Earlier this year I shared my 2025 Win of paying off my Credit Card Balance, and my goal of paying off my Personal Loan from some older Credit Card Debt.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ynab/s/9pqwI0gz9a

With some budgeting and a large than expected raise this year, I was able to pay off my personal loan 2 months early! and not accrue any additional debt!

I still have student loans to pay off, but am currently working towards PSLF and have about 2 more years of payments before the balance is forgiven. If my employment changes, then I will prioritize that and pay it off. So using the next 2 months adjust my budget to start maxing out my 403b and Roth IRA going forward, and to build up my emergency funds!

But it feels so good to have paid off over $10,000 off over the last 10 months, and to have one less monthly bill date to track, no more extra payments, and to free up those dollars from my paycheck to have more flexibility in my budget. It has only been 2 days since I made the final payment but already feel so much less stress and no more loan portal that I constantly log into.

I have been usingYNAB since mid-January and at this point I am feeling really confident in my management of my plan, fully comfortable with credit cards and reconciling, and found the immediately available reports in the Reflect tab helpful.

I've been intentional to stick to basics until I felt I had a really good handle on things, but now I feel like I can do more. I've seen things like "toolkit" and "scheduled transactions" in this forum, and would probably enjoy more detailed reporting options (maybe they exist and I just haven't learned how to manipulate them)

What are the ways you "leveled up" your usage of YNAB? I'd love any recommendations or best practices for moving beyond the basics!

None of my banks have a YNAB connection. Salary account, savings, daily spending, a foreign currency account, a credit card. For years that meant typing everything in by hand, or exporting a CSV and reformatting it with a separate tool before I could import it.

Then I realised my banking apps were already telling me about every transaction, in real time, through notifications. If my phone knew about each payment, there had to be a way to hand it to YNAB.

The hard part was reading them. Every bank words its notifications differently, and some are very creative. I thought about using AI, but that would mean sending every notification to someone else's server to be read, and I didn't want that. So I built a small parsing engine instead, and a way to teach it: you tag the amount, the payee and the date in a real notification, and mark which parts are just noise.

After a few iterations, it could read every one of my banks.

I figured I wasn't the only one fighting this, so I put a test version in front of other people. They had setups I'd never thought of, and I spent about eight weeks adapting the app to them: new features, plus fixes for odd date and amount formats.

It's now on Google Play, as a one-time purchase after a free trial. It's also listed on YNAB's Works with YNAB page (https://api.ynab.com/#works-with-ynab-third-party). That's a list, not an endorsement, and I'm not affiliated with YNAB.

I'm the developer, happy to answer anything. If you've got unlinked accounts too, how are you getting them into YNAB today?

Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.notifsync.ynab

Website: https://www.notifsync.com/

Is there some way to make YNAB tops auto editing payee names? It's trying to be too clever and stripping out payment references (for incoming transactions) - E.g. imported transcation memo reads "FNB APP Deposit REF MB13456" and it edits that to "FNB APP". I mean. Come on. Help please?

On iPhone, latest OS, latest app, seems to pretty regularly freeze when entering a transaction. Either after I enter the amount or after I enter the Category, it just freezes. Have to close out app, retry, then it works. Anyone else experiencing this?

I rely heavily on sync instead of manual updates - automation makes al the difference in whether I can actually focus enough to use a softwrae like YNAB.

And with RBC, I have to reconnect every day, which was already painful.

But it just got way worse: now Plaid requires me to enter my userid and password for the bank every single time, and it won't fetch it from my password manager.

• So now I have to open the password manager, fetch that userid and password, validate that it's me trying to connect, etc.
  
• I was already calculating that I was losing hours each month to this syncing process, and this has doubled or tripled it. Especially because sometimes I lose attention mid-way through and don't respond to a notification, then RBC decides I'm suss and blocks me completely and creates even more hoops.
• Plus the sync is now often incomplete, so I'm having to make adjustments and/or do a bunch of extra work.
  
• The part that bugs me the most is that processes like these are positioned like they are to protect security. But it actually decreases it because I get less sensitive to "weird-looking" things happening, and I get so many messages asking "was this you that tried to log in?" that I could never tell if something problematic was happening or not.
• I've tried changing between Plaid and MX and they are both a problem.

It might be RBC, but I have the impression that all Canadian banks are a disaster in this area. I used to live in the US and YNAB was seamless there. In Canada, I'm not sure if there is any point in continuing to try - it's like they are actively trying to keep me from managing my money responsibly.

There has to be some better answer.

