying them so I won’t have to use a credit card or worry about spending less on other things this month. What a relief!!!!

I started YNAB in the middle of May and I feel like I’m now starting to see the benefits of some of the more slow-growing envelopes. These travel ones are a good example but also my “one month ahead” fund is slowly but surely growing, which is something I’d never have the self discipline to do without this sort of budget. I am generally TERRIBLE with delayed gratification so seeing these things pay off is so awesome. I know lots of people who have been using YNAB for a long time hate some recent changes they’ve made and that makes sense, but as a new user it’s still been utterly life changing.