Tamba posted:

You could even wait until the inevitable Steam sale to pick up a key for cheap (usually $12.50).

redcheval posted:

Judging from my own experience and the past few posts, I'm thinking I may wipe and start over on June 1st, but I've been trying to get YNAB set up and am a little confused. I started it just a couple of days ago and have been retroactively putting in transactions from this whole month. I THINK I have a decent grasp on how this is all actually working, but something I'm confused about is YNAB denoting all the money from the two accounts I have put in as May's income. I keep a decent buffer amount in my checking as a 'just in case', so this obviously doesn't reflect what my actual income will be on a month to month basis. I'm guessing YNAB is just pulling what it has as income and next month that number will only reflect actual income for June? Or is this more synonymous with 'this is what you have in your accounts and available to budget'?

Another thing is that I make a decent but unpredictable amount of money from freelance projects on top of my full-time job, which I typically use to further pay down my car loan and channel as much as I can into savings. Because of this, I'm overspending on my car payment and savings categories, as what I've budgeted is the minimum required payment and base percentage from my paychecks, respectively. I'm not sure exactly what this means or how to fix it; is there a solution for this? Do I just bump up what I had budgeted for that category in accordance with how much extra I'm paying into it each month?

Zilkin posted:

Pretty happy with myself. Used YNAB for two months now, and definitely still learning how to best to do things, but I should already have all my August expenses covered. So I guess I can start living on last month's income now!

YNAB team posted:

Pricing’s a tricky thing. As we considered how to price the new YNAB, we asked ourselves questions like:

- Is the price friendly?
- What are our competitors doing?
- How does the price compare to the value YNAB delivers?
- What is YNAB’s cost per user? What price will support that cost and operating overhead?
- What about our future plans? Will profits at a specific price point allow for investment in future growth?
- Will the pricing support YNAB as a business far into the foreseeable future?

These questions (and probably many I’ve forgotten) and their answers guided our process. Still, pricing is scary. You wish you could have a Goldilocks moment and try a few before landing on the price that is “just right.”

So here is where we landed. After our usual 34-day free trial, if you want to subscribe, the pricing breaks down as follows:

- $45 per year if you subscribe within our lifetime discount launch window. (You lock in a lifetime 10 percent discount off the annual plan.)
- $50 per year if you subscribe after the lifetime discount launch window.
- $5 per month if you’d like to take the monthly option.

Once we officially launch, if you purchased YNAB 4 recently, we’ll credit you free months if you decide to upgrade:

1 month prior to launch -> 11 months free
2 months... -> 10 months free
3 months... -> 9 months free
4 months... -> 8 months free
5 months... -> 7 months free
6 months... -> 6 months free

Arbitrary Pricing Cutoffs
I totally recognize that cutting off the monthly credits at six months is arbitrary. We’ve run into this every time we’ve released an upgrade in the past. We need the cutoff to happen somewhere. We’ve always done it at six months, so we’re just going to stick with the devil we know.

It’s kind of like when you buy some new tech gadget and then a new version comes out three months later. You liked the gadget when you bought it. You felt you had received value for it. But when the new gadget comes out you kind of are left thinking, “Gosh, I wish I had waited.”

I totally get that. Again, I’m excited for the business model switch so we can avoid this and just continually add value to your use of YNAB, while having you continually assess whether that value is worth the price we’re asking.

The Upgrade is Completely Optional
We are not going to cripple the software you purchased. Everything will work great as long as you maintain hardware that runs it. If YNAB 4 is delivering the value you’re looking for, you bought the license, and it’s good for as long as you want to use it.

If you purchased eight months ago and think, “Gosh, I don’t think I want to purchase YNAB again so soon.” That’s totally fine! Hopefully we release some feature down the road in the next few months that will change your mind. Again, I’m thrilled that our pace of development will finally be showcased on a regular basis instead of hidden behind arbitrary major upgrade release cycles.

I just want to be super clear here: You can continue using YNAB 4. Just assess this purchase like you did your original purchase of YNAB. I hope we can make a compelling case for the upgrade!

Locking in the Discount
We are keen on a simple price point in the long run: $5 per month, or $50 per year. However, we also want to incentivize you like a used car salesman, where he assures you that, “This offer is only good until Saturday!” (Yeah, right.) So, once we move out of the soft launch phase, you’ll have until the end of the discount window to lock in an additional 10 percent savings off the annual price, making it $45/year.

That’s a locked in discount. So when we’re all being driven around by self-driving cars, and have iBrains embedded in our, well, brains, and we announce that we’ve increased the price to 120 Megadonks (the currency switch happened fast, it’s a long story that your grandkids love to hear), you can rest assured, sipping on your nano-machine-anti-aging sweet tea, that your price will be 12 Megadonks less. Because you get that 10 percent off. Which still computes even though we switched to a 10-month calendar because the moon.