Hey y'all,

I have my main bank account connected to YNAB to automatically import transactions. Most of the time this works fine.

Today I woke up to a number of weird payments towards some Methodist Church and something suggesting I am applying for a visum somewhere. After getting a mild shock I checked my banking app and all of the transactions have perfectly normal payees there (e.g. a bakery).

I have no idea how this happened. I have seen mismatched categories before, or mangled payees because it couldn't interpret the import properly, but making up a payee I have never, ever used or seen? This is new.

It's like "Bakery Paul" turns to "Order of St. Paul" even though my hundreds of previous payments to Bakery Paul didn't cause any issues. Has anyone ever seen this and is this something I'd have to raise with YNAB or their import partner?

EDIT: Thanks to /u/pierre_x10 I figured out I can see what the ACTUAL payee was by either going clicking into the "Payee" field and selecting the (i) for info. This led me to figure out how to do it on my phone as well (just tapping the payee like if I want to change it) which at least makes cleaning all of this up easier. I hope they get this sorted soon.

It seems to me that the most important metadata stored in YNAB is target data. It basically represents the structure of your budget. We should be able to export all category target data.

Thanks

Tried clicking into the YNAB RC Beta app this morning and got an error message stating it has “expired.” Anyone else?

This is my first time actually depleting an hsa for the next year (for glp1).

Money leaves my paycheck and goes to health equity. This is not reflected in ynab.

My plan is to pay the "medical bills" in ynab with my regular credit card.

Then once a month submit a claim to health equity. The route that money back into my "medical bills" account to reimburse myself.

So my expense still flows through "medical bills" for tracking purposes.

Is this how you do it?

Hey All,

Has anyone had issues with these cards lately? Both my cards flagged needing a update last week. I can login to the site using my credentials for both cards and access the account. However, in YNAB I cant update. It takes my password (sometimes, others it times out) and then sends me a verification link which I click but then it always errors out and says it cant add the account.

I tried everything I could think of -- removing all connections, updating connections, changing syncing providers, etc.

I did reach out to support and they gave me another bank connection to try but that also had the same errors. They said they were reaching out to MX but couldnt say it would work soon or ever.

Any solutions or tips to getting this working?

I have been experiencing an issue where automatic transfers between a linked checking account of mine and a linked Discover savings account are being lumped together under the same roof as my Discover credit card payments. In the below screenshot, the payee is my checking account, and the recipient should be my savings account, but payments to either of them are under the banner of "Credit Card Payments". I am only able to set my savings account as a payee, not as a recipient. Is there any way to change this behavior? It causes some havoc since these transactions never become "cleared" because these aren't actually credit card payments.

there's no reason to be required to create a new account and transfer all you transactions if you just want your manually input transactions to not need another click to clear

its entirely asinine. what is wrong with these app developers

iphone

Hello YNABers

I feel like I'm missing out on some stock opportunities with the amount of idle cash I have sitting in my bank account. I'm about 5.5 months ahead in my YNAB plan. These 5.5 months are sitting in cash in my main account.

The current plan includes a monthly $100 transfer to a broker (MSCI All World ETF) and about $750 for my 3a third pillar (US equivalent would probably be a traditional IRA?) to have a maximum of 7'285 at the end of the year.

The assigned money for the future months is about on par with my income.

Essentially what I think I'm asking is:

• How do you decide what amount of money you keep idle and what to invest? I really do feel like I have too much sitting just doing nothing.
• Should I un-assign the months January through April and only keep like 2 months ahead in YNAB?
• How should the category and target look like for the ETF broker in my YNAB plan? As of now it's $100 by the end of the month.

Edit: Taking in feedback from you all, I went ahead and fully funded my emergency fund (about 16k) and will move that money to a low risk savings account with my bank. This also means that I'm now about 1½ moths ahead which feels manageable.

Question/Seeking Ideas: Our spending is out of control despite using YNAB. I want to do some sort of analysis and I'm sure lots of you smart folks out there have already done something similar. I have my YNAB categories and i tried compressing categories about 2 years ago, and of course have slowly expanded yet again. I have numerous credit cards i use. and i have more than one primary checking account so multiple "sources" of spend.

I also use Morgan Stanley advisors so they have a budget tool as well that I could import data into - I have connected some but not all accounts.

So: if i want to do a spending analysis and figure out where I can truly cut spending (i have a target in mind but it's a bit fluid - could get bigger or smaller depending on what I learn). What's the best way to use all of this information I have and analyze? My go to is a google sheet/excel file. Export 24 months of YNAB data and go from there. But if anyone has a better idea - i'm all ears!

