Forest Green Zebra 

It doesn't matter where the funds are physically located. The $100 can be sitting in your chequing accout, your savings account, in your wallet, or in your sock drawer.  What matters is that you have assigned $100 to your emergency fund savings.  If you use your budget to make future spending decisions, you will not 'accidentally' spend that $100.

You can add $100 more next month and leave that $100 in your chequing account.  Your savings account will read $100, but your savings category will tell you that you have $200 saved.  Both will be correct.  YNAB teaches us to not look to our  account balances to figure out what our funds are for; look at your budget categories.

Woolloomooloo Hi. In the Income vs Expense report, you have an Average column and a Total column. The last number of these columns will give you either the average amount you save per month or the total amount saved over the period of the report. Since it also shows you the average or total income and expenses, you can simply compare it all together.

Or you can also use the Net Worth report: the amount your net worth increases per month is the amount you "save" (in an extended meaning as it includes reducing debt). You can compare that to your income or expenses.

Note: I think it is pointless to look at that month per month. There will always be months were you spend more than your income for the month. For example we have a month when we have to pay for 2 car registrations and 2 car insurances and winter heating electric bill. Both car expenses are annual expenses and the whole together is higher than our monthly income. But since we save for those expenses over time, it doesn't matter as we have the money there.

Is that what you want?

Ceeses  Yes, the Income Vs Expense report does work well for looking at that net savings over time, I hadn't considered using it that way - it's a lot easier when the categories are collapsed visually.

Net worth is pretty good, but obviously is considered other asset accounts like 401(k) etc or home value, which means monthly cash flow has a small relative impact. Thanks for the tip.

nolesrule  I think what is important for YNAB to function, and the purposes of budgeting and managing cash flow, you're right that accounts are not important. In the real world of course, accounts are important for a host of reasons, and therein lies the rub. Of course there are ways to make it work in whatever tool you're using, and some of those have been outlined here.

Regardless, many financial applications and tools do make the business of transferring money and tracking it in a flexible manner difficult. Let's take an example of a transfer of money to a 401(k) account or IRS account, or in fact any investment or savings account where are penalties for withdrawal. For the purpose of budgeting this must be considered spending because it is money that should not be available for anything else, except in the most dire of circumstances. OK so in YNAB just set up a category for 'retirement' or some other long term nebulous goal, no problem. But depending on the person's financial situation they may want to see that as part of their spending, or simply eliminate it from their budget altogether ("it never existed, forget it" approach).

Why? Well if you're like me in your mid-40's with a positive cash flow every month, no debt and are behind on your retirements plans, I might want to know what my 'net' savings are monthly, but otherwise exclude it from my budget (thanks to Ceeses above for the tip). However If I'm 27 and drowning in debt which is getting worse with high interest, yet still maximizing my 401(k) and IRS, it might be good to know that I am worse off investing in my 5% annual growth on my savings, while paying 16% on my debt. So flexibility in these tools to include or exclude transfers based on the account they are transfers to or from, is a useful feature.

Woolloomooloo 

Woolloomooloo said:
But depending on the person's financial situation they may want to see that as part of their spending, or simply eliminate it from their budget altogether ("it never existed, forget it" approach).

 What they want and what they should do (or need) are two different things. A lot of people want to do something in YNAB, but often it's a bad idea.

Woolloomooloo said:
However If I'm 27 and drowning in debt which is getting worse with high interest, yet still maximizing my 401(k) and IRS, it might be good to know that I am worse off investing in my 5% annual growth on my savings, while paying 16% on my debt. So flexibility in these tools to include or exclude transfers based on the account they are transfers to or from, is a useful feature.

 This is not relevant to your budget. If you need to do a financial analysis of this sort, a spreadsheet is the place for running the numbers.

ETA...   And actually, you don't even need to do an analysis to determine this is dumb. 401k to the match, then pay off the debt. Once that's done, max retirement accounts. It's only questionable with moderate debt interest rates, and even then actual analysis will only tell you about the past, not the future. After all, 2018 was looking pretty good the first half of the year and then tanked badly.. 2019 is looking good so far, but it may not hold. Past performance is no guarantee of future results.

nolesrule But what do you mean I can't hang this picture with this rasp?!

nolesrule Of course, the example I gave was illustrative, not particular good. I’d never advise anyone to do that. 

Look this really  shouldn’t be an argument, I don’t think we’re disagreeing on anything meaningful. My poorly articulated point is really about being able to determine whether a balance in an account can be available or not for the purposes of budgeting, on an account by account basis. While it might not quite be aligned with the spirit of how YNAB is intended to get people to think about their cash and budgeting, it could help with some fringe cases.