Wrapping Up
That’s a wrap. I’ll try and field questions as they come. As long as they’re on-topic. I have seen all of the Star Wars movies. Hopefully there won’t be too many questions. We really tried hard to make the pricing friendly, competitive, economical, and at a point where we can keep YNAB going and growing strong.

Edit: 1 month, 2 months, etc. prior to launch, not from the moment I'm posting this.

IllegallySober posted:

I wanted it completely off-budget because that way I don't think about it when I have it and it's not in a bank account for me to spend. I know it's not exactly what YNAB teaches but while I'm getting used to YNAB I thought it was a good thing to have.

That being said, I went ahead and added it to the budget for now which will solve both of the current problems with that (tracking the expenditure and replenishing the fund)

And thanks for the tip on the reports. I'll go dig through that and see where I went wrong!

Okay, something else I don't think I fully understand:

With YNAB, the idea is that you basically have a series of "digital envelopes" that you're budgeting your money with, right? So let's say last month, when I started YNAB, I had $100 in a savings account and when I set up YNAB I "budgeted" that money for my Buffer. I didn't withdraw anything from it, it just carried over. Now it's a new month, that $100 is still sitting there, but it's not in my checking account, it's in my savings. When I'm budgeting my money for the new month, the only way I could overdraft is by spending the money that's in that Buffer, correct? Even though it's not in the actual checking account?

Even typing that out I'm not sure if my have my question right but hopefully it's enough for you guys to understand. I'm not to Step 4 yet but I'm terrified I'm going to have something bounce because I don't have the money in the right spot and I'm not certain what I'm doing.

Edit 2: Okay, now I think I really hosed myself. When I made the "emergency fund" an on-budget account, that then added that $500 to the pool to budget, didn't it? So when I budgeted to zero and cued up bills to pay- I was doing it with $500 that isn't actually in that account, wasn't I?

God drat it, I'm getting really frustrated trying to make sense of this poo poo. I don't know if I'm making it harder than I need to or what but I'm pretty sure I just paid a bunch of bills with money that isn't actually in the account because YNAB said "yeah, go ahead, there's lots of money still left!" HELP

kidrobotx posted:

Hey guys, is there any real downside to not going the final step and following Step 4? I've followed the rest of the steps to a tee, but for Step 4, I just can't bring myself to do it when it'll look like I'm pulling a month's worth of income from my emergency fund. I'm salaried so I know exactly how much I'm getting paid and when so on the first I can budget my month out, and then I pay for everything that I can with my credit card anyway for those sweet cashback dollars. After my second paycheck of the month gets deposited, I just pay off whatever's on my card.

Thermopyle posted:

So how do they expect you to handle reimbursable expenses that span a month boundary?

Combat Pretzel posted:

As far as reimbursement expenses go, does it kill anyone to front them the first time and then reallocate them in the budget this or next month, whenever you get them reimbursed? It's just a numbers game. And practically exactly what happens in your wallet.

gariig posted:

I used to to do this for my wife's work expenses but it gets real easy to forget about them. Mostly the $5-10 random expenses she'd have when not on a business trip. It was nice seeing the red $-5 in YNAB to remind me that something needs to be expensed or is incoming.

Combat Pretzel posted:

What's mildly annoying for me is that scheduled transactions are fixed now. There's no more option to pull its current instance into the register. Apparently I have to bow to the masters of time instead of my own decision when to pay it. Either that or start fiddling around editing the scheduled transaction every drat time.

Combat Pretzel posted:

CEO did an AMA on reddit.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ynab/comments/3z1zps/im_jesse_mecham_founder_of_ynab_and_this_is_a/

quote:

I also want lots of emoji support.

Zamujasa posted:

The attitude seems to primarily be "well, all of your actual banking info is kept with a third party", never mind that plenty of financial info exists in a transaction ledger as well.

Blinkman987 posted:

Just bought YNAB 4 on Steam since it seemed like that train was leaving the station. I need the manual entry as a mental gimmick to make my spending "real."

I have this trip planned for Dec 2016, about $7,200 total. I save (and have saved) $300 a month for it that goes into my savings account. I occasionally buy items for it, like I bought some expedition pants this week. I've paid about 20% of the trip, and in August a big chunk of the trip cost itself comes due. Any recommendations on how to handle this in YNAB?

I have my investment accounts AND savings accounts off-budget. The money in there isn't really for month-to-month spends (it doesn't have a job). The trip stuff gets pulled (or, I just adjust the deposit amount) occasionally, and in the case of my future car savings I did pull $1k this month for repairs/brakes but that happens like once every two years. Is that the best way to handle the savings account?

