"Your credit card payment was greater than what you had available in your budget."
I always use the mobile app to keep track of my purchases and, on the first of every month, I pay off my entire account budget. Today, it is telling me that I paid over $400 beyond what I budgeted for my credit card. I can't make sense of where the number came from or why it is there. Not sure how to troubleshoot this.
-
Hi Purple Foal !
When your Credit Card Payment category is red, it means you made a payment for more than you had “Available” for it. Here's a video explaining the following reasons why this can happen:
- Overspending. If you had any credit card overspending in your budget (in the current or a previous month), the amount “Available” for your payment would be lower than the balance due. If you still paid the full amount, you’ll have spent more on