Category: Best Practices
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Are you budgeting for YNAB?
If it’s your first year of YNAB, you might not have added a category for your YNAB subscription (particularly if you’re in your trial period!). It’s more economical to pay for an annual subscription, which is $99 (which amounts to $8.25 a month), than it is to pay monthly at $14.99 a month. And if…
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Handling credit card rewards in YNAB
One of the great things about YNAB is that it allows you to use your credit card like a debit card. If the things you buy with your credit card are covered in the budget, YNAB moves the amount of the transaction from the budget category to the credit-card payment category while it waits for…
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Year-end budget scan
There are just ten days left in 2023 and this morning I took the opportunity to take a look at my budget to see if I think there’s anything I need to adjust. I’m toying with doing a Fresh Start in 2024 but I’m pretty much in the “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it”…
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Covering overspending at the end of the month (video)
The turn of the month is so important in YNAB that I blog about it pretty much every month. Today, I made a video to show you what happens if you don’t cover overspending and how to go about covering it. If you move to a new month with red or yellow bubbles in your…
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My daily YNAB routine
I think that a key to being a successful YNABer is to set up a routine for interacting with YNAB on a regular basis. If you let transactions build up, they can easily become overwhelming. And the longer you wait to categorize a transaction the harder it is to remember what you spent money on.…
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Do you have a holiday gifts category?
It’s the end of October and the December gift-giving season is just around the corner. Let’s face it: giving gifts is a lot more enjoyable when you feel you can afford them. If you don’t already have a Gifts category in your budget, I encourage you to create one. Then set a Monthly Savings Builder…
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Looking for an elusive transaction?
Sometimes things come up in YNAB that cause me to scratch my head in puzzlement. That happened today and I came up with an easy way to figure it out, so I thought I’d share it with you. When I logged into YNAB this morning there was $54.38 in Ready to Assign in my business…
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Entering a credit card payment in YNAB
The way YNAB handles credit cards is part of its magic. But for people just getting started actually entering the payment can be a little confusing. I made a little video to show how to do it. The easiest way is to use Record Payment in the credit card account. It will automatically populate the…
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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…
