Hello YNABers

I feel like I'm missing out on some stock opportunities with the amount of idle cash I have sitting in my bank account. I'm about 5.5 months ahead in my YNAB plan. These 5.5 months are sitting in cash in my main account.

The current plan includes a monthly $100 transfer to a broker (MSCI All World ETF) and about $750 for my 3a third pillar (US equivalent would probably be a traditional IRA?) to have a maximum of 7'285 at the end of the year.

The assigned money for the future months is about on par with my income.

Essentially what I think I'm asking is:

• How do you decide what amount of money you keep idle and what to invest? I really do feel like I have too much sitting just doing nothing.
• Should I un-assign the months January through April and only keep like 2 months ahead in YNAB?
• How should the category and target look like for the ETF broker in my YNAB plan? As of now it's $100 by the end of the month.

Edit: Taking in feedback from you all, I went ahead and fully funded my emergency fund (about 16k) and will move that money to a low risk savings account with my bank. This also means that I'm now about 1½ moths ahead which feels manageable.

Question/Seeking Ideas: Our spending is out of control despite using YNAB. I want to do some sort of analysis and I'm sure lots of you smart folks out there have already done something similar. I have my YNAB categories and i tried compressing categories about 2 years ago, and of course have slowly expanded yet again. I have numerous credit cards i use. and i have more than one primary checking account so multiple "sources" of spend.

I also use Morgan Stanley advisors so they have a budget tool as well that I could import data into - I have connected some but not all accounts.

So: if i want to do a spending analysis and figure out where I can truly cut spending (i have a target in mind but it's a bit fluid - could get bigger or smaller depending on what I learn). What's the best way to use all of this information I have and analyze? My go to is a google sheet/excel file. Export 24 months of YNAB data and go from there. But if anyone has a better idea - i'm all ears!

There is definitely something humbling about setting a target based on calculations and realizing you spend way more on something than you thought you did!!

For me it's been the price of car ownership. Pre kids i biked everywhere except the occasional car rental for road trips. I would see media quotes about how many hundreds of dollars a month it costs to own a car and I secretly didn't believe them. Like surely they are exaggerating!

I bought a used car soon after restarting YNAB a few years back, just under 100k miles on it so I did a lot of major maintenance when I bought it, and I set time based targets for scheduled maintenance based on the costs then. And we are low mileage (like 6-7k/year) drivers!!!

- Gas: $60/month (of course it's gone up a lot in the past few months so I should up that target

- Insurance: $128/month

- Monthly/annual maintenance: $35/month (car washes, oil change, change air filters myself, change wipers myself, wheel alignment)

- Biannual tags: $12/month

- Fluid changes ~every 3 years: $11/month (Brake, transmission, PS)

- Battery ~4 years: $6/month (change myself)

- Brake pads ~5 years: $17/month

- Tires ~6 years: $40/month

- Major maintenance ~7 years: $18/month (belts, spark plugs, coolant)

- Parking: $1/month (we pay for it very rarely)

So that's $328/month just operationally! And that's with me doing some stuff myself. Plus, I saved $3,000 over the first couple years for misc major repairs (NOT standard maintenance) and to have the deductible covered in case of major damage, so the budget was even higher then.

I also put aside $82/month (which is about how fast this car is depreciating by my guess) so that when this car dies we will have a fund for a new car. So that brings us to over $400 in our budget a month on car(s).

Hi everyone - I am in kind of a nightmarish situation, like "rolling with the punches" but at its most extreme. Cash is extremely low due to circumstances outside of my control so I have had to use or reallocate all of the money I had saved up in various targets.

According to YNAB, I only have 500 Euros at my disposal. All of those Euros have been assigned. But when I look at my actual bank account, there is actually 900 Euros. Even more confusingly, all of my accounts are correct, I have checked them and reconciled them (they were only off by a few euros here and there). How is this possible? Where are the missing 400 Euros?

How do you all feel about the new transaction UI on the app? Much like the previously changed “clear transaction“ update, I think it just adds another click where none was needed. Maybe they should consider a beginner mode if people are overwhelmed by the existing screens?

New YNABer as of this week! I have multiple student loans (13) all from the same loan servicer but only 1 monthly payment.

Visually, I like the idea of adding every loan to YNAB individually with all of the different interest rates (helps me better make sense of my snowball method). But I’m not understanding how to track this in my plan? If I’m only making 1 payment monthly, won’t my other loans look underfunded every month?

I read a couple other reddit posts on this, but wasn’t sure anyone knows if the YNAB tech has updated recently enough to reconcile this?

