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I only manually upload. Am able to do so from mobile and desktop.
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It took me a minute to get used to the CC payment portion, but now it’s a breeze. I record transactions on my CC, if those transactions are budgeted for then $ are taken from budgeted categories and placed into “CC payment” budget line. When I make a payment on my card, I go to the card transactions page and use the “record a payment” feature at the top, then go to my checking account transactions page and approve that payment.
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I have a question about how other people use YNAB. For categories where you need a set amount each month, like rent, once you’ve filled that bucket for the month, do you put additional money in that category for the current month or do you go to a future month and start filling it in? For example, I need $950/month for rent. I just budgeted $950 for August. If later in the month I want to put more money toward rent, would you put it in August and exceed the amount you need for that month or would you move to September and start filling in the rent bucket for that month?
(Sorry that is wordy… why is this so hard to explain haha?)
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I personally preferred to put it in the next month because it made me feel like a rich badass
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ooo, this is interesting! I’m going to have to check that out!
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To September! Spending money you earned last month instead of right when it comes in is their whole “age of money” concept and it’s a nice position to be in 
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I keep forgetting that you can go ahead to the next month and fill there. I always continue to fill the current month which will roll over into the following, especially since I want to keep my goals the same.
So if my goal is to fund rent by $995 every month, but I have extra and want to get ahead, I’d put the extra in the current month. That way the next month I still have a goal of funding $995 even if I already have an extra $300 or so in that category.
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I put all my extra $$$ in a buffer category in August, and then I subtract that money from a buffer category (by negatively budgeting, say -$100) and then in September, I’ll have $100 available to budget, then I will budget it to rent. That’s just how I like to do it. I actually am buffered about ~3 months out in advance, so I have all my categories filled out til November which is good for my anxiety but is a bit excessive. So my “age of money” is about 155 days
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so I did checkout Buckets, and it has potential, but I couldn’t figure out how to split transactions, so I’m tabling that one for now! In case anyone else was interested!
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I just started watching the instructional videos and you can split a transaction. When you’re categorizing transactions click on the amount and change it to the first amount of the split and then a second line will show up with the remainder of the amount. I haven’t actually tried ti yet, but here’s a link to that part of the video https://youtu.be/jVwoCKaoEYI?t=61
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This thread convinced me to give YNAB a try again. I tried at the beginning of the year but my brain was stuck in my normal budgeting mode and it constantly made me frustrated. I wanted to be able to say “I will have $X in income this month, and these are my expenses for the whole month” but it would only let me budget what was sitting in my account on that day and it made me really frustrated. Plus the way they handle credit cards really bugged me. This time I’m going into with a different mindset entirely and (still running mint concurrently as a backup) and so far I like it a lot more.
It also helps that I figured out how to re-categorize accounts. Last time it categorized my Ally savings as an investment account that could be tracked but not budgeted toward my savings goals. That was another big annoyance because I had several goals that were 50-75% saved for but it made it look like I didn’t have any savings going towards them.
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Oh, I also got really confused with the whole “age of money” thing. In my mind I had 4 months of income sitting in my accounts, so why is it telling me that I need to break my paycheck to paycheck cycle and aim to budget this month’s income for next month’s expenses? I’ve accepted that it is a quirk of the system that it will count from day 1 regardless of how much savings you actually have, and that it is assuming you start with no savings and high debt loads, which is definitely helping put me in the mindset of liking the program more.
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It sounds like you are restarting a new budget. The age of money will take a few weeks to start having any real meaning. The system does not know your spending habits yet. Once you start spending it will be able to extrapolate out how long your money will last. I’d ignore that feature for at least the first month until ynab has a while month of data to analyze your spend rate. I run into this issue each time I decide to redesign my budget and start a new one.
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Yea also don’t worry too much about age of money. It’s a rather useless metric in my opinion. Especially because I often have very high Age of Money when I have less income because I’m living off very old income - it’s a measure of how long it takes between $$$ hitting your account vs leaving your account
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I 1000% ignore the Age of Money. I don’t understand it and it doesn’t seem useful to me.
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ooo thanks! I tried importing my current ynab budget and it seemed real stuck on splitting my mortgage payment between my principle and interest. I’ll try again!
I’m on YNAB4 still and thinking of switching. Though I don’t know if I can get that old grandfathered price anymore! I tried switching several years back but I didn’t think they had the kinks worked out plus we were on a tighter budget at the time. A little mad at myself for not going ahead and switching. It’s a product I’ve used 2014, so it’s not like I didn’t know that I would eventually switch.
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I get a pop-up every day from my YNAB4 that says the 10% lifetime discount is still available to me if I upgrade. I would just email them.
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10% is about $75 - if you switched when they first were migrating over it was $50/year. I think that’s what the original grandfather price was…
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Yea I pay $45 a year Grandfathered in but actually I don’t pay anything I have referred a lot of people.
I REALLY struggled to understand nYNAB’s credit card handling (coming from YNAB 3 and 4 it just did not make sense.)
If I had ANY overspends on any line item, the CC handling made little to no sense to me. Once I figured out to go through and make sure that any overspends are taken care of BEFORE looking at the credit card line, it was magic - everything balanced! (The credit card payments line matched the amount showing in red in my accounts section.)
Previously, I kept stressing that I was underfunded for my payment, and so I would add funds there. Then I would go through the budget and fix up any overspends. If I went back to the credit card line I would now have too much there - it was infuriating and I could not figure out where I was going wrong. So, make all adjustments to your budget and ensure everything is covered. THEN look to the credit card payments line to see if you need to add anything to make the payment in full. Once you adjust this once - hopefully it will stay balanced in the future!
(*ETA - and please ignore my large balance - we are renovating!)
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