The YNAB Blog
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Easily overlooked categories
When you’re setting up your budget for the first time, it’s a great practice to brainstorm all the categories you can think of and add them to your budget. The fact is, no matter how complete you try to be, you’ll inevitably have expenses come up that you didn’t think of. I took a look…
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WAM Dos and Don’ts
Rule Three: Roll with the Punches, encourages us to move money around among categories as necessary. Over in the wonderful YNAB Fans Facebook Group, participants refer to moving money from one category to another as WAMing (short for Whac-A-Mole). Covering overspending (either proactively or reactively) is an essential part of YNAB. But there are ways…
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Beginning-of-the-month challenges
Even when you’re paying close attention to your budget, the beginning of the month can cause problems if you’re using Direct Import to automatically import your transactions into YNAB. There is often a delay of a day or two between when you spend money and when it shows up in YNAB. The result is that…
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Cover overspending as it happens
It’s the end of the month and it’s a good time to focus on whether you have any overspending in your budget before it turns over to a new month. Let’s face it. Overspending happens. The magic thing about YNAB is that you can overspend without breaking the budget by employing Rule Three: Roll with…
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Reconcile often
If you’re old enough, you might remember having a paper checkbook register, in which you jotted down every check you wrote and kept a running balance. Once a month, when your bank statement came in the mail, you would reconcile your checkbook, which meant making sure that your running balance matched your bank balance, taking…
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Always budget to zero
YNAB is a zero-based budget method. If you follow Rule One: Give Every Dollar a Job, you’ll budget every dollar to zero. It can feel tempting to leave money in Ready to Assign and bask in its green glow. It might give you a feeling of abundance. But it’s not helpful. In fact, it’s counter…
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Working with a YNAB coach
Have you wondered what it’s like to work with a YNAB coach? Erin Lowell, Lead Educator at YNAB, who is one of the fabulous YNAB employees involved with the coaching training program wrote a terrific post on the YNAB blog about it, called YNAB Coaches: A Personal Trainer for Your Finances. One of my favorite…
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Focused Views are a dream come true!
YNAB recently launched its Focused Views, which allow users to select categories that they’d like to include in a single view of their budget. It solves one of the most difficult aspects of YNAB for me, which is finding the categories I need at any given time in my somewhat unwieldy budget. If you noticed…
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End-of-the-month YNAB checklist
The end of the month is a special time in YNAB. When the calendar month rolls over, things happen. Luckily, they’re predictable, so you can prepare for them (though it took me quite a few months before I stopped being taken by surprise). Some of the things you’ll observe include: When I overspend in a…
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