I recently lost my six figure job two months ago and have used up my severance. I am now dipping into my 200k savings, checkings and investments. I recently got a min wage hospitality job because I got a 600k house this year with a 450K mortgage. Essentially I have wealth so feel I can take some time to career transition and take a break to deal with corporate burnout. How do I plan for this on YNAB without going into the red every month? My expenses are 5K per month and I am hoping to make a few K in the hospitality job and also get beck to setting back my consulting business. I have all these accounts linked on the app so just don’t want it to be red every month even tho my plan is to dip into savings.

Mentally this has been brutal as I don’t have closure on why I was let go and enjoyed the job and thought I was doing well. After ten years in my career, I feel like I had chosen something else even though tech project management is what i have always done. I am capable and can live on a budget but sucks to be in this situation- I want to be focusing on my personal life and dating and building a family.. just thought I would have it figured out in my 30s.

I've been using YNAB for the last six years or so, and it has helped me a lot, so much so that I started using it as my main source of truth. I wouldn't check my bank account; I would check YNAB instead, which I think is how it's meant to be used.

I've also been using a credit card, always paying it in full, to get some benefits from it.

However, over the last few months, we've been overspending on the credit card. I was aware that this was happening, but I assumed it was "under control" based on what YNAB was showing me. From what I understood, when the month rolled over, the overspending would either reduce "Ready to Assign" or leave categories red and needing to be covered.

But since last month, what's been happening is that my salary comes in, and I have just enough money to pay the bills that can't be paid by credit card, such as the mortgage and electricity. The rest goes towards paying the previous credit card statement. I even had to move the credit card payment date because it was due two days before my salary came in, and I didn't have enough money to cover it. The first month, I ended up paying it two days late.

I'm basically a month behind now.

I have a plan in place to reduce spending and get out of this situation. For example, I'm reducing my use of the credit card so that each month's statement gets smaller, leaving me with more cash available instead of continuing to push spending onto the card.

However, my budget is now completely messed up. I've seen recommendations to simply start over, but I have so much history in this budget, and I find that history really useful. I often search through old transactions to find something I've paid for in the past.

Note: I know I most likely misunderstood or missed the signs YNAB was giving me. I'm not blaming YNAB for my overspending, but I genuinely believed I was in a better financial position than I actually was.

Does anyone have any recommendations on how to fix this?

Until I fix the "month behind" situation, I'll effectively still be overspending on the credit card, so I'm not sure how useful the budget will be in the meantime, as I feel like I'll never be able to see a clear picture of where I actually stand.

Hi Everyone, am I the only one that would like tags to be implemented. I saw the recent work done on the plan tab and I really think we need to give YNAB some feedback on what we really need. I personally would like to see additional functionality rather than redesign.

What do you all think? What are your thoughts on tags or any other functionality requests.

Hello!

How do you categorize transportation to/from the airport when you’re leaving for vacation? Do you consider it part of your regular transportation category or part of your travel/vacation category?

I’m a new YNABer and just started using it a week ago. For now, I’ve logged it under transportation, but my wife thinks it should be part of our travel budget.
How do you guys handle it?

I’m working on paying off $75000 in consumer debt. I’m wondering should I stop using the cards while paying the CCs off or can I still use them for the points and pay off those expenses. I’ve thought about the velocity method. I don’t know what’s the best method to use when getting out of debt. Thanks for the advice.
Navy Federal 23000, 18% 560 min
TD cash, 6768 0% until 4/2027 70 min
Venmo 4888 0% until paid off $165 min
Apple Card 2600 25.49% 35 min
Chase- 300 27.49% 35 min
Debt Management Plan 7200 12% 216 min
TD Auto 28000 5.89% 515 min

I have access to 3000 balance transfer with 0% until 4/2028
I have 2500 cash I could use to pay down debt.
No savings at all.

I'm new to YNAB and this is what my transaction list looks like. Is this by design? I have to cross reference my bank to add the names. I might as well run a manual spreadsheet for that. I'm coming from Monarch where I don't have this problem. :(

I've been using YNAB for just over two months. I was feeling like I should be further along, but I realized that I have not added any new debt in the past two months. That's a success for me! I previously was using credit cards to cover everyday spending and not being able to pay them off. I still have a bunch of debt to tackle, but I'm not adding any new debt. That's big for me. I appreciate YNAB so much!

