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spinst posted:Someone wrote a script that converts YNAB4 from 32-bit to 64-bit, enabling it to be used on newer Mac OS. Provided you still have your key. +1 on this, I used a fork of this I found here awhile back and it worked fine and my identity wasn't stolen. Kept the output dmg in case I ever need to reinstall and they pull the installer from their website. I never did move to nYNAB and I looked into maybe trying it recently, saw it's $15 goddamn united states dollars per month now, and changed my mind. I won't even use bank integration (gently caress giving a third party my credentials) so I'm not going to subsidize that feature. I would have happily paid $5/mo or something... i'm not opposed to subscriptions for software and I even subscribe to a really useful grocery list app but it's like $15/year not $15/mo. I tried Pocketsmith out and it's ok but kinda janky. I'm going to give Budget with Buckets a try. Failing that I'll stick w/ ynab4 as long as I can.
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Jun 21, 2022 02:30
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| # ¿ May 4, 2024 08:34 |
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I didn't end up migrating to BwB as it didn't really appeal to me. I also tried the Buxfer demo; it seems decent and the price is good (4usd/mo) but I could not figure out how to split transactions, which is quite important to me. So in the end I went crawling back to ynab4. However, I was sick of how ridiculously slow my 10 year old file was (even after compressing it and doing a few fresh starts over the years) so I decided to restart my budget effective Jan 1 this year in ynab4. Created my accounts, set opening balances, and recreated my current categories, exported registers from my old file as csvs, imported into my new ynab4 budget. Everything categorized properly so i just had to approve, delete some duplicate transfers, and I was done. Net result? My ynab budget file "package" went from ~220MB to ~2MB! Good for another ten years and BaseballPCHiker posted:Ill run YNAB4 in a VM and keep it chugging along as long as I can. They'll never take it away from me. i'll absolutely do this too if it comes to it.
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Jun 24, 2022 01:17
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Combat Pretzel posted:Those YNAB success stories that they regularly post on their Facebook page are pretty loving tonedeaf. Just got another one. "Family of six barely surviving from paycheck to paycheck". But YNAB changed it all. They even posted the related networth graph, in which it shows said family amassing around 55KUSD in about 9 months. The gently caress! Personal finance pundits and communities often have that problem, hence the rise of alternative places like /r/povertyfinance/ for people living in the margins and unable to increase their income where the standard "just track your finances" advice is at best useless and often insulting. See also: henry.gif
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Aug 10, 2022 22:30
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Baronash posted:If I get a check from a roommate that is for, say, $550, but is actually representing $600 dollars they owe for rent minus $50 that I owe them as my share of utilities, can I put it in the budget as a split transaction with both inflows and outflows without messing something up? I do this sort of thing in ynab4 to track rebates for loyalty programs: Split: 550 Rebate: -50 ie inflow Groceries: 600 Basically the same as doing it in three transactions but then it reconciles with my bank later without issues. I personally am not a fan of tracking this sort of thing as income, that messes up my reports later. Edit: Thinking about it more, I would structure it as: Split txn: Split Total: -550 (inflow - matches cheque you receive) Rent: -600 (inflow to account for rent owed by roommate) Utilities: 50 (outflow to account for your share going back to roommate) Separate txn: Rent: 1200 (outflow - matches payment you make on behalf of yourself and your roommate) This way you net spend 600 on rent and 50 on utilities and it will reconcile to the two transactions in your bank account register. Cold on a Cob fucked around with this message at 19:26 on Oct 4, 2022 |
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Oct 4, 2022 17:53
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CmdrRiker posted:How detailed to people keep their budgets? I budget with a fixed/variable/sinking fund spreadsheet, and some of my sinking funds are very detailed. I think most people just keep a surplus of misc and when, say, Nintendo Online needs to be renewed they just deduct it from that rather than a Nintendo Online sinking Fund of $2 a month. Same with other stuff like your dental visits, which ideally are free cleanings twice a year, but, maybe this year you needed a filling. I think I am overthinking it. Do people do this? I just budget current and next month with the money I have in the bank ie I stay two months ahead of my bills. I keep my categories broad in areas where I have little control/don't overspend and detailed in areas where I have lots of control/do overspend. My categories have changed a lot over the years but I've tried to merge categories where I received no value/insight from tracking separately ie I used to track electricity, cell phone, gas, etc separately and now I just track as bills because they tend to be pretty static for me and there's not much at this point I can do to cut costs here anymore.
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Oct 31, 2022 21:05
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The easiest way to understand it is your max budget is money you already have. So if you're budgeting November, you are not using money you will receive in November to do it, you are using money you earned and didn't use up to that point. This way your budget is not fantasy. Caveat: I'm still running the old YNAB 4 desktop client so I am not closely familiar w/ how the web version works.