Also, is anyone else having trouble connecting their student loan account to YNAB recently? (Mohela specifically)

Hey, folks! We're introducing a simpler, built-in way to handle credit card interest.

The Problem

The recommended way to handle credit card interest in YNAB has worked, but it’s not intuitive. We taught YNABers to create an Interest & Fees category, then either assign money to that category to cover interest or assign money directly to your credit card payment category to cover at least the minimum payment (interest included). It worked, but it had to be taught, and too many people never got that teaching.

The Solution

We're automatically creating a Credit Card Interest category for everyone with a credit card account. You'll only see it in the category picker when you enter a transaction in a credit card account. It won't appear in your plan.

When you select Credit Card Interest, YNAB handles the rest. Your card balance increases, YNAB tracks the charge in your credit card payment category, and (if needed) that payment category turns yellow to remind you to assign money for the new interest.

You'll also see a new "Interest Charges" row in the credit card balance breakdown under category details. It shows the total interest charged on that card this month.

What if you already have an interest category?

If you're happy with an Interest & Fees category you created yourself, feel free to keep using it. It will continue working the same way.

If you opt to use the new category going forward, data will be split between the two categories. If you'd like to consolidate, recategorize transactions from your old category to the new one, move any leftover available money elsewhere, and then delete the old category. Our support team can help you with this process if you have questions. 

Rollout

This update began rolling out to all platforms yesterday (10/7). It will be available to everyone next week if all goes according to plan. Testing on this update was very successful, so I don’t anticipate any snags.  

I’ve included a few screenshots below. ~BenB

The new Credit Card Interest category will *only* appear in the category picker when categorizing a transaction in a credit card account.

New interest charges line on category details for a credit card payment category on mobile...

...and on web

I have nearly 12 years of history with YNAB, (since YNAB 4 around 2014). Of course, I have used at least 5 different budgets/plans on those years, and I did not have a clear picture of the progress, milestones, average spending, etc. I asked AI to build something and ask me clarifying questions.

I pulled the data from YNAB 4 (exported to csv files), and connected an LLM model to YNAB using my personal token (I want automatic refreshes, you can do it this way, or just export csv files if you don't want to share the token). I am using Muse, but you can do this with almost any other model. Just wanted to share in case you want to give AI a good use and know more about your data.

https://preview.redd.it/z8864ama8huh1.png?width=1288&format=png&auto=webp&s=c7360f2250048465e6f2e5933f2881e07c9aa178

https://preview.redd.it/2hz4hwyl8huh1.png?width=1260&format=png&auto=webp&s=1e688aba2d82add99e893e1fd6b2e026ecbe830d

https://preview.redd.it/w5dnw1ws8huh1.png?width=1256&format=png&auto=webp&s=208df2ef67aa75b660a3d2c4738668ce53b5997b

I guess this has to go with rollover: is there any way put your unused money or overspent money into one category? Example: in one month I overall didn’t use $700. That goes into a bucket. The next month I overspent by $200. The bucket drops to $500.
Rollover is nice but I prefer to also have option to do total budget rollover. Like next month I’m not going to eat $300 more in groceries lol
Anyone find a workaround this?

So I have two credit cards. One I’m carrying a balance, the other I pay off if I use it. I have an overspent category that I used both cards for. I want to assign money to pay off the card that I’m not carrying a balance on but no matter what I do the money isn’t moving correctly. I tried directly assigning the money to the card but it doesn’t change the overspent category. If I assign the money to the category it only moves it to my other card that I’m carrying a balance on. I then tried to test paying off the overspent category completely by removing money from my rent category and that was the only way I got everything to move correctly. Is there a work around for this?

Hello everyone, I’m new to the community and am trying to get everything in order. Would someone be available to walk me through the primary functions and uses for YNAB? I am much more of a hands on person, I have already tried YouTube. Willing to pay as well!

Especially when you get refunded the following month, after paying the credit card balance.

When I travel for work I generally have a mix of expenses mostly on my Charge card, and a few on debit card. I have a specific refund category.

When I get the money back, the following month usually, I re-assign to the category, and then move back to the cards... but lately, since I am now funding future months as well, the cards do not really need money, as I think YNAB subtracts the "future available" cash to fund what's missing in the cards. They don't turn yellow.

I think I still have to move the money back there and have the cards on a positive balance?

It would be so nice if YNAB designed a specific feature to manage this. Something like flagging a specific transaction "to be refunded" to then match and rebalance everything at a later date.

Sorry, late evening half rant :)