So… I’m going to have a go at the new YNAB next week. I am thinking of setting up the credit card as a chequing account that is allowed to go over? Will that let me treat it like normal (I pay it off every due date) instead of doing the ridiculous shenanigans that apparently it is doing now?
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AAAGH I imported my budget which I’ve been using since 2014(?) and it messed up all of the times I dealt with overspending by “keep in same category, roll to next month”. Goddamnit.
OK, I will deal with this, and if I don’t get it done over the weekend I might gulp START OVER.
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Someone please tell me how I deal with this. What if I have business expenses that my employer pays back in the next month? How is this dealt with?
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It’s stupid but if you think through their philosophy (don’t spend money you don’t have) it makes a little more sense. If it came out of cash/a bank account it automatically eats your “to be budgeted” from the last month. If you spent it on a credit card it adds it to your credit card balance the next month and expects you to budget to pay that down.
I just budget the money up front and the leave the reimbursement in the category, or move it back to other categories once I’ve been reimbursed. If you have “business expenses” as it’s own category it help a little.
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I didn’t have an import, but I would do that sometimes and it really messed things up going forward. There’s a magical quality about the end of the month and if you leave something dangling it can cause trouble later.
I think you have to go back and make sure each month ends at zero. Like cover with savings to that category and pay it back next month.
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I would probably set up a somewhat fake account like “Employer Travel Funds” and then budget all of that money into a “Work Travel” category so it looked like work travel was funded. When the employer reimbursed me, those funds would be budgeted again into the Work Travel category. I’d set up the Employer Travel Funds account with a high starting budget so it didn’t mess up income calculations.
Disclaimer: Some of the budgeting difficulties in YNAB, combined with its high cost for one not grandfathered in, are why I no longer use it.
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Omg. I “overpaid” my credit card because I had to make sure it had enough for a big bill. YNAB thought this put it in the positive (it… Didn’t?) And added the positive balance to my “to budget” category. It fucking made money out of nowhere. WTF, YNAB? I don’t understand why it thought that was the appropriate thing to do. I didn’t make money, it’s just an account that shuffled all the same money around! Now I’m meticulously going back over my budget to make sure I only have real money budgeted.
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I hate little things like that! I have $900 missing from YNAB right now. I tried to reconcile and for the life of me I can’t figure out where YNAB is hiding it. I manually double checked that the balance for each account was exactly reflected in YNAB. Then in a spreadsheet I wrote down every budget category that I have in YNAB and the current amount “available” in each category. On my spreadsheet it balances exactly by in YNAB it said $-900. Oh well. I gave up trying to figure it out. I know on my end the money is all there to cover everything.
I have a negative “amount to budget” all of the time anyway because at the beginning of a new month I allocate all of the money I know I will have for the month to the categories for the month, including savings. So I always start out my month with like, $-8000 and then throughout the month as I get my paychecks my negative gets smaller until the final paycheck when I’m finally at $0. I know I could just let myself get a month ahead on there but it makes me angry that it means I can’t allocate any savings until that point, which is dumb because obviously the money is there and waiting. I also don’t want to deal with allocating part of my monthly budget when I get each paycheck. It’s too much mental energy. Just let me allocate it all at once at the beginning of the month. I would understand if I didn’t have enough cash to cover a month of spending, but I literally have 6 months of spending sitting in cash in my accounts – it’s just all spoken for in different savings categories.
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I just want to do it once at the beginning of the month too. But I can’t take the “stress” of a negative number. So I put in two paycheck on the first. The first one gets reconciled and the other floats there until it actually arrives off the fifteenth. The down side of this is that your account balance is off, but I look at the cleared and I have enough padding. That $900 would drive me nuts. I love YNAB, but sometimes…
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The more I hear about YNAB, the more I think it hurts more than helps.
(Disclaimer: have never looked at it as I had much-loved elaborate spreadsheets before it existed).
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I’ve written to YNAB support before and they’ve helped me figure out why I have missing money (or additional money). It’s usually months back. Why it took so long to show up, I never understand…
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Yeah they will go through and fix it for you if you give them permission to look at your data.
I also didn’t realize that “reconciling” the account locks the transactions and so (usually) whatever the problem is is from the newer, unlocked transactions. Just in case someone else also didn’t understand what the point of reconciling is.
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omg you guys my YNAB credit cards are all fucked up
how do I fix this
FALSE ALARM.
I mean it makes no sense but I fixed it I think.
High confidence.
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I worked out how to fix mine, lemme know if you want to talk through it.
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I’ve solved all credit card confusion by making my new one a “cheque/ savings” account instead of a “credit card” account. No more weirdness.
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Giving YNAB a try for budgetober. Set it up last night and I like it so far.
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My partner just informed me that our $80 annual subscription for YNAB will no longer be honored once our current sub is up in July, and that YNAB is increasing the price to $100.
On the one hand, I’m paying $50/yr for a Nintendo Online subscription which shakes out to $4.16/mo. My portion of our YNAB subscription would be the same, and that seems like a price worth it to me.
However, on principle, YNAB is doing a crap thing by no longer honoring the lifetime price that we and others have signed up for.
I like the way that YNAB works. assigning all money that I have, allowing me to budget ahead, allowing many categories, allowing manual updates instead of linking my accounts.
Does anyone have recommendations for alternatives that cost less and are similar?
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I don’t have ideas, and that is a shitty thing. I already wasn’t keen on the subscription thing. I had planned out a totally fresh budget for January and now I’m wondering if I also want to look into switching elsewhere.
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It’s so disappointing. I’ve used other systems before, like Mint or just a spreadsheet, but YNAB stuck well and functioned well for me. I have problems establishing and maintaining habits and routines 
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I just realised I can almost guarantee I actually have no capacity to look into alternatives or the effort of changing within the next 6 months.
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