Yeah, it’s unnaturally friendly and supportive for Reddit haha |
Can you make it pull itemized credit card charges, like Mint/Quicken, etc? I couldn’t figure out a way to do that and it was a dealbreaker for me. I don’t know how anybody sits down and enters every $4.50 drink charge line by line. |
I haven’t used Mint in 10+ years so I can’t speak to it specifically but you can link your CC account to YNAB and it’ll pull in transactions. I have our accounts linked but still manually enter everything. It takes like 5 seconds on the mobile app. Easy peasy. |
The bolded is 100% the step I’m missing. I’ll try to figure it out tomorrow morning. And I’ll also try to stop being annoyed about the negative balance showing for the CC balance. Now I think I understand if I can get your step 1 right it will clear that up. Thanks again! I will def report back tomorrow. I will need to get to your step 3 eventually but I haven’t gotten that far yet. I do pay it off each month so let’s hope it doesn’t get more complicated for me. Thank you again!!! |
You're right, I'm stupid. |
The biggest issue with YNAB's handling of credit cards is the learning curve. You're definitely not alone in your frustration there. But once it clicks for you it really is brilliant. If you have any specific questions around YNAB's handling of credit cards I'm happy to help. Alternatively I know tons of people love Nick True's video on the subject (and all things YNAB related) if you have 30 minutes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ix0Jibc0Lw |
Rock on! Think of that negative CC balance as part of a net worth calculation. You have $1,000 in checking, $0 on CC and a net worth of $1,000. But you spend $200 on CC. Your $1,000 is still in checking but your net worth is now $800: $1,000 in checking + ($200) on your CC = $800. You can also think of paying a CC as a transfer because that's how YNAB does it. When you pay that $200 CC bill you're transferring $200 from checking to your CC. $1000-$200 = $800 in checking. ($200)+$200=$0 in CC. |
Entering the charge is the point I think--it's supposed to spark that moment of consciousness. On a mobile app it's not that hard and it does give you a moment to see your budget and then realize that maybe you better not say "the next round's on me" because you've used up your alcohol budget for the month. Through your categories you decide how granular you want to be--so if it's not an issue for you to manage your drink expenses, you can make a broader category of going out. Mint is great at monitoring what you are doing with little effort (though quite a few errors at least for me because my cc is about 60-70% at correctly categorizing my expenses), but it's not great at producing the consciousness that helps you meet your financial goals more. |
NP here but I wonder if this has changed in the past 10 or so years. When we tried to use YNAB about 10+ years ago, we really struggled with (a) using credit cards and (b) having multiple bank accounts. Does YNAB still preach that you should only have one credit card and one bank account? |
If you tried YNAB a decade ago it was YNAB4. They completely revamped everything (now called New YNAB or nYNAB) around 2016. I don’t have any experience with YNAB4 but you can certainly have as many cards and accounts as you want. I do know some people like to continue keeping separate accounts for different types of spending. Like an account just for real estate taxes. An account for presents. That sort of thing is a ton of extra hassle for zero benefit with YNAB. You can do everything with one account and then use categories in YNAB to allocate money to different jobs. |
I am the OP - and I have two credit cards. Granted I am new to YNAB but I never saw anything suggesting I shouldn't have 2. |
Current YNAB4 user here (yes you read that correctly) with multiple credit cards and bank accounts. I believe that YNAB handles cc's and bank accounts similarly. The main difference with New YNAB is that it moves away from the envelope system. You don't know where you stand budget-wise on a day-to-day basis like you did with YNAB4. If you want something similar to YNAB4, I think Buckets is your best move. I posted upthread that the key to cc's is in the setup. If you are set up right, making purchases is applied to the card account and paying the bill is done every month with a transfer from the bank account. |
I know from the YNAB subreddit that there are plenty of diehard YNAB4 adherents but since I've never touched the software the differences between YNAB4 and nYNAB are very abstract to me. I hear talks about red arrows and stealing from the future but since nYNAB is all I've known for five years I just keep chugging along. EDIT: and yes, I made an account on DCUM so I can edit posts. FREEDOM! |
i love YNAB. been using for 5 years.
credit cards were the WORST to figure out! and processing refunds is tough too. i made a category just for the credit card refunds. i put the refunds here. then, i will use the refund to cover any additional spends. i coudnt figure out a better way, so i choose to apply the refund to another category, rather than putting the money back into the original category. |
I'm confused, why wouldn't you put the refund back in the category? I spend $100 on shirts and then decide to return $60 of them. I put that $60 refund back into the "shirts" category and my net shows I spent $40 on shirts, which is what I'd like it to do. I don't mean this in a snarky way but sometimes I think most of people's problems with YNAB come from overthinking things. |