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Nov 5, 2022 21:18
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A huge amount of the personal finance industry and communities tend to cater to solid earners that spend/save badly, aside from the ones that are formed specifically in response like r/povertyfinance/ so I don't think it's limited to YNAB. I finally bit the bullet and jumped from YNAB4 to nYNAB. I have to admit that logging as I spend has done a lot to curb my spending, but for anyone already cutting to the bone I get that the monthly model is untenable. It would be cool if YNAB charged on a sliding scale. Technically they could do that, but people would lose their poo poo so it'll never happen. Would be nice if they gave free accounts to low income users and it would do a huge amount to raise their profile imho.
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Feb 12, 2023 18:47
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Sockser posted:More than likely-- I started nYNAB in January and I had this problem at first. To correct it the hoops I jumped through were: 1. Make sure my CC starting balance was bang on (-917.69) and every txn logged after that wasn't included in that starting balance. This was a pain because Jan 1 is 1/3 through my billing period so I had to wait almost a week for everything to post to my account properly so I could balance it. 2. Set my first month assigned to credit card payment to account for the money I owed at the start ie +917.69. 3. Make sure my cash back rewards go in as "Inflow: Money to Assign" (+67.65) and adjusted the assigned value to the credit card payment by that amount but negative. So for my first month that was -67.65 and my first month assigned ended up being +850.04 (917.69 - 67.65 = 850.04). This accounts for balancing the Inflow "category". 4. Make sure refunds are credited back to the same category they were logged against in the first place (do not categorize as Inflow). It's obtuse as hell but after I figured all this out everything has reconciled just fine since then. I am sure it's even more complicated if you start out not paying off your balance every month as I do right now and I don't blame people for saying "gently caress it, it's a chequing account with a negative balance" and just incurring an interest "bill" if they're still paying down debt.
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Mar 22, 2023 21:57
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Fezziwig posted:For the month of June you should only have the cash you currently have available, and in June you should only budget what you have left due in June. Yeah this, or backdate your starting balance and import/enter all your past transactions for June if you want a full month for reporting/historical reasons later.
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Jun 23, 2023 14:19
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The thing about ynab is you'll be changing your goals/targets every so often anyway; it encourages you to approach every new month with a "go with the flow" attitude.
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Jun 23, 2023 15:56
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I don't actually use any bank scrape features in budget apps right now. It's against the terms of service of my bank account and I don't want to have to fight my bank if somehow my account is compromised and drained or if Plaid gets hacked. The banks also constantly break sync services like Plaid here anyway - the status for my bank on YNAB's website reads:quote:There is a long-term issue causing connection errors and transactions to not import for CIBC. While it is expected that you may not be able to connect or import successfully at the moment, our import provider is still working behind the scenes to resolve this issue so we recommend that you try to connect every few weeks just in case the issue has been resolved before we've been notified. Once "open banking" standards become supported industry wide in Canada (which is coming, albeit slowly) and is adopted by Plaid/YNAB/etc then I will probably set it up. For now I manually enter transactions as they happen so I can do any splits and see immediate impacts to my budget. I periodically reconcile by exporting qfx files from my bank (I just download, switch to ynab tab, drag from bottom of browser into the relevant account in ynab to import). Looked into Copilot and seems great if you just want to track things but doesn't do zero-dollar envelope budgeting ("every dollar has a job, you can't budget for money you don't have") so that's a hard pass for me. Same reason I didn't bother with Mint.
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Jun 27, 2023 12:57
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99% of my transactions are auto-categorized just fine by YNAB and the ones that aren't are because I have to do some splits. I just checked screen time and I'm in YNAB an average of 2 minutes per day. I maybe spend 15 minutes on the website after every payday to give my dollars jobs and import my bank statements to reconcile. I think I spent more time reading this thread and composing this post than I did in YNAB this week.
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Jun 29, 2023 19:26
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Boris Galerkin posted:Is there a free or cheaper than $99/year YNAB alternative for bucket/envelope based budgeting? I don’t need it to sync to my bank account but it would be cool as a plus but not mandatory. I went on this little journey awhile back, gave up and subscribed to new YNAB after using classic YNAB on my Mac for ~12 years. My main requirements were: 1. cloud sync 2. shared budget w/ my partner 3. allow import of csv or qfx files 4. can't require sync with bank edit: 5. envelope/zero-based budgeting, in case that wasn't obvious Only a few stick out in my memory: - Buckets aka Budget with Buckets - Janky; iOS app is still in beta - Goodbudget - Pocketsmith - Pocketguard - forced you to sync accounts so hard pass - Buxfer - no txn splitting wtf I also tried a few self hosted solutions but decided that was not worth the trouble. Cold on a Cob fucked around with this message at 13:29 on Jul 27, 2023 |
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Jul 27, 2023 13:27
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Not a Children posted:I made the jump to New YNAB and while I hate hate hate the way it handles credit cards now (or maybe I just haven't figured it out correctly) the auto-import saves me so much time. I suppose it's worth the yearly fee... I got used to it but figuring out how to handle cash back transactions was unintuitive.
