Yeah, once my old laptop, that’s running some ancient version of windows, dies I will have to move on. I pretty much only use the laptop for YNAB, but it’s worth it lol.
I use this months paychecks to fund next months expenses but don’t go further because we change/go over budget a looooot and I didn’t want to have to adjust 3 months ahead all the time. I have a category called “to be budgeted” (different from their default one) that I put extra money into the month before and take out overspending from. Then anything left in there at the end of the month goes into extra savings.
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You are not the only person! I am currently excessively committed to old YNAB. Its gotten a bit janky on the latest OS, but is still chugging right along. There is a strong chance that a lot of the jankyness is from having a giant history (2015) and refusing to start a new budget.
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I wish you could start a new budget and keep your net worth and spending history! My averages are about to become extremely useless but I don’t want to reset my net worth graph
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Right?!?! The spending/budget specifics are extremely irrelevant at this point, except for looking up how much I paid for that thing way back when. But the NW graph is extremely important to me!
I have a lot of conflicting feelings about personal capital, but I respect their account value/nw model of just save end of day values independent of transactions and call it good.
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I use the averages in reports by filtering by a time period - it will adjust averages based on the time period. Super helpful for things like rent/groceries that change a lot over time.
Also sometimes I make totally new categories and just stop using the old categories (hide them/move to the bottom).
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I have a question for those of you using YNAB.
To me it seems like there are two options (once you have more than 30 days as your age of money)
- Make an “emergency fund” for extra money
- Fund future months
I have gone back and forth on the best option for me and my brain so I would love to hear how others do it!
Right now in YNAB I have $5500 in my “emergency fund” but my mortgage is not funded (paid on the last day of the month). I do this because I know I will fund my mortgage before the end of the month. My mortgage is ~2500 but I only had $1000 in “ready to assign”. Instead of partially funding the mortgage, I put the extra into the emergency fund. I do not like having the “ready to assign” higher than $200ish.
I also do not fund future months, I put extra into the “emergency fund” bucket.
Am I making this too hard for myself? Do you have a system for assigning your funds that you like better than others? If you fund many months in the year, why does that work better for you than having an emergency fund?
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Once I have my goal for emergency funds and and goal age of money, I “spend” the extra into investments. For me in YNAB it’s easier to have “vanguard” as a pay category so I just fund that with any excess each month and “spend it” at the end of the month by buying stocks.
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I do not fund future months. I have a jobloss fund category and that’s it. If I need the money for example if I lose my job, I will fund one month at a time until I find a new one. For me budgeting future months is like forecasting and I don’t like that
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Adding: I also don’t spend that investment category until the last day of the month because I use it as slush in case I need to move a few extra dollars to mortgage or restaurants or something. So it sits there and on the last day of the month I reconcile my budget and use whatever is still there to invest.
I find my Roth and 401K separately so this category goes into taxable vanguard funds, but if you aren’t fully funding your Roth (or backdoor Roth) this would be a good category to add too.
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I don’t fund future months*. I distribute all extra money into sinking funds or savings categories (and emergency fund is one of those categories).
*I fund everything based upon my pay periods. So my last paycheck of April was used to fund my mortgage (due on 5/1) and all spending I planned to do until 5/10 when I get paid again. So I kind of fund a little in the future, but just that crossover time between paychecks.
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This is interesting. I have my automated investments as a budget category to fund. They pull from my bank account for the same amount every month on the 16th but I can see extra money going there too. My “goal” is to have $15k in the emergency fund so once that is fully funded I’ll look at changing things up.
This sounds like what we are doing too! My emergency fund is low compared to what I want but the other sinking funds are carrying more of the weight (like home maintenance, etc.).
Okay so I am not making it more complicated than it needs to be!
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This happens to be what I do, so my pattern may not be for you.
I have an emergency fund that stays at a set amount (assuming I have no emergencies).
Extra money sits unused in Ready to Assign. I have several months worth of spending in Ready to Assign.
On the last evening of each month, I scroll over to the next month and assign to all categories from Ready to Assign.
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I like to fund a few months in advance and keep ready to assign at zero, just so I know where everything is going. Having one big pile of money for future months doesn’t quite work for my brain. When I get paid, I assign that to whichever future month is next, and extra goes into the current month’s “send to savings” category. I also have a “misc/flex” category that I keep at a few hundred dollars, and I use that to handle any small extra costs or fluctuating things (mostly utility bills).
I also keep a separate emergency fund category, but I view that as a “sudden big medical bill” kind of emergency fund while the money assigned to future months is for a “sudden job loss” kind of emergency. Perhaps overcomplicated, but I like being nitpicky in YNAB 
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when i had income, i funded next month with this month’s pay. anything above that went into savings. i liked having one month of expenses in my checking account.
now that i don’t have income, i don’t do this, because i want my savings earning interest for as long as possible. so i budget what i will need for next month going into the red, and on the last day of this month, i transfer over the cash i need to cover the red categories.
i had been pulling a lump sum at the beginning of the month, but each month is a little different, so this way i’m budgeting more accurately for my actual needs month to month.
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Yeah I fund next month with this months paycheck, so that on the first everything is all filled out and don’t need to play catch-up with adding to categories.
I also don’t like my “ready to assign” to be more than zero, since it auto pulls the money into categories that I’m over on, when I might want to cover an overspend in eating out from an entertainment budget (for example). For that I started another category that the extra money for the month, and then at the end of the month any extra goes into emergency fund (which right now also doubles as renovation savings).
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Do you have a different version than the standard web-based YNAB? Mine definitely doesn’t do this. I still have to manually choose where the money comes from to cover an overage, even if there is money available in “ready to assign”
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mine also doesn’t do this. i wonder if it’s a preference you can set.
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Mine does the “auto-pull” behavior.
Currently in May I have a couple categories that are red, and an excess amount of money in Ready to Assign. These are my partner and my personal spending categories, which we’ve overspent, and which we’d like to remain red for a couple months until the regular allotments to those categories brings them back to green.
If I click the arrow to view June, those categories suddenly appear at $0 (no longer red), and my Ready to Assign is decreased by the amount that they were overspent.
I actually quite dislike this feature. I’d prefer that overspent categories remain overspent across the month-boundary. When the new month rolls around I have to fight against this behavior by moving the same amount of money from those categories back to Ready to Assign, just to restore them to the state they were in.
ETA: If it’s a setting, I haven’t found it. And I’ve looked. 
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Me too! It’s one of like 3 things I dislike about YNAB (although I understand how letting you roll over “debt” doesn’t fit with their rules)
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