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.

I've decided to do a reset as I've changed banks and are moving things around. I'm (frustratingly) waiting though until I get paid at the beginning of May to get started.

Coming to the end of the month how is everyone’s budget going?

I have been paying for everything on my credit card and then paying it off in full. I’ve decided this month to transfer the amount I’ve allocated for general expenses into my current account and then only use my credit card when I am away and might potentially go over (which is budgeted for separately)

I’ll see how that goes.

I have had a good month, thought I had over stretched myself, but turns out I was trying to get a month ahead so had allocated money for may that I should have allocated in April!

Been using ynab for about a year now, and I am in a much better position financially than before. I can trust myself to budget.

I have a big holiday coming up in 2027 and not only have I saved the money, I've also put it in a high interest savings account!

New month everyone! All money for the month assigned and the first bit put towards next months funding. I get paid on the 7th so I’ll put that ready for June. I did a lot of overtime last month which will be handy because I’ve got a lot on over the next few months 🤣🤣

I reconciled everything last night so started this month properly 😊

I've done my fresh starts for May. Feeling a bit astonished as both the personal and household budgets seem much healthier than I expected. I seem to have got to the point where I can pay the credit cards off in full.

It all feels very odd. Especially as I have been a bit footloose and fancy free with some of the personal spending. Celebrating finishing a large monthly loan repayment a few months ago. I need to stop that now. Party is over.

I keep wondering what I have forgotten/missed.

I'm getting more used to the YNAB methods, especially the target setting which is very helpful.

Now to try and keep on top of the entries. That should be easier if I stop spending!

It works if you work it!

Good luck everyone and see you in June.

Half way through may how are we doing? @EastCoastDweller are you keeping on top of the entries?

@WorthySloth No is the short answer 😆I was just thinking I ought to do it today. I have dialled down the spending! I will report back later.

All updated, thank you for the prompt @WorthySloth Quite pleased. All in good shape. Had to do a bit of covering some things with other things but basically sound as debt is not being created. So useful seeing where things are sliding etc. Also, have no idea what I was thinking when I set up some of the categories. So will do some tweaking at some point.

I regularly have a tweak of categories. I’ve streamlined some quite a bit. It’s liberating really.

A couple of times I've gone through my YNAB history for months (or a year) to see what I actually spend on petrol, groceries etc then fiddle about with my categories, feeling powerful and grown-up 😁

I look at YNAB practically every day and get slightly twitchy when my bank doesn't complete transactions over the weekend so I can't reconcile. I like everything nice and tidy now.

Still endlessly struggling away here. Got some worrying news this week that the company I work for is in financial difficulties. Just kind of vague worrying news. It´s an industry badly affected by AI and similar new tech so the job will probably disappear in a few years anyway, but this sounds like it might be faster than I had thought, maybe 3 years instead of 5-10 kind of thing. Problem is that I live in Spain and am 50 and there´s really nothing else out there except for TEFL. TEFL pays less than I currently earn and we have to be really careful as it is (low earning husband with similarly no chances of higher earnings and 2 teens),
From business failing about 5 years ago (due to AI as well - translation) I got into debt and still have around €3000 of loans to pay off (will take me another 18 months to 2 years) BUT also the roof started leaking this winter and I need to sort it, so will need another loan for that. Neighbour (terraced house, it´s where the houses meet) has agreed to go halves and I need to get some quotes.
So I am just consumed with anxiety at the moment about money.

Wondering whether to increase the target for my loan repayment by a bit to try to remind me to add a little bit more each month to get rid of that earlier. Or to have a separate category for loan overpayments.

Really fretting about the future to be honest.