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Sep 13, 2023 17:43
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I like the weird little pop-up thing they added recently. The UI reskin in dark mode has a bit more contrast, which I personally like (viewing scheduled txns in the old UI was a bit tough sometimes, eyes are getting older  ), but I also could have lived without. Font seems fine but again didn't have issues with the old one.In dark mode the greens are definitely a bit brighter too. People that want dark mode to be both dark and low contrast are complaining about it elsewhere.
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Oct 18, 2023 13:05
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Tech companies have absolutely psychotic interview processes so I am unsurprised that weirdos like the YNAB crew took it to some exceptional level.
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Oct 19, 2023 22:14
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X-posting from a discussion about iOS automations. When I use ynab, I don't sync with my bank but instead enter transactions manually and then reconcile periodically by downloading exports from my bank. This iOS automation triggers when I tap with apple pay and it helps me stay on top of things. The only annoyance is it defaults fields you don't fill in with the last one you used so it might be worth putting in a category you use most often for example. The main goal here isn't to save work (although it does that) but to remind me to enter the transaction in the first place.Cold on a Cob posted:i don't seem to be able to share automations and the shortcut action is built into the automation but if you want to replicate:
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Jan 10, 2024 17:58
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Heroic Yoshimitsu posted:So from my experience, what I feel like what happens is that I put the initial CC transaction in candles, then I log the checking payment to CC into the CC Payment category. It then asks me to fund the CC Payment category… but I’ve also funded the candles category. I’m now funding the same $100 transaction twice, resulting in YNAB’s perception of my available balance being off. Am I seeing this wrong? The budget screen can be a bit confusing when it comes to debt. You only need to assign money to a credit card under payments if you are paying off pre-existing debt that's not accounted for by ynab budgeting eg your opening balance in your first month. When you assign money to it you are increasing the amount of money owed, which then shows up under "available" but means "available for payment" not "available for spending" which (understandably) confuses the hell out of people. If you are paying of a larget CC debt the available for payment can be reduced into payments over a number of months but I haven't explored that or know how it works. Many people just create a "credit card" account using the "chequing" type and run it into the negatives. It just means your budget screen doesn't show your debts, you only see them in your account listing on the left side of the screen. Less confusing for many people but I prefer seeing the debt on my budget screen so I just got used to the weirdness with cc account types. An aside: CC accounts also get annoying if you have a rewards card that gives you cash back. If you do this I recommend you categorize the cash backs as a refund to a normal budget category (I have one for general household spending I use) because trying to treat it as income and then fixing the CC balance via budget assignments gets frustrating fast.
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Jan 21, 2024 13:52
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Heroic Yoshimitsu posted:But now in my CC Payment category, it is asking me to cover the -$20 by moving some kind of money to it -- this is part I don't get. I should not have to move any money to cover this, the money went from Savings to the CC so it should balance out, right? I don't see why I would need to pull money from my checking to "pay" for a movement of money that is already covered. Maybe you can post some screenshots because what you are describing does not happen normally, I even tried to replicate it with a new budget without success. I created a new budget, created a visa with -100 opening balance and savings with 1000 opening balance. Put in a txn for $20 against the visa (so balance is -120) then paid 20 to the visa from the savings account. Budget now shows visa as owing 0.00 payment with a -100 balance. Edit: note that if you are paying more of your balance than you spend in a given month you should also assign money to the cc budget category to account for debt paydown but that's not what you're describing and ynab doesn't force you to do this. edit 2: alternatively, watch this and make sure you're creating accounts, recording purchases, and recording payments the same way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZlAj1utJFI Cold on a Cob fucked around with this message at 21:46 on Jan 21, 2024 |
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Jan 21, 2024 21:37
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Add another $20 to your hobbies budget. You are spending more money than you have allocated to your budget. It's a weird design that they do but it's on purpose. edit: to try to explain further - when you overspend a category YNAB shows it as red. However, since you did the spending on your CC the overspend shows up there and not in the category. It's annoying but it's because ynab automatically reallocates your budget spend to the cc "budget" to reflect you are spending money you don't have on your cc. If you had two credit cards, the red negative would show up on the one that has the last txn that pushes you over your budget. edit 2: yet another reason why just using a chequing account called "visa" just makes more sense to many people. I get the ynab way but it's not intuitive at all and I don't blame people for opting to do it with a non-cc account. It would be nice if YNAB at least tracked interest and projected payoff dates for large balances with payment plans to justify the weirdness but they literally tell you to "just ballpark the interest based on prior months" 
Cold on a Cob fucked around with this message at 01:01 on Jan 22, 2024 |
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Jan 22, 2024 00:53
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Henrik Zetterberg posted:Of course, Amazon transactions come through as "Amazon*F45766987F65FSF6DFSD" and "Amazon*SA9DF867SA90DF78SA90F7SA907GFASGAS07F087AF" so sometimes that confuses it. In this case you can do a custom "contains" rule for AMZN, Amazon, etc.
