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There's also the lightning bolt in the top right corner of the budget's monthly summary that will do that over every field. Good for when you have a full month of "available to budget" money. Methods for dealing with under- (or over-) spending vary a lot based on what you want to accomplish, but either way you probably have a "target amount" for each category. If you're consistently budgeting where you have $50 more left over every month, drop that from your budget and let it even out again. Or at the end of every month, "balance to zero" every over-spent category and move the newly-freed funds into a buffer category or however you want to set it up. Just play around until you find a method that you like, because that's the one that's going to stick (and probably work) best for you.
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Dec 12, 2015 05:19
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Looking at nYNAB just makes me happier that I have YNAB4. There's no reason to switch right now unless you have to have access to your budget at work, and if you can use the web version at work there's not much saying you can't find a way to remote-desktop your way to using the classic version. There are a few things that look neat, like the "age of money" indicator and more streamlined reconciliation option, but there's no compelling reason to upgrade. YNAB4 also works fine with no internet or if you really can't afford to pay another subscription, and the data is always yours -- it isn't on someone else's server that might become unavailable or lost at some point. Honestly, I would've just been more open to dropping $30 on a yearly upgrade with the new features in the desktop client.
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Jan 2, 2016 04:36
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Xik posted:When I started YNAB, I'm pretty sure I read somewhere on the site that "it's better then mint" because manually typing in transactions keeps you "aware" of your budget/money. I actually only just noticed a couple of weeks ago that you could import transactions into YNAB 4. I guess that was because I thought the method specifically relied on not doing that so never looked for it... quote:I imagine the problem "YNAB vets" have is that they have almost been trained too well. You'd have to look at this as a new line in your budget and ask the hard question "does this add value". Someone else also pointed out that other financial management tools like Quicken and such have lower yearly costs than YNAB does ($30-40). YNAB itself has a few direct competitors of its own that make the $60/year price point really hard to swallow as a SaaS thing. Karthe posted:I went through that AMA in Q&A mode and I'm not all that convinced that they've thought out the whole data security thing. I'm disappointed that their view on Two-Factor Authentication wasn't as aggressive as it should be given the nature of the data we're supposed to entrust them with. I'd also feel better with an option to encrypt userdata with a secondary password. I love PushBullet's system, and I think now that nYNAB is web-based there should be an additional level of protection to safeguard our financial info. 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.
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Jan 2, 2016 09:49
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I tried the budgeting with expected future income thing a few years ago and it was pretty ruinous since I'd just get lazy with budgeting and do it all at the start of the month and never touch it again.  YNAB really works best if you're fiddling with your budget on a regular basis.If you want to do "future budgeting" with excess money, you can always just operate on the ideal of keeping the future "amount to budget" at $0. Anything you don't budget in one month automatically rolls over into the next month as "available to budget", so if you have a lot of excess income you can theoretically budget it out pretty far, and get a decent idea of how long you can survive with no income.  You can see that I didn't finish budgeting everything in January and it automatically rolled over to February, and I budgeted it down to $0 there. (Ignore that the numbers don't make sense, I fudged them for this.) It's pretty flexible how you want to use it, but maybe not as responsive as nYNAB is. You just have to be aware of what you're doing. Zamujasa fucked around with this message at 19:56 on Jan 9, 2016 |
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Jan 9, 2016 19:54
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Nettles Coterie posted:I've been using nYNAB for exactly two weeks thanks to this thread, and it already feels like it's been ages. I actually know where my money is going for the first time in several years, and I already feel so much more secure and confident in my finances. Even though I impulse-shopped, and had $300 in unexpected car repairs, I was able to manipulate my budget to cover it. This feels amazing after several years of willful ignorance and overspending... maybe I'll actually be able to pay down the $8k credit card debt I built up during that time. Just wanted to say thanks, guys.  I'm finally getting ahead, too. My car is all paid off, my net worth is slowly rising... I've started to cut down on the parts of my life that were costing too much with no benefit, and it's let me put more money into the things that matter.
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Feb 18, 2016 19:53
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SaltLick posted:
Congratulations!  Excellent work, keep it up.
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Mar 30, 2016 03:13
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I still find it funny that they went from "direct importing would be bad and make people lazy" to "direct import is good please use us" and this happened. In the mean time, I finally got my friend to use YNAB and he's finished his first month of budgeting so far.  It's still complicated for him but I'm helping him manage it and it seems to be working well for him otherwise.
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Apr 7, 2016 16:47
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nYNAB (the new one) is still missing a handful of features that YNAB4 (Steam version) has, but it's also a web-based SaaS thing so you can use it anywhere as opposed to YNAB4 that's mostly desktop-only. If you go the nYNAB route you might want to look into the toolkit extension that supposedly makes it less crappy to use.
