Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I guess I’ve never tried to carry over a negative in one of the categories to a new month. It makes sense that you spent the money and the money had to come from somewhere, right? At least that’s how I think about it.
But I can also understand wanting to think of it as a sinking fund that is in the negative and only wanting to contribute your normal monthly allotment towards it
For me it feels “painful” in a sense to have to decrease one area to put more money in another area. That’s also why I almost always have my “Ready to Assign” at $0. I don’t want to have “extra” money just sitting around ready to assign. After every paycheck I assign every dollar so I have to physically remove it from one category if I overspend in another one.
This is one of the things that changed from YNAB4 to the YNAB app and I get why they did it but it is so annoying when I have expenses that will be reimbursed but aren’t by the end of the month like work stuff and FSA.
It works best for me to have this month’s paychecks fund next month’s budget. So my May income goes to the June budget. I like to have some buffer.
I also tend to assign all my money immediately. If my regular categories are fully funded, I’ll put any extra into more fun categories like vacation, theater, or eating out. Before my emergency fund was at the level I wanted, I’d put the extra there instead. Now that I have a sense of my monthly spending, I adjusted my 403(b) contribution so I don’t have too much extra take home.
If I overspend in a category, I pull from somewhere else. I can totally see why you’d want the category to stay negative so if, say, you overspend on eating out this month you want it to be in the red so you’ll eat out less next month. I guess YNAB doesn’t like that because in their framework you’re spending your future money now. I usually deal with it by transferring funds from another category. It is kind of motivating to see that when I spend too much on takeout I’m losing some of my funds for theater or vacations…
I have also learned the hard way that if you move on to the new month without covering the overages, it really messes up the credit card categories (if you use them). If you don’t move the money around to the red category, it never moves the cash to your credit card payment category. This is part of the reason why I generally never like to have unassigned money, or categories in the red.
Anyway, the reason I hopped over to this thread is for something totally unrelated. I wanted to complain about the spending summary reports being web-only, even though they are the reports I most want to reference on a regular basis. Why can I not see what I spent so far this month in the app??
Sorry I’m a little late to these posts (UK time!) but just to say, I’ve been watching a lot of YNAB’s YouTube videos the past couple of weeks and one thing I’ve learned is that there’s no one correct way to categorise things. For me, an emergency fund would be for the purpose of something like not having income for a couple of months (I’m working towards an emergency fund of one month’s income). I think it’s 6 and 2x3s in many ways. If you choose to fund future months, you can always siphon some off if a shorter term emergency presents itself
The third is that it’s a subscription. Seems hypocritical for a personal finance app. I know the justification is that they need to have the resources to keep it running but my AmEx credit card wouldn’t connect properly for a year and a half and I was very salty about it.
I was talking to a friend about this today as I’ve been recommending YNAB for them to try out. I think I said it sounded a bit counter-intuitive, paying for a budgeting app, but as someone with a really messed up relationship to money both the tool and the resources are super helpful to me. I am saving up for an annual sub as it’s much cheaper, but I don’t mind paying for the tool. I think it probably depends on how well something works for you/serves your own needs. I do like that they offer so much in the way of learning and support. (For me at least…I need a lot of support )
Did anyone else see the price increase email this morning? Maybe I’m just prickly over literally everything else costing so dang much (especially groceries) but this feels pretty jarring. Like didn’t we just do this?
It’s frustrating. I’ve been using it for the last…7 years? or so. It’s the one system that has worked consistently for me, and I’m trash at starting and keeping routines. It’s been the most consistent thing in my life
I’m so cranky about how much it costs and I’m rich enough that it doesn’t really matter. It just seems scammy for a product that’s supposed to help people struggling with their finances to cost so much and be a subscription on top!
Plus my AmEx credit cards weren’t linking for like a year and a half so I was extra cranky that paying for upkeep wasn’t even giving me functionality! They did fix that sometime last year though.
I’m still manually entering all my transactions (can you believe that I’ve done that since the beginning??). I agree, I’m just so annoyed. Especially since they don’t have any kind of student pricing. Students can get it free for a year, but then it’s the full price after that. (Which feels especially scummy when I’m trying to fight food insecurity, housing insecurity, and financial insecurity for students on my campus, for.myself included.)
I’m irritated too. I was grandfathered for years at the 50 USD price. Then when the price came up, I thought « fair enough ». But again??? And it will be more in canadian dollars This is the only system that really helped me manage my money so I am a bit scared to switch programs honestly.
Can’t they offer a lower price for folks like me who do not care about auto importing?
The price increase announcement definitely adds salt to the wound of the half hour I just spent deleting and readding my AmEx connection to get it to sync so I can do my June finances. What am I even paying them for.
Idk if this is reasonable, but I am still running the desktop version of ynab4, if anyone wants some help getting that running. It’s missing all of the cute new stuff, but the basics of setting the budget all work just fine.
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This is the only system that really helped me manage my money so I am a bit scared to switch programs honestly.