YNAB support thread (2)

[HouseofHolbein]

Just a continuation of the previous one before it fills up!

Condolences for the loss of your mother @WorthySloth I have been thinking of you. Thanks for getting the thread going again. I am feeling very pleased. I have started the year in a positive position. No overspending from last year hanging over me and a bit of savings. So the discipline of re-starting YNAB and following the rules has worked its magic. I just have to keep at it now.

I renewed my YNAB subscription as well and consider it well worth the money. It has saved me far more than it costs.

This year I am focusing on saving up for known future expenditure, eg holiday trips, and building up a better reserve for things like appliance replacement and insurance renewals. Trying to do what YNAB calls 'ageing the money' and using the Target function.

This time next year I am going to try and have a few categories funded in advance for 2027. Ambitious but even a little would be better than nothing.

Dividing the food/household budget into four segments of seven days each seems to be working as well.

I need to be a lot more disciplined about entering expenditure as it occurs. If I leave it I often can't remember what it was as I don't recognise the name on the bank account. This is particularly the case with things like Amazon and PayPal. So I have to log into these and work out what the items were. This makes me procrastinate about filling in YNAB. Perhaps if I can't be bothered to enter it into YNAB before purchasing I shouldn't spend it! That might save a lot.

Just checked YNAB and am now in the queue for Korn tickets 🤣🤣 love knowing I have enough cash for my hobbies 😊

Got them! Yippee. Now to sign up for some overtime 🤣🤣

Not sure if this is the right place but if anyone can use these to save a bit of money.
They run out tonight 11.59pm.
Argos voucher £5 off a £50 spend LVXMTC3E8MXS
£10 off a £100 spend EZBQ2GKC4XVP

Well done @WorthySloth for the tickets, so sorry to hear about your loss 💐

We’re trying to get ourselves out of a spiral with overspending and building debt. Thanks to ynab we’ve gone a whole 3 months without spending on credit cards which is a big step for us!

We haven’t gone too harsh with the budget as that’s been unsuccessful previously, made sure we all have some money to do things we want to do so we haven’t taken all of the joy out of life, it’s just been such a relief knowing there’s money in the pot to cover all the things we need, and that we can occasionally go out for coffee!

This sounds life-changing @YnabNewbie , more power to your elbow.

General question: when I look at previous months on YNAB, how do I make sense of the amounts there? For example, if I look at Feb 2026, I've got a highlighted yellow amount of £80-ish showing in the Available column for my Groceries category.

Is that useful information? Should I have done something at the end of the month to make that £0?

I think It means you spent less than your budget that month. It then automatically rolls over to next month (so if you budget £800 a month, the £80 will roll over so you only need to allocate £720).

Ah, thank you @Goldpanther !

Thinking of starting a brand new budget!
I’ve been with YNAB for 2 years but I feel like a total new start.

Anyone else done this? I’ll lose all my reflection stuff I suppose.

Yes, I've done this: about 18m ago I wanted a reset and I wanted to include all of our ISAs and little savings accounts to make me feel more in control/less anxious.

I still have access to my previous budget, and in fact I ran the old and new budgets simultaneously for almost a year, before I realised I didn't need to and was just giving myself twice as much work!

I did it a while ago because I’d cocked up somewhere and couldn’t work out how to sort it out. I’ve made it a lot simpler and I’m a lot happier with it.

I do resets regularly. Mainly because I get behind with the entries and it’s easier to start again. Also I like allocating the available funds from scratch and making a clean start. It helps bring into focus what I have and haven’t got.

I have started over before but I really like having a couple of years to be able to look back on. I just hide categories I have stopped using.