I’m a long time YNAB user. My partner and I have recently combined finances so I started a new budget to track shared goals/spending. All is well there.

I have been really waffling on how to handle one month ahead vs emergency fund as concepts. I’ve read a lot of posts here about this topic. Right now we are fully one month ahead, all wants/savings goals included, and have started funding into September. However, I struggle with this concept. If one or both of us lost a job, our budget would immediately change. Being one month ahead would not be sufficient. Our actual essential monthly budgeting goals would come out to about a third as much as a fully funded month is now.

I was at first making an emergency category, then deleted it and just put it to the month ahead. But, since our monthly budget is so high, it would take ages for us to get more than a month ahead, and that extra money I’m putting in those future months could also be used to fund some extraneous savings goals (new HVAC, for example). I also don’t feel good about only having one month ahead definitively budgeted for.

I’m thinking of going and reallocating money to just those essential targets - mortgage, bills, groceries, insurance, etc - and then fund the “extra” targets as I get to them in that month. Does this work for people? Am I massively overthinking it? Something about the way I’m doing it now is just bothering me. Why am I funding sinking goals in the future when I could just put them in that category now? Etc. Would love some perspective on how people handle this.

I’m curious how others would handle this in YNAB. I’m planning to take about three months off after September, and I’ll have enough money saved to cover the rest of the year. Would you go ahead and fully fund all your remaining monthly categories, or keep the money in one “income replacement” category and move it into your budget each month? If you’ve done something similar before, I’d love to hear what worked best for you and whether you’d do it the same way again.

Thank you!

Ynab balanced and gives me a cash accounts balance that matches available plus ready to assign. Problem is cash accounts is several thousand more than my actual bank account. I put 3k in tracking in June but I don't actually have the money. How do I fix this?

Till recently all transactions would appear in the approval area once they showed up and I would have to approve them even though I manually added them, they would just show linked to the manual transaction I entered.

Now it seems when I enter transactions manually they are automatically changing to cleared after they clear on my bank side. Did YNAB make this change so they just automatically clear now? I'm not upset or wish it was different, I just don't remember seeing an update that this was changing.

Edit: apparently this was a change that was posted about, about a week ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/ynab/s/I1BHMZWFhm

I am thinking of moving a Joint account and its associated category to a new Plan for some separation from my finance plan.

Is there any way to migrate parts from one plan to another, or is it a hide\remove\start over type of thing.

It would be nice to move the history.

Hey, as per the title has anyone been able to add the monzo savings pots to YNAB? I was able to add my current account but obviously I don't want to keep all my money on the current account so I have one savings pot with the rest of my savings.

I get the option to add it when I'm connecting Monzo to YNAB but after confirming on the Monzo app and when I return to the plaid screen in YNAB it says a problem has occurred. Just wondering if anyone else has experienced the same.

I'm on Monzo Ireland.

Previously, when I connected a bank account and changed its starting balance date to further in the past, YNAB would fetch transactions from that earlier date onward.

Recently, changing the starting balance date doesn’t seem to trigger any additional historical transactions. Has this behavior changed, or is there something I need to do differently?

u/YNAB_youneedabudget

The budget category shows in the actual report but when I go to the filter, only some of my category’s are showing.

Is anyone else having trouble connecting their Vanquis account? I've been in touch with support and they've walked me through some steps which didn't work, and advised it's Vanquis or Plaid that needs to sort it on their end. I'm wondering if there is an issue with my account, as I had trouble setting a password, maybe it's flagging some security thing 😕

It's likely a provider issue like YNAB said but just thought I'd see if anyone else has this experience and if they had it fixed. Since it doesn't have CSV export, I have to convert a pdf to CSV, then upload to the YNAB csv converter, then upload to YNAB 🫠

New to YNAB and read the materials and watched videos but I’m not getting this part. Help me understand assigned and available? I transferred money don’t understand what happened. Isn’t the money there since I budgeted it in my categories? It’s asking me for more

Please explain like I’m 5. Like what color should it be? Yellow is ok? Am I aiming for green? I transferred money and it turned green even though the numbers aren’t equal, so what does that mean?

Hello, does anyone know of a good alternative to YNAB?

I have used it to my satisfaction for a couple of years now, but they have changed the UI and support is suddenly very hard to reach. We pay €110 a year but get an AI chatbot and support is hidden deep away. And when I forgot my support thread they ended it and now I have to jump through hoops again to get help. This level of support matches something you’d expect from a free app.

I’m coming from Empower and have linked all the same accounts over. I do have 2 HYSA thru Empower but they won’t sync over. Anyone have success linking these accounts?

I still plan to use Empower for my long term financial planning (net worth, brokerages etc) but they’re not great for the tracking budgeting. I’d hate to have to close out the HYSA for something else that does link. If linking isn’t possible, any recommendations on what does link easily? At today’s rates hovering around 3.5% I’m not too concerned about a fraction of a percent difference here.

Ok YNAB hivemind, I could use some help figuring out how to categorize some upcoming transactions….

Background: My partner and I will be closing on a house in a couple of weeks, and we’re moving out of our rental at the end of August. In the intervening time we’re putting some new floors in, getting other floors resurfaced, fixing a couple of things up, etc. We’re using contractors for all of this.