Less Fat Luke posted:

I find credit card handling terrible in both. In 4 it seems like credit cards are probably fine if you have massive debt and are paying one off. For now I actually just created one account and import both my bank and credit card into that - any payments I just delete (since I don't carry a balance).

Ludwig van Halen posted:

Credit cards in nYNAB started making more sense when I realized you don't have to budget for credit card payments (unless you're paying down a carried over balance)

When I spend with my credit card it subtracts from the spending category and enters it as available money for credit card payment. When I pay my bill it will subtract the available money on the credit card line, and I will have budgeted $0 for credit card payments, but it will balance out because the money came from the other parts of my budget.

For the first month of my nYNAB budget (January) I had to budget the balance on my credit card from the previous month (December), but after that it'll be smooth sailing.

SaltLick posted:

I got a modest increase at a new job in July but after retirement was taken into account my take home was more or less the same. I think the biggest factor into getting ahead is budgeting for 4 weeks in a month and that "extra paycheck" every couple of months padding that step 4.

TraderStav posted:

Has anyone solved the best method for handling items to be reimbursed in nYNAB? It's especially a nuisance when I have to pay for the first room of a hotel stay for business up front but won't be able to submit the expense report until after the trip is completed (3 months later). It seems as if I put a negative value in a "To be reimbursed" category it'll flow into the next months 'overspending from previous month' budget dollars. Can I just do the same amount (negative) again in the next month and keep kicking the can down the road until I get my expense report submitted and paid?

I GET why they decided to turn off the push forward a negative balance function as my biggest misuse of YNAB classic came from that, but there has to be some sort of handling of business reimbursements on personal cards.

Sockser posted:

I managed to gently caress up one of my credit cards in ynab and it thinks the balance is 0 but the available amount in the budget category is -130, which implies it thinks there's a positive balance? I guess?

I had the account balanced out to 0 with spending and payments in April, so I definitely hosed up something this month but I'm not sure what, since if I take all the transactions on paper, out=in

However, I did delete a reconciled transaction in that account. Possible I found a bug, I suppose. Unless any of you kind folk have a decent explanation on what happened. I can provide the straight up transaction log if that would be helpful.

In either case, I'm just going to take the $130 hit to my budget, I guess.


E: all of my individual category balances are either 0 or positive so it's not that

dreesemonkey posted:

Yea but with Rule 4, I DO have the money since I'm budgeting a month ahead. I get it, I guess I'm just too much in the classic YNAB mindset.

Today is a great example, I just went grocery shopping and spent ~$100. I didn't have that left over in my budget for this month, but you know, it IS the last day of the month. So I'd potentially have to do some budget shimmying for one day?

epenthesis posted:

I guess I'm the only one who tracks to the penny. Whatever; I'm used to doing it and it makes me feel better knowing that level of detail. Also, I represent small personal debts as uncleared cash transactions so they're harder to overlook.

I have four cash accounts: wallet, loose change (I reconcile this one every few months, and eventually I'll take the trouble to deposit it), emergency cash, and laundry quarters.

LLJKSiLk posted:

I've owned YNAB for several years but started using it at the beginning of this month as my budget has spiralled out of control. This is the first month in at least a year and a half where I am comfortable at the end of the month financially.

I spent about 3 hours setting everything up, but now it takes me around 5 minutes each morning just doing a reconciliation and keep a very accurate picture of what's going on. My financial situation looks dire, but it isn't impossible to overcome. For the first time in a long time I feel more empowered having control of my finances.

spincube posted:

Sounds like a category difference - where you spend your money isn't as important as whether it's going out of your 'work lunches' category, or the 'eating out / can't be bothered to cook' category, or whatever. I keep 'groceries' and 'household bits' separate for this reason, so I can stock up on paper towels and detergent without it coming out of my food money!

Randler posted:

What am I supposed to do if I got YNAB 4 on Steam?

Combat Pretzel posted:

Start with 130$ then keep filling it up to that amount each month. You'll actually be topping it up by the amount of your bill each month, yet have a full 130$ budgeted.

spinst posted:

Steampunk Hitler posted:

This actually makes sense to me, although I've got maybe a weird case that I'm not sure how it's going to handle it. My Amazon Prime card adds 5% cash back as a statement credit so my balance owed on the card has decreased (which I added as a inflow to be budgeted transaction) but my amount Available for payment has stayed the same. I'll be curious to see how that is handled once the bill comes due and I pay it off.

BAE OF PIGS posted:

You guys are talking about two different cards, FYI. Steampunk is talking about the Synchrony card, Defenestration is talking about the Chase card.

Henrik Zetterberg posted:

Don't do this. You're passing up 3% cash back on your new purchases. Put your credit toward statement credit.