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Jan 24, 2024 21:13
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Mine is generally between 30 and 60 because after I have next month's budget fully funded the rest goes out of budget accounts into tracked accounts eg savings. It's still liquid and I can still transfer it back to chequing instantly if I need to.
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Feb 2, 2024 04:00
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gohuskies posted:I just don't know how much exactly I should plan to be in my "groceries" or my "hookers and blow" envelopes yet. "Rent" and "utilities" are comparatively easy. But I guess maybe just do a month and see how it shakes out and adjust from there? Yeah estimate and track, refine, repeat. It's a skill you'll learn over time and as time passes ynab can start offering up estimates as well. Fixed expenses are easier to estimate at the outset, so you can start with those and then estimate the variable ones. If you put everything through a credit or debit card you can probably download old transaction exports from your bank and do some rough estimating that way as well to come up with starting numbers.
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Feb 22, 2024 03:56
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YNAB4 users get a 10% discount too. https://app.youneedabudget.com/upgrade
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Mar 17, 2024 11:59
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I have 38 categories. I think categories shouldn't be so granular you might as well tie them to a provider/vendor/etc or so broad you can't tell if you're overspending. I call this "goldilocks budgeting". It can take time to figure out how granular to go, and it will definitely depend on the person. Some people might need to break down "groceries" into sub-categories to figure out why their grocery spend is higher than expected. A car enthusiast may want to break down essential car maintenance vs "fun" spending. I have a single category for "Streaming Services" because I frequently subscribe/unsubscribe from services depending on what I want to watch in a given month. Having a category for AppleTV+ vs Prime vs Youtube Premium would just be unusable noise. If I want to see a breakdown by vendor I can filter for this easily enough; I don't need it to be a category to do that. This also applies to savings and emergency funds. Thus I have "Emergency Savings" and "Vacation Savings" but not a "job loss fund" or "furnace dead fund" or "dog got sick fund". When I spend from this category, I make sure to put a "sub-category" in the memo field eg I used my fund for moving expenses this year so I put "moving" in that field for the 10 or so transactions I incurred for moving costs. For some types of emergencies I "save" by having insurance; that's as granular as I feel I need to get. However, the exception for me is if I get value out of budgeting something separately, I do it anyway. I only have one transaction per month under "Car Insurance" but I do want to see my spending on this specific category over time in a top level report so I do track it separately. All that said, if ynab would let me nest three deep and assign budget amounts at different levels I might do things more granularly. But they don't, so this is where I landed. I also keep top level categories to a minimum so I can budget and see historical Essentials vs Optional expenses at a glance. I always fund our Essentials and Business expenses before Lifestyle. Because our income is inconsistent (biweekly pay + freelancing income + royalties) savings is funded in larger lump sums so I just do that when I can. Edit: TheCenturion posted:I know I need glasses every few years, so I toss some money every month into that. Here is an example where I just lump it into a "Medical (Deductible)" category and then keep it funded. This will vary by the person; for me, I spend on a lot of things under medical so I prefer to just budget at a broader level. Another reason I do this is because I have a health care spending account through work so one year I may not need to go out of pocket, another year I may - so I just target an amount and refill when I spend. (This isn't being critical of TheCenturion or anyone that wants to break things down because ultimately, it depends on what works for you) Cold on a Cob fucked around with this message at 14:46 on Apr 18, 2024 |
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Apr 18, 2024 14:43
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Leon Sumbitches posted:My favorite feeling is when I get to hide a category. For example, I had several legal expenses last winter and this spring. Now that those are finished, bye bye legal bills category! +1, although I do wish it didn't permanently introduce a big button on your UI to show them again when you use the feature. I'm sure they did it because hiding it in the settings somewhere would just lead to a bunch of support requests and confusion but it's one of my nit-picks. Edit: probably worth mentioning that if you don't care about historical reporting and won't reuse the category, ynab makes it easy to delete a category. It will prompt you to reassign all transactions and assigned amounts from the deleted category to an existing one. I do this sometimes with a temporary expense and just lump it back into my "Emergency Fund" or "Household expenses" when I'm done so I don't have the "hidden categories" thing on my reports or UI. For many this is the OPPOSITE of what they want though, ymmv, etc. Cold on a Cob fucked around with this message at 15:15 on Apr 18, 2024 |
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Apr 18, 2024 15:09
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| # ¿ May 4, 2024 08:34 |
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They also added custom views. Still waiting for spending reports on mobile though.  any day now
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Apr 18, 2024 18:00
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