As I said before, I think the suggestion made above works really well for me and I’m happy with that.

bevocat  It’s not quite that extreme, although I appreciate your sarcasm :)

Woolloomooloo But you *can* do exactly what you want, actually. You can sync up your categories and account balances if you want to.

Just for fun, I highlighted all my categories that I consider long-term savings/emergency funds, and the amount I have budgeted is reasonably like the account balances of my CDs and savings accounts. That is probably because in considering how much I wanted to lock up in these accounts, I looked at what I was probably going to need liquid and made sure not to tie up that amount of funds in these somewhat-less-liquid accounts. If I wanted them to match exactly, I could adjust the amount I have budgeted to one or more categories, but there is no benefit to doing so.

If that works for you, nothing in the software is stopping you.

Slate Gray Chef You obviously did not read all the posts, because your answer is in the very first response.

nolesrule said:
Budgeting money to a category deducts it from your To Be Budgeted.
When you budget money to a category, it stays in that category until you spend it.  So saving money in YNAB is just budgeting it to a category and then not spending it.

 Figure out what the money is for, create categories for those purposes, and put the money in those categories.

Slate Gray Chef Your savings goes into savings categories. "Available" simply means the money is in your budget and ready to do its job, whether that job is spending on necessities this month or being ready for expected or unexpected expenses in the future.

There is no distinction in YNAB between "savings" and "non-savings." All of the money in your budget is categorized and given a job. That's how we protect ourselves from overspending in YNAB—not by separating money out into an off-budget account for general "savings," which is easy to raid, but by putting it into categories with a specific label. It's MUCH harder to raid a box that says "annual car insurance premium" than one that says "general savings."

I understand why this is scary at first. But I've used tons of different tools and methods for controlling spending, and YNAB has been the most effective, even though it puts all of my money right in front of me in the budget.

Hi StormyRowdyGhost !

Savings accounts are purposefully included as a part of your budget, because we want you to give those dollars a job too! It's a different way of thinking about savings, but it's really powerful.

Assign the dollars in your savings account to savings categories. You mentioned that you already have a job for those dollars in mind, so go ahead and make specific categories for those things in your budget. Then you'll assign the dollars there!

This article on Budgeting Your Savings goes over that in a little more detail! Let us know if you have any questions. 😄

StormyRowdyGhost Is this a retirement account, investing account or a savings account? Retirement accounts and investing accounts generally  should not be part of your budget.

Savings accounts should be part of your budget. When you first add the account , you will need to budget the entire balance. Because it is newly added money to your budget. You will not be budgeting it every month.

nolesrule nolesrule I'll have treat it as such. I've watched the YNAB YouTube video on treating savings like a dresser of drawers, but that is not what I am trying to do with these funds. I'll treat my "in case I get laid off again" funds as a retirement or investment account. Thank you for you reply.

StormyRowdyGhost Just create an "in case I get laid off again" category and put the money there and move on with the rest of your budgeting. I've had my income replacement category as part of my budget for 5 years, and add to it monthly.

If you then take a look at next month, you'll see the money is still there sitting in the category.

nolesrule I understand what you are saying, but the only way I seem to be able to keep it from appearing in the header for YNAB is to constantly perform a "withdraw" so it is not considered as part of my budget. I had to do that for all the "Ways to Save" transactions that Wells Fargo automatically was doing and I ended up changing banks as reconciling those types of was a nightmare (and a YNAB rep. recommended I find a different type of checking account).  

I don't like seeing "red" and even when I set up my "Budgeted" for future months, YNAB throws me the color red as I haven't gotten paid yet, so that makes me just not do future months. I am trying to learn/like YNAB, but I may just go back to Quicken later this year. The budgeting part of Quicken is a bit tedious, but it does what I need. I create and work with budgets for my department at work (several millions of dollar), and I know how much money I will have for the year as that is what elected officials approved.  With my personal finances, I know how much my employer will pay me for the year. I allocate expenses for each category and subtract during the year, not to exceed those amounts. If you plan your expenses, you know your costs. I've never been "in the red" as a manager. With YNAB, it is like city council will only approve my department budget every two weeks (using my personal payday as a revenue day example). Its is just a weird approach, for me.

StormyRowdyGhost You could also set up an automatic transfer to your savings and categorize it as such. My employer can split my paycheck to whatever accounts I want. I categorize the amount going to my savings account as Emergency Buffer, and I never see that money in my TBB.

StormyRowdyGhost Also, I think the greatest strength of YNAB is it's flexibility throughout the real month of spending and as a communication platform for multiple budgeters. Both my husband and I used Excel before we got married, but when we got married, we found our thinking processes to be vastly different. We got both Quicken and YNAB to see which would work better for us.