I am in my first year of YNAB and I am finding it is taking some time to decide what way of using this system works best for me, and I am not there yet. I have 3 plans. One for personal finances, one associated with my PLLC and one associated with my LLC. My personal plan has so many categories and many groups under each category...I am feeling like it is too much and I need to simplify but then think I may not get as clear a picture or the amount or type of reflection from that system that I need in order to address the issues that brought me to YNAB in the first place. Wondering how other people are feeling about these topics....they say "less is more" would you say that is true in YNAB? Should I have only one plan? How many categories is too many, too less? At what point does wading through it all become so tedious that the benefits outweigh the resistance you feel when thinking of YNAB'ing? TYIA for your feedback

Hurrah!

I started using YNAB a couple days ago and I’ve already gotten super confused. I payed my rent and then tried to assign my money however my bank balance was still showing my amount BEFORE I payed my rent.

Here are my actual questions
1) how does assigning money work when they keep asking me to assign money I know I don’t have?

2) How does clearing/unclearing transactions work?

3) where do I go from here, cause I’ve deleted the rent transaction so now I’m over assigned?

Please help, extremely frustrated!

Hi all! I have a baffling situation on my hands and I'm not sure what I'm missing. I have a credit card connected to my YNAB plan, and I've never had a problem with it until now.

I categorize all my transactions, including the credit card ones, with a normal category. When I notice that a category is a yellow negative, with the little card icon next to it (as opposed to the normal overspent red negative), I just move more money to that category to make it zero or positive. I never really pay attention to the credit card payments category at the bottom of my plan; I pay off my card every Friday and make sure those transactions are correctly marked as transfers from my checking account to the credit card account in YNAB.

For August, however, it's showing that my credit card payments category is negative by $1246. I checked, and all of the transactions that I used the card for are categorized into normal categories, which were all fully funded. So now at the beginning of September it's saying my "Ready to Assign" is starting at -1246. I already assigned money to cover those transactions, so I'm not sure what's going on?

Also, I took all of the "Activity" values for the category and added them up, and between the negative transactions and the positive card payments, the total sum is +846, so I'm not even sure where the 1246 number is coming from.

Any advice would be appreciated!

iPhone user here. I had the test interface, and now it has rolled back. I provided feedback previously to the team.

I’m making this post in hopes that the design team sees it, but I have a few questions.

My first question is when did this happen? I don’t feel like I was gone for that long…

Second question, do you guys like it? I mean the new Home Screen is okay, but the transaction page, or what they call the spending page, is hands down the worst. In my opinion, it’s so bad I’d rather just not use it anymore. It’s hard to explain, but it feels like everything takes longer, if that makes sense. Like to do anything, you’ve got to tap more or go deeper… plus I was a fan of the compact feel of the old design, now everything feels bubbly and just bloated. Almost feels like it was vibe coded, or built by an AI trained on Dribbble lol … Idk, I’m not very good at describing it, but what I do know is that I highly dislike it.

Please YNAB, be like Reddit and have an “old” version so we can switch back.

Whenever I search this sub for credit cards, I mostly find posts about debt, overspending, and how dangerous credit cards can be. And tbh, that was us for a while too.

But one of the biggest things YNAB has done for us is change credit cards from something that felt risky into something we can actually use intentionally and to ultimately save money. We no longer treat available credit like available money, and every purchase is backed by cash in the budget!

Now that we’re on the other side of that, I’m starting to think more about optimizing our wallet for points and travel rewards instead of just avoiding debt.

I’m curious whether anyone else here has used YNAB this way. How do you manage things like:

-rotating which card you use for different spending categories

-tracking welcome-bonus minimum spends

-keeping annual fees and card credits in the budget

-tracking points/miles balances

-deciding whether a card is actually earning enough value to keep

-making sure chasing points never starts influencing how much you spend

Right now I’m keeping all purchases in their normal YNAB categories and using transaction tags/memos to track welcome-bonus spending, because I still want my reports to show where our money is actually going.

I’d love to hear any systems, categories, tags, spreadsheets, or other tricks people use alongside YNAB for credit-card rewards optimization.

Wanted to share a trick that I’ve found helpful. I have a tracking account with $0 balance called “YNAB Schedule”.