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Apr 20, 2016 16:26
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nYNAB is still missing a ton of poo poo compared to YNAB4. There's an extension for most browsers called YNAB Toolkit that makes a valiant effort to restore them. I'm still using YNAB4, though. The only thing nYNAB offers is auto-import from some banks and being a webapp, so you can access it from anywhere... but at the cost of being a subscription-based service with half the features.
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Aug 24, 2016 18:52
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Teeter posted:The only downside to YNAB 4 is that I can't edit my budget using the app, and the desktop version requires an install so I can't run it at work when I'm much more inclined to push around numbers. Quick search suggests so, but if you're using the mobile app, unless you can have Dropbox you might run into some issues.
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Aug 25, 2016 18:37
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Goals sort of works in nYNAB but you lose all reporting with it, and the goals feature isn't more than you could get with a calculator and the notes field in YNAB4; just take $Target ÷ Months, budget it for the month, add a note with "$xxx by yyy: $zzz/mo". You don't get anything fancy, but if you trust your numbers (and remember the note) you'll do fine.spincube posted:like being able to review your spending as a proportion of your income You can sort of get this too, with the income v. expense tab (as slow as it is), but you have to do the math again of $Expenses ÷ $Income. (Alternatively, you could export it and import it into something like Excel/Google Sheets that might be able to format it better) TheCenturion posted:Hands down best software I've used for budgeting. I wish I'd had it from the start.  I used it well for a while, stopped using it around the start of 2015 when I really needed it most, and I ended up regretting it and back-importing all of it, categorizing it, and setting it up when I started again at the start of 2016. The spending reports are way too useful and helped me get an idea of what was going on, so I could plan out the future better.
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Sep 23, 2016 18:22
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Ignoranus posted:I jumped onto nYNAB and then came to this thread and now I'm feeling antsy about my future. I think I'm going to stick with it for now, though, because otherwise I'll lose all of my inertia and founder outright. I just use the place name (e.g. "Albertsons") and if I need to differentiate more than that I use the memo field. I use the memo field for gas, too (eg. 14.229 @ $2.319, 258.1mi = 18.1mpg). It doesn't mean much for my budget but if I ever wanted to look back at it the information is there.
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Sep 24, 2016 20:53
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. It's worse at my new job because I can't just walk somewhere and get food, I have to get it delivered if I want to eat out and that adds up fast as all hell. I think I like this better than using Mint for tracking because it requires more direct involvement from me, but the automatic "import" function does some doofy stuff where it mis-labels payees and stuff.
" and "I ate at Zachary's because my fiance and I wanted to get some pizza together tonight". I suppose that's better handled through the "memo" field?
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Xik posted:There is no reason for carrying them over in the budget view, the money had to have come from somewhere. It's an expense like any other and should be budgeted, even if the next month you get reimbursed. I use it for carrying over things but with a caveat; in the master category of reimbursables, I have the categories for reimbursable expenses, then an extra category for "balancing". The balancing category always holds the inverse sum of the reimbursables, so the balance of the categories evens out to $0. Then when I'm paid back, I just budget the income to the category that went red, and update the balancing category appropriately. This way I can keep track of the amounts but without the missing money issue. It's a little more work but lets me keep track of who owes what easily.
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Oct 20, 2016 20:08
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I'm pretty sure the nYNAB folks said at one point that the new way is just The Way You Do It Now and that if you're a dirty holdout you can simulate the YNAB4 way with a non-CC account, exactly as you are doing now.
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Nov 1, 2016 18:21
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No Butt Stuff posted:Why would they want it this way?! From what I can gather it's mostly meant for people who don't pay off their credit cards (or something), for whom budgeting a "credit card payment" was weird because it sort of went into an abyss. Like trying to rationalize "I spent money on this (from my budget), but where do I put the money for the credit card payment on my budget???" babydonthurtme posted:I'm not sure. I kind of feel like the way credit cards are set up in this iteration is just one of those ideological hills they're going to die on. In YNAB 4, their hill was automatic transaction importing (or at least that was one of the things on their hill), which was Bad and Wrong and Undisciplined, at least until they realized that they weren't going to reach a wider audience without adding that feature to their web app. I still feel like automated import encourages laziness. I mean, I'm not great at keeping up to date, but it makes you think a lot more about your money if you're having to manually put stuff in when you buy things. (Or just importing manually I guess  )
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Nov 2, 2016 04:22
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babydonthurtme posted:Sometimes I feel sorry for the pushback the YNAB folks get over some of their decisions. This is not one of those times. I'm starting to really wonder what's going on behind the scenes for them, even though I know fluff features like this probably don't take that much time to put out, and that the automatic transaction import issues took away longer to resolve than they expected. One nice thing about nYNAB's newest competitor is exactly that -- it's a Trello board with what the developer behind it is working on.