Granted, we have not found maximum efficiency in our workflow, but currently our process is to have automatic transactions for bills/paychecks, set monthly funding goals for various savings (medical, debt down, car down, etc) and variable spending (groceries, gas). Then we make the month's budget on paper (like Excel, but we're physical learners, so this has resulted in less stress), then as each paycheck comes in, we fund the categories it needs to support. We always know how much we can spend at a given time.

We are NOT a month ahead, but when we get there, we'll use the "money for next month category" workaround. Ideally, we'd be able to fully fund the budget in about 3 clicks, and then we'd just dump paychecks into the next month category, instead of trying to find 3 budget dates a month (totally unrealistic, long term).

Quicken makes the above pretty easy, I think. The YNAB edge comes from the ability to clearly communicate in the middle of the month about possible changes in priority (overspending). With Quicken, we couldn't manage cash flow as easily, much less communicate about possible changes. Maybe we just didn't understand its full capabilities.

But if your hang up on YNAB is not seeing monthly savings goal money in the TBB, there's an easy solution there.

StormyRowdyGhost This is an allocation budget and not a forecast budget. And an allocation budget is very different than most people are used to and therefore not for everyone. But if traditional forecast budgeting hasn't gotten you ahead financially, why not give the YNAB method a whole-hearted try - couldn't hurt right? Rule 1 of YNAB is give every dollar a job. Corollary is don't give jobs to dollars you don't have. So don't budget in the future if you don't have money in your accounts to cover those costs. Eventually you build up to future budgeting - the two paychecks that I receive in March will completely cover my April budget. Budgeting farther into the future isn't useful for me because then I have too many places to make adjustments if my cable bill changes or there is an escrow shortfall or whatever.

I have been laid off twice in 2 years as well. That's why I have an income replacement category. It has enough to cover 6-8 months if I get laid off again. It doesn't live in any particular account though. In order to account for inflation, I allocate a bit to it every month from my leftovers (I budget the same amount to my categories each month and then have about $200 left over to be allocated to high priority categories). It stays on budget so that if the worst happens again (not inherently unlikely - I work in government contracting so if we don't win a follow on or if there is a prolonged shut down again because contractors don't get back pay), I can reduce the amount in the category to allocate to my living expenses.

My 401(k), IRAs, and taxable investment accounts are set up as tracking accounts so they never appear in my monthly header. I update their balances anywhere from once per month to once per quarter. Taxable investment and Roth IRA accounts could in theory be accessed in an emergency (and if things got really dire, TIRA and 401(k)). In those situations, it would be treated as income to my budget and appear in the header to be allocated as needed.

StormyRowdyGhost The money will not constantly appear in the header. It will only appear in the header when the money comes into your budget. Once it is budgeted to a category then it comes out of the header.

The rest of it seems like you may not be managing account transfers correctly.

If every dollar is given a job correctly, you shouldn't be seeing any red in your budget. Red is a sign of overbudgeting (putting too much in your categories) or overspending (spending more money than is contained within a category).

I suggest you might want to sign up to take one of the live classes to learn how to use YNAB properly. It's actually a very simple, easy to use system, and should not be resulting in confusion or red in future months if you are using it correctly.

jenmas and by twice in 2 years, I mean twice in 10 years. 2007 (January and I was notified in Dec 2006) and 2015.

Move Light Sound Life This will screw up reporting of Income and Expenses.

The easiest thing to do is have all your money deposited into a single account, budget it all to the categories you want, and in a separate decision move some of it to whatever on-budget accounts you want, because purpose and location are not linked.

nolesrule Thanks for letting me know. Reports are something I haven't figured out in YNAB. They don't seem to tell me what I want to know. I've tried looking up help docs/etc, but I can't find anything that tells me what they should be like. 

But, I just looked... On my income vs expense report, my entire paycheck is even in the same line. The account doesn't seem to matter...

Move Light Sound Life Inflowing directly to a category rather than to the TBB category treats it as a "negative" expense rather than as income. This is more representative of receiving a refund for a return, in which you want to show a reduction in the spending total.

Hot Pink Yeti you can, but it would involve a transfer transaction in YNAB to move money from your "on-budget" savings account to your new tracking savings account which requires a category on the on-budget side, which would be easiest if you had all the savings money in one pot, which seems to be exactly what you are trying not to have to do.

