I have a fairly YNAB-specific question… how do I budget for allowance in YNAB?
In theory, it’s easy. Since allowance is weekly, I can just create a category with a weekly goal, and YNAB will tell me how much I need to budget every month.
However, I’m giving the allowance in cash, so it’s harder to track whether I’ve given him the week’s allowance. I suppose I could use a bunch of envelopes marked with weeks, but that seems annoying. The obvious solution is to make “cash” its own account rather than just putting an estimation of what it will be used for every time I withdraw cash, but… well, that seems annoying too!
Any ideas?
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Oh I use a cash account so I do that! I transfer from checking > cash to withdrawal. You could make allowance an off budget account and transfer into it when you do atm withdrawals
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Oh, off budget account makes sense!
definitely create a cash account, and when you give the allowance you can enter the transaction coming from your cash account.
I have a YNAB question too. It’s about the categories that you won’t necessarily spend from every month.
So the general personal finance advice is to save an emergency fund of 3-6 months expenses and then invest the rest.
Normally, it is advised for a YNAB user to have different sinking funds like a car repair fund, medical expenses, jobloss fund, etc. You can a lot of categories if it makes sense to you.
It’s my case, I have a lot of categories, but I feel like if I fill every single category I will have way more than 3 to 6 months of expenses, and I don’t necessary need all this cash in a savings account, so I am currently funding a Jobloss fund (that will have the recommended 6 months of expenses), and just a general “cash buffer category” that I will pull from when I will have a medical expense or any other sinking funds.
I was curious to know how do you do it? I made a quick search in the FB group and it seems that most people just fill every single category.
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IMO, if you’re in a position in life where you can regularly fund these kinds of sinking-fund categories, and allow them to build up, and if you’re also “investing the rest” … well, you may be past the point of needing an explicit separate sitting-in-the-savings-account emergency fund.
What I do: I have sinking fund categories (major home repair, major auto, “big adventure”, etc.) and I allow them to fill up slowly over the months. Because these categories rarely get spent from, I frequently have enough cash sitting in the checking account that I don’t worry about overdrafts.
If ever an emergency comes up, if it’s on the scale of a few thousand dollars, then I can cover it with the cash available in those categories. I will have to decide how to later refill those categories (but I’d have to decide how to refill a regular emergency fund too, if I had one). If the emergency is 10s of thousands, then I have multiple credit cards that can tide me over immediately, until I pull in cash from less accessible places (i.e. my brokerage).
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That makes a lot of sense, thanks!! 
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Our credit card was stolen and we have a replacement. At the Chase site, it looks like nothing ever changed- just one long list of transactions and even one of our subscriptions has gone through without being updated!
But I can’t figure out how to get YNAB to update this. I have tried unlinking and relinking, but YNAB is still showing the old card number as the only account that we can link, and also it is showing the wrong balance and not importing new transactions. Does anyone know how to resolve it?
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This absolutely sounds like a case for support. I’d reach out they may have to do some resetting behind the scenes
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I went ahead and emailed them. For what I pay I hope they get right back to me and fix the problem! (I remember buying the software for $45… forever…)
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I have a how to question now;
So I had a loan and I made a nice little loan account like they say to. And then I paid it off. Now what do I do? Just let the “account” sit there at $0 forever in its own category I’m not otherwise using?
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In the old YNAB you can hide that category.
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You can still hide categories. My hidden categories also include “Loan payoff” (The Boy’s ex wife student loan that we paid off in 2019) as well as “IVF” and “Wedding” (we have been married for 6 years).
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You can close the account in YNAB
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This is probably an obvious question, but: I’ve been using YNAB for about six months, and every month it tells me I’m allocating more money than I actually have. What is the best way to attack this? How do I make the amount assigned in my categories match up more realistically with what I actually “make” (AKA my spouse pays me) every month?
I’m not going into debt, and I’m not spending more money than I physically have, but I’m always in the red on YNAB. How have others navigated this?
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Are you actually allocating more money to categories than you had available in Ready To Assign?
If you are, then the thing to do is to not do that. (Ha!) Maybe you could tell us why or how it is that you’re allocating more than is available, and we could help strategize.
If you aren’t … then I’m not sure what’s going on. More investigation would be required.
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Yes I think that’s it, basically. I think it’s because I am encouraged to have all these categories that I don’t spend from very often–think “emergency fund” or “car insurance,” and I can’t actually afford to fund those every month and take care of our daily expenses. When I set it up I made a LOT of categories.
Maybe I can look into some of those categories that are more optional, like “kids’ activities” and “home decor.”
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Yea, you have to take out of the over-budgeted categories. This might lead to you feeling “YNAB-poor”. Let’s say you’re $200 overbudget and you have $50 in Kids clothes and $150 in Car repair category. You want to get back to zero, so you would do -$150 in car repair and -$50 in kids clothes. Otherwise you’re budgeting fake money, and if every possible thing hit the fan at once, you wouldn’t have all the money in reality that you have in YNAB.
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Yep, I think this is the key realization. If you’re assigning more money than you actually have to categories, then you’re not actually budgeting. You’re not actually reserving (real, existing) funds for their intended purpose.
You’ll have to go through your categories and make the (sometimes hard) decisions about removing money from some of them to get back to zero/balanced (like Anomalily described). And then going forward, you’ll need to allocate only as much money as you have each month.
Too many categories can be a problem. It can get tedious to separate the “Pet Food” charges from the “Pet Vet” from the “Pet Meds”, etc. It’s even worse if you go to big stores like Target and then have to split the single charge between “Groceries” and “Household Goods” and “Clothing”, etc. The exact right number of categories and how to divide them is totally a personal choice.
This starts to set off red flags for me. Yes, the “Car Insurance” category may not get spent from every month (like maybe they bill you every 3 or 6 months?) … but it is a real bill that needs to get paid! I’d be concerned if you deleted the “Car Insurance” category and didn’t regularly assign money towards paying that bill.
An “Emergency Fund” category likely has much more leeway. Not everyone uses an emergency fund category; it’s personal preference, like all categories. And even if you were to keep the category, it’s also personal preference as to whether or how much you choose to add to it each month. It could be a set amount (like say $50/mo or something), or you could just assign any extra money there are the end of each month, or you could decide it has enough in it already and not assign anything to Emergency until/unless it gets drawn down.
Agreed!
K (partner) and I feel this all the time. We typically have thousands of dollars allocated to our “Major Auto” and “Major Home” and “Medical” categories, so our bank accounts show very positive balances … but we only have $150 each month for our Restaurants category. By the end of the month we feel pretty YNAB-poor if we can’t afford a stop at Starbucks. It’s hard to make those choices sometimes, but it really works for us overall, so we stick with that “we have lots of money, but we’re too poor for restaurants” mentality.
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I usually just use YNAB for tracking. I don’t have enough money to budget a whole month at once, much less have sinking funds. When we get a paycheck I sort of catch back up.
If I do want to budget a month in advance, I use a Google sheet so that I’m not putting YNAB in the red.
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