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Nov 5, 2016 22:02
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If you import a ton of data into YNAB you can just go through the old months and budget everything to zero using the lightning bolt. Might be a little dirty but it should make the "available to budget" accurate for the month after the last one (so you can allocate it to your savings or emergency fund or whatever). I had to do this for half a year's worth of transactions, having the reports section be useful was worth the time spent making the (current) budget area useful. As for the credit cards, since 1 point = $0.01, I just take a look at my rewards balance whenever it updates around the first of the month, then budget that as income to an off-budget account. If I put it towards a statement balance, I use YNAB to transfer it across. Works like a charm
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Jan 24, 2017 00:23
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TheCenturion posted:If you're carrying over a negative balance, you're spending money this month you won't have until next month, yeah? Carrying over a negative balance (for reimbursement purposes) is actually fairly simple, you just have to janitor a little more than usual.  Keep an extra category that you don't assign any transactions to, simply for balancing. Budget your spending on those in the extra category, so that the total ends up being $0 (or more). This way you can see both how much you've reserved for these loans, and how much is actually outstanding. When you get paid back, just assign it to the negative category; then you can extract money from the balancing category. E: Oops, I see I goofed in the second to last month. I've fixed it but don't feel like reuploading another screenshot 
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Feb 8, 2017 20:16
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The way nYNAB handles credit cards seemed so foreign. YNAB4 works a lot better for it if you pay them off every month. The "automatically moves money from budgeted categories to CC payments" thing just sounds like it causes all sorts of additional problems.
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Mar 21, 2017 20:04
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I just use the category notes field in YNAB4 to note when/how often I expect irregular things and repeat the budget number monthly, adjusting if I need to myself.
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Apr 28, 2017 02:33
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Has anybody asked the Financier guy about possibly going open source? If he's effectively done with the project it might be worth seeing if there's room for collaboration on that.
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May 9, 2017 18:02
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Chin Strap posted:I have a real first world problem question. Budget what you're depositing into this savings fund. Transfer the amount from your on-budget accounts to your off-budget savings/investment account. Once a month, update the balance in the off-budget account to account for interest/profit. Doing it the same day every month means that your reports will fairly accurately represent what's going on. Step by step version: 1. Make a "College Fund" category. Budget the amount, per month, you'll be saving. 2. Transfer that amount from your on-budget (checking/cash) account to your off-budget savings/investment account. 3. Your budget now represents how much per month you're saving, and your off-budget account now represents the total savings. 4. Update the off-budget account with the interest/profit every now and then. 5. Repeat 2-4 as desired. 6. When you eventually use this fund, transfer it back to an on-budget account as income, and budget that amount towards College. Now spend it as needed. You can do the same thing in reverse with, say, a car loan; off-budget account with a negative starting balance, then budgeted amounts and transfers to the off-budget account until the balance reaches $0. Doing this makes the "net worth" graph accurate and can provide good motivation to keep going.
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May 18, 2017 19:40
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That depends entirely on if you're using YNAB4 (the old one) or nYNAB (the web based new one). They handle credit cards differently.LogisticEarth posted:So, if and when YNAB4 "breaks", what else is out there?
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Jul 5, 2017 10:06
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I just import manually. It works just as well and if you spend the time setting up auto-categorizing and renaming it's basically painless.
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Apr 3, 2018 23:20
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Welcome to why everyone was going  when nYNAB launched for a higher yearly cost than most people paid for YNAB4.
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May 9, 2018 17:37
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If you have YNAB4, just use it. YNAB will still work for you if you're broke, the concept is just don't budget what you don't have.
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May 9, 2018 20:03
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I assume they mean the kind of reporting tools that YNAB4 gives you (lets you break down your net worth, spending trends, spending by category or payee, etc.). Last I checked nYNAB was awful at this and I don't think Financier was much better
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May 16, 2018 21:28
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I solve that problem by having a "Black Hole" payee in YNAB that all of the money in my wallet is immediately assigned to. It mostly works out because I infrequently carry cash and mostly use it on things that won't take cards.
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May 17, 2018 00:10
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It comes out of the "entertainment" category. I budget an adequate amount towards it. (My usual cash spending is less than $5/month on average, so I don't worry about it very much.)
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May 17, 2018 00:46
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hey ynab thread. i used to use ynab4 but managing transactions and constantly downloading/importing lists was a huge pain in the rear end. the new ynab sounds like it hasn't really gotten any better from when it first started if i'm mainly just interested in seeing where spending is going and not worrying about the budget itself so much, is mint a better option? the thread op is over 11 years old now and i'm not sure what the recommendations are.
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Feb 3, 2022 03:31
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Bluh. I used to use YNAB4 back in the day and was considering the new one, but it's $15/month. Is that the best option still? I'm funemployed with a decent budget, but it's time to get back on the train and it's yet another expense to justify.
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Mar 17, 2024 03:32
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That makes it a bit easier to swallow, at least. I guess I just need a referral code, then
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Mar 17, 2024 04:08
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