So, if your account balances are right, you can move your category available balances around until you are happy with them. If that means matching a set of categories with an account, go for it. 

adriana01 Thanks! Hadn't thought about the transfer transaction. So if I have $1k in my savings account, split across 3 categories ($200 for emergency, $300 for vacation, and $500 for new car), I could create a savings account under tracking, move the $1k from the on budget account to the tracking  account (splitting the transaction to reflect the 3 category amounts, to zero them out) . . . Right? Then just hide those categories in the budget? 

Hot Pink Yeti 

Hot Pink Yeti said:
but it never seems to add up correctly.

 There's no reason it has to add up. All you need in checking is money to cover any near-future outflows so you don't overdraft. The rest can be in any account you want.

Hot Pink Yeti you will still need a category for any money you send to savings. And with 3 different categories in it, how will you track how much is for vacation vs emergency fund? Categories in YNAB were designed to tell you this; anything else (like whatever savings goal set up your bank has, or Excel spreadsheets) is busywork & will become even more tedious than having it in YNAB seems right now.

HappyDance Thanks, this is what I needed to hear. I've been an avid Excel budgeter for years, and YNAB has taken some getting used to (started 4 months ago) . . . But I'm really liking it and have enjoyed the paradigm shift - - even though it came with some discomfort. I can see how it might take more time to adjust to the savings categories. Will keep trying! 

Meanwhile, I've done something that would make most YNABers wince. I had an unused checking account from when I had a side hustle for photography, and never added it to YNAB. I just moved my emergency funds to that account, and added it as a tracking account. I kept my savings account on budget and will try using categories to assign those dollars jobs (vacation, etc) from TBB. I kept a category for "emergency fund" and will assign those dollars/move the money to my tracking account (from my main checking account). For now, I need to see my emergency fund as a separate, untouchable thing. The rest I'll keep grappling with.

Just so everybody doesn't throw their computer across the room when they see that I moved emergency fund to a checking account, I'm not in a tax bracket where that matters. Last year I earned exactly $3.75 in interest with my savings account. ;-) When YNAB makes me rich as royalty I'll rethink this strategy, and move money accordingly. :)

Hot Pink Yeti an emergency fund should be in something as liquid as a checking or savings account. Maybe a CD if the penalty is only an few month’s rent. If you invest your emergency fund you risk that you will need to access it when the market is down and suddenly your emergency fund is 30% lower than you need. 

jenmas No plans to invest, at this point. Eventually I'll put the EF into a savings account instead of checking. Maybe.... one day.... I can make $5+ per year in interest! ;-)

Hot Pink Yeti 

Like HappyDance said, you don't need to worry about the actual living place of the money if you don't need to spend it right now.  I have 90 categories, but most of the money lives in a money market account, not the checking account.  If I had to pay for a new washing machine, the kids' camps, new glasses for 2 kids, the orthodontics one kid needs, and a $1000 house repair on top of this month's monthly bills, I'd have to move money from savings to checking to cover them because I don't have enough in my checking account for them all.  I don't see any reason the keep all my money in checking like some people do, we pull in $20 a month from money market and I can transfer money account to account easily enough if need be.

My emergency fund is off budget as a tracking account.  The actual funds are being moved into a one year CD ladder; I only have 1 CD currently and the rest of the money is an Ally savings account that pays over 2% APY.  Over the next 9 months I will open the other three CDs.  If I had to, I could skim from the various sinking funds account to cover expenses for up to 3 months before I had access to the first CD in the event of a job loss.  

I meant to say that my on budget money market account makes at least $20 in interest every month and that's reason enough to keep it there vs. checking.  We'd make more if we moved all of our savings to Ally but I like having a local bank.  

Orchid Leopard my savings doesn't consist just of "savings" categories. Any money I don't need in my checking account goes into high interest savings. That amount has varied over time based on the types of accounts I've had (rewards checking, interest rates, etc) & my spending patterns, but not on what categories I am saving in. A running balance would help with optimizing cash flow, but so far I've managed with the one provided by the Toolkit.

When it comes time to spend my savings, I don't spend it out of my savings account either. I prefer to use a credit card (for the rewards, of course), transferring money if needed for the CC payment (or check), or in rare instances I get a cashier's check. Often I have enough in checking just by not transferring anything to savings from the most recent paycheck to pay anything I have been saving for, and if I didn't, I have plenty of time to transfer the funds, & often results in getting more interest because I can leave more in savings for longer.

How would YNAB stop you from using the "wrong" card at the gas station? Even if you had geo location turned on & had a way of specifying what card you wanted to use for each transaction, the best that it could do is push a notification every time you are at a gas station. That still doesn't stop you from just grabbing the wrong card from your wallet when you pay, and likely wouldn't work at a place you had never been before, or a place where you could buy gas on one card or fast food on another. 