I use it to store reminders related to my plan as a whole rather than any individual account, e.g.:

“Move leftover money from the Dining envelope to savings” on the last day of the month

“Update this month’s line of credit payment target to match the latest statement” on the first.

“Review quarterly tax payment targets”

Etc

It’s basically a place for me to keep any financial reminders.

Been using YNAB for four years and just realised my Age of Money has reached 375 days.

We’re now looking to buy our first house, so a big chunk of the money sitting there is finally going to disappear.

Part of me is going to hate watching that number collapse, but I suppose that’s literally what the money was there for.

YNAB has genuinely changed our life and how we manage money. I used to think mostly in terms of “how much money do I have?” Now I think much more in terms of “what does this money need to do?”

We’ve basically been YNAB poor for the last four years. My wife sometimes hates it because the bank balance can look healthy while I’m saying “we can’t afford that” 😂 It drives her mad but she also appreciate's how much we have been able to do by staying disciplined.

We’ve got money sitting there for the house deposit, emergency fund, childcare, holidays, annual bills and all the other random stuff that used to feel like it came out of nowhere.

So this is mostly just a slightly geeky post to mark the occasion, because 375 days might be the highest this number ever gets.

This is my second month trying to use YNAB. Here’s where I’m struggling…

I get paid once/month on the last business day. My August 31 check actually deposited on Saturday (August 29), though didn’t actually show up in my RTA until last night (with an August 29 deposit date, so I’m not sure why it took so long to show up in RTA. It showed as an inflow right away)

In my mind, I’m using that money in my September budget, though I think I’m understanding that I should assign it in August and then the amounts not spent (almost all of it) will just roll into September.

So - I assigned my check in August, and then when I change to September it says I am negative in RTA.

I think I also may be confusing targets and assignments. Are they the same thing?

Also - full disclosure, I am a jump-into it type of person, I haven’t sat and watched the getting started guide. Maybe that would clear things up?

Hope all this makes sense. Thank you!

I've recently added a new credit card to my account, but any time I use the credit card to pay for something, the transaction comes in as an inflow transaction. I have another credit card attached and every transaction comes in as an outflow transaction so I assumed that's how credit cards should act.

I like to manually enter my transactions, but since it's coming in as an inflow, my transactions aren't syncing. Is this a configuration issue on my end or am I just misunderstanding how credit cards work on here?

when assigning $$ to budget categories every month, is there a way to save an overall default to assign to every category? I generally go through each sub-category I have and use the "auto assign" / "assigned last month" route, but would be nice to reduce the clicks and just have a monthly default to start with since at this point my budget is generally pretty stable month to month.

Quick update for Canadians using YNAB and other budgeting apps:

The Consumer-Driven Banking Act has been law since March 26, 2026. The proposed regulations that will actually make the system work were published in the Canada Gazette on June 27, 2026. The 60-day public consultation period closed on August 26, 2026.

We are now waiting for the Department of Finance to review the feedback and publish the final regulations. Once finalized, the framework is expected to come into force in a staggered way (starting with accreditation), with the full set of rules intended to be in place within about one year of final publication.

What this means for users:
Secure, consent-based data sharing through official APIs (no more sharing banking passwords)

More reliable automatic imports into apps like YNAB

Stronger protections against fraud compared to current screen-scraping methods

Phase 1 (Read Access) is still expected sometime after the regulations are finalized.

Phase 2 (Write Access) remains targeted for mid-2027.

No firm operational launch date has been announced yet. Progress continues under Bank of Canada oversight, but we’re still in the “waiting for final rules” stage.

I’ll post again when the final regulations are published or a clearer timeline appears.

I'm fully familiar with stealing from the future, and the problems that doing so can lead to, but what about stealing from the PAST? As in, going into past months and moving unused money between categories. Has anyone else done anything like that?

The biggest problem I can foresee would be if you move unused money out of one category, but that rolled-over money was used in a later month. As long as you're aware of that and don't shortchange spending that's already happened in later months, I can't see any downsides to doing this (other than it being pretty hokey).

My specific use case is this:

I want to create a new category with a yearly recurring target. However, the initial payment is due this month. Over the past several months, I've had a couple categories that have carried available funds forward each month. I'd like to create the new category now, and move money (in past months) from those excess categories into the new one to help soften the blow of funding the new one entirely this month.