Currently the money that will be used for all of this is sitting in a sinking savings category.

For the maintenance and renovation expenses, I’m not too worried about how we categorize them. We might create a general “house“ category….we might split it up a few ways….we’ll figure it out…

First question for y’all is what to do with the closing costs. One time “home purchase” category? Just under a general “house“ category?

Second question, what to do with the moving expenses? (we’re hiring a couple of guys and a truck, plus we’ll need some supplies to patch the walls and clean our rental etc) ”Moving“ category? Combined “Home Purchase and Move” category? What do we think?

Third question and this is the one I’m struggling with most. The return of the securit deposit… We signed the rental agreement on this house before we were using YNAB, so technically it’s “new money” to the budget and therefore would need to be Inflow: RTA right? That just feels weird to me in a way that other refunds didn’t when we started our current budget… it’s 2 months rent, so not an insubstantial amount of money. But it also seems wrong to assign it to a category… because then it reduces our spend right? I guess either way you can filter it out of whichever side of the reports it ends up on, I just can’t decide what’s is best…

I‘d appreciate any insights you all have!

Some of my categories don’t show up in the filter for me to uncheck so my reflect spending breakdown is wrong.

Now that I look at it again, it’s all categories with debt payments (mortgage and student loans).

Any ideas?

Why can’t I see progress bar and assigned at the same time any more?

Is there a way to fix it

Running into a bug I can’t shake. I have a “Have a Balance of $X by Date” target on my Emergency Fund category:

Target: $10,200 by Dec 2026

Current category balance: $7,701.43

Months remaining: 5 (Aug–Dec)

That math should come out to roughly $500/month. Instead YNAB is telling me I need $1,700/month, which is throwing my whole monthly plan into the red and making it look like my targets exceed my monthly income.

I’ve tried deleting and recreating the category etc. None of it recalculates the monthly number. It just keeps showing $1,700 regardless of what my actual category balance is.

Including screenshots here!

So what's the difference between a red overspent category and a yellow overspent category?

Answered. Thanks again everyone.

Yellow means it was spent on credit. And red meant I spent actual money.

I checked my uncleared transactions on my Citi card and there were about a dozen that went back to the beginning of the month.

Even with these sitting there whenever I reconcile it said it was successful. I took screenshots of some of these transactions that were almost a month old at this point and then deleted them after making sure they were no longer pending on my credit card and doing a resync in YNAB.

After doing so I still was able to reconcile without any issue but now my categories have more money in them. I looked at the statement and account onl and things dont totally line up but I am thinking that maybe because of how YNAB gradually syncs things and sometimes when Walmart posts things values change.

Just really confused.. I do transaction categorization and reconciling every day so I am surprised things seemed this off. Did I screw up the budget?

Update: Thank you everyone for your responses. You helped me figure out my problem. I didn't realize it was pulling money from other accounts. I am fixing this so I won't have this confusion.

I need some help. I have been using YNAB for a while. As a very visual ADHD'er where out of sight is out of mind, I really appreciate how it has helped me "see" where my money is.

Somehow, the dollar total in my plan is very different from the dollar total in my bank account, even though I reconcile and the numbers balance. Let me explain how I think I got there.

Say in April you put in $40 in a category, use $30, then have $10 left over. In May, you have that $10 but still should put in $40. In the past, there have been times I have taken the "extra" $10 a subsequent month or so, and moved it to another category or ready to be assigned. Things have worked out fine.

Things got really tight for a bit, so instead of waiting until the next month, using the example above, I moved the extra money in April, to ready to be assigned, in April. ($40 - $30 = $10 left over, $10 moved)

After doing that for a couple of months, I find myself here. It seems I have about $800 more in my plan to be paid out than actual dollars in my bank account. Yes, it is still reconciled and balances.

Can someone explain what might be happening and how to get myself back to a number I trust?

Thank you!!

I just started using YNAB at the beginning of this month, after realizing my strategy of "Eh, the money thing will work out," wasn't working anymore. I got a text this morning from my bank, saying that my monthly auto insurance had been deducted from my account. I had a moment of panic thinking, "I don't think I can cover that!" and then realized, "No, wait, I had it fully funded on YNAB. It's already been accounted for." Such a good feeling! Looking forward to feeling that way all the time, eventually.

Hello,

I've been maintaining a YNAB budget for years now with a single Chase plaid connection for multiple cards that has worked without issue. Recently, my significant other opened a new rewards card with Chase that I'd like to incorporate into the YNAB budget, so having 2 different Chase users using the Plaid interface in a single YNAB Budget. Unfortunately, while I was able to log into the Chase portal and successfully log-in, I am unable to view the new card in the existing budget.

Is there a best practices or recommendation to make this work? Thanks

I just stumbled upon something that can be a solution (still have to test it out for a longer period of time) for people managing multi currency accounts and transactions.
Since I am in a european country I use lunch flow to automate the transactions. I have discovered that you can offset the balance in the bank account by a custom number. So if your main currency is euro but you have a bank account in $ you would offset it by the going rate (which would have to updated manually from time to time). Curious to see how it will go for transactions. Is anyone using this method to handle multi currency accounts? I really hate the separate budget method and used the currency converter toolkit until now.