Orchid Leopard I've been budgeting with YNAB for 9 years and I'm in the position you describe and I agree with you that better cash flow management would be a nice feature for YNAB to incorporate but I will never care to equate budgeted funds with a particular account. My on-budget accounts are currently comprised of 12 accounts including 3 checking accounts, 3 savings accounts, and 6 CC accounts. Every one of those accounts has a purpose but only one checking account is my main spending account. The purpose of the 3 savings accounts are to accrue more interest like you said.

The only thing I need to know is that I have enough in my main checking account to make all of my various payments. It is up to me to make sure I have enough in this account to cover them. If I need to move some funds in from my various savings accounts, I will decide how much and from which accounts. This is where YNAB could provide some better feedback. I currently use the toolkit's running balance along with scheduled transactions to make sure I have enough in my checking. I even do some workarounds with scheduled transactions to see my next two upcoming fortnightly paychecks. IOW, I have to use a third party toolkit to better track this. YNAB needs to incorporate better cash flow but not by account.

adriana01 I agree that YNAB has no place in preventing you from using the wrong source at time of purchase, however I think that it can point it out when the transaction is input/imported. I'm in a situation of debt repayment, where I have 2-3 years of aggressive CC paydown in combination with building rainy day funds. I've had 3 instances in the last 6 years of working for startup companies where a seemingly stable position was just gone overnight and I'm not even going to be able to collect past dues because the company was secretly running out of all funds and selling off all assets to pay off debts. I need to both build a liquid asset savings (in high interest savings) and avoid using the CCs because the interest rate, excepting on a low interest card (which rarely offer rewards), exceeds the reward rate. Rewards cards only work in my favor if I am paying them off in full each month. I have rewards cards, but unfortunately my income losses were all pre-YNAB and I was unprepared and lived on CCs for months at a time until stable equivalent income was established.

Superbone I have to look into these toolkits, I'm pretty new to YNAB but I've attacked the philosophy with gusto. Within 24 hours of starting it stopped me from prematurely making a payment to pay down a CC. 

What I am doing right now is a manual replication of the account transaction process in YNAB. I have a savings category for each account that I keep savings in. In this case it is a checking and high interest savings account for an online institution. I have a debit card and checks I can use for the checking account, so the money is accessible via direct purchase, check, ATM, or by 3-5 ACH transfer. It's not my primary account right now because I haven't moved my direct deposit and autopays to this institution yet. I keep track of each account's balance as a category. When I use or transfer funds, I manually mimic the transfer via the budget categories. For example, if I spend on groceries from the online checking, I transfer that amount from it's savings category to 'to be budgeted', or directly to Groceries if I'm now overbudgeted.

Superbone as a fellow engineer, I'm sure you can see my perspective that any repetitive and predictable tasks such as this should just be automated. Maybe there is a toolkit that does this already or I can write a toolkit to manage this automagically.

Orchid Leopard Definitely check out the toolkit. It provides some nice add-ons. Most notably for me is a running balance which like I said, helps me to better manage my cash flow. I definitely agree with you that repetitive and predictable tasks should be automated but what I don't agree with is your method of keeping category balances in sync with accounts. There is no need for that in YNAB and you are adding extra complications unnecessarily. But don't fret, this is normal behavior to those that are new to YNAB. 

Did you read the article that nolesrule posted above?

https://www.youneedabudget.com/the-relationship-between-your-budget-your-accounts-its-complicated/

It doesn't matter that some of your savings are in account A, some in account B, and some in account C. It is one pool of money to draw from.  Like I said above, you just need to make sure when you spend that the spending account has enough to cover that spending. That's where the toolkit with its running balances and future scheduled transactions comes in handy.

Woolloomooloo You don't have to have one account. But you should have one central account that almost everything flows through. It makes everything so much simpler. That's what my checking account does. All money comes into the checking account. I can move it to savings accounts or my wallet via ATM. All payments ultimately come out of this account (except for when using cash), including mortgage payments and credit card payments.

So all that matters is that you have enough in the one checking account since everything flows through there, based on income cycle and expenses. When you have too much, you move it to an account that will earn more.

The Toolkit helps, but you can get into a rythm and determine essentially that you need $X amount in the account at the start of the month. Future income replenishes the account as you are spending it down. If the account grows over a certain balance, sweep the money out.

The interest income on money sitting in the checking account for a couple of weeks between sweeps isn't going to make or break the bank. On average $1000 sitting in a 0% checking account for an extra half a month before moving it to a HYSA will cost you $0.90 interest.

Transfering money to an IRA is a long-term transition, so the money should go off-budget. Therefor you have to budget for it like any expense.