As stated above, I just started with YNAB. I was attempting to add my PNC accounts but after putting in the pin generated from PNC, it redirected to a Chase login. I do have accounts with Chase, but they aren't my primary banking. I tried another bank and again, it redirects to Chase. I'm not seeing any help options in the app, very confused!

Edit: I can't edit the title, apologies to the UX person. Thanks to u/SailCamp for helping figure this out, I now believe this double Overflow Menu is due to me being on a small screen (iPhone 13 mini).

Original:
2 clicks to Clear, 3 for Delete and everything else. Are you clickmaxing? Come on now, this is ridiculous.

Hi everyone - I am in kind of a nightmarish situation, like "rolling with the punches" but at its most extreme. Cash is extremely low due to circumstances outside of my control so I have had to use or reallocate all of the money I had saved up in various targets.

According to YNAB, I only have 500 Euros at my disposal. All of those Euros have been assigned. But when I look at my actual bank account, there is actually 900 Euros. Even more confusingly, all of my accounts are correct, I have checked them and reconciled them (they were only off by a few euros here and there). How is this possible? Where are the missing 400 Euros?

New YNABer as of this week! I have multiple student loans (13) all from the same loan servicer but only 1 monthly payment.

Visually, I like the idea of adding every loan to YNAB individually with all of the different interest rates (helps me better make sense of my snowball method). But I’m not understanding how to track this in my plan? If I’m only making 1 payment monthly, won’t my other loans look underfunded every month?

I read a couple other reddit posts on this, but wasn’t sure anyone knows if the YNAB tech has updated recently enough to reconcile this?

Also, is anyone else having trouble connecting their student loan account to YNAB recently? (Mohela specifically)

How do you all feel about the new transaction UI on the app? Much like the previously changed “clear transaction“ update, I think it just adds another click where none was needed. Maybe they should consider a beginner mode if people are overwhelmed by the existing screens?

There is definitely something humbling about setting a target based on calculations and realizing you spend way more on something than you thought you did!!

For me it's been the price of car ownership. Pre kids i biked everywhere except the occasional car rental for road trips. I would see media quotes about how many hundreds of dollars a month it costs to own a car and I secretly didn't believe them. Like surely they are exaggerating!

I bought a used car soon after restarting YNAB a few years back, just under 100k miles on it so I did a lot of major maintenance when I bought it, and I set time based targets for scheduled maintenance based on the costs then. And we are low mileage (like 6-7k/year) drivers!!!

- Gas: $60/month (of course it's gone up a lot in the past few months so I should up that target

- Insurance: $128/month

- Monthly/annual maintenance: $35/month (car washes, oil change, change air filters myself, change wipers myself, wheel alignment)

- Biannual tags: $12/month

- Fluid changes ~every 3 years: $11/month (Brake, transmission, PS)

- Battery ~4 years: $6/month (change myself)

- Brake pads ~5 years: $17/month

- Tires ~6 years: $40/month

- Major maintenance ~7 years: $18/month (belts, spark plugs, coolant)

- Parking: $1/month (we pay for it very rarely)

So that's $328/month just operationally! And that's with me doing some stuff myself. Plus, I saved $3,000 over the first couple years for misc major repairs (NOT standard maintenance) and to have the deductible covered in case of major damage, so the budget was even higher then.

I also put aside $82/month (which is about how fast this car is depreciating by my guess) so that when this car dies we will have a fund for a new car. So that brings us to over $400 in our budget a month on car(s).

So I have two credit cards. One I’m carrying a balance, the other I pay off if I use it. I have an overspent category that I used both cards for. I want to assign money to pay off the card that I’m not carrying a balance on but no matter what I do the money isn’t moving correctly. I tried directly assigning the money to the card but it doesn’t change the overspent category. If I assign the money to the category it only moves it to my other card that I’m carrying a balance on. I then tried to test paying off the overspent category completely by removing money from my rent category and that was the only way I got everything to move correctly. Is there a work around for this?

I have nearly 12 years of history with YNAB, (since YNAB 4 around 2014). Of course, I have used at least 5 different budgets/plans on those years, and I did not have a clear picture of the progress, milestones, average spending, etc. I asked AI to build something and ask me clarifying questions.

I pulled the data from YNAB 4 (exported to csv files), and connected an LLM model to YNAB using my personal token (I want automatic refreshes, you can do it this way, or just export csv files if you don't want to share the token). I am using Muse, but you can do this with almost any other model. Just wanted to share in case you want to give AI a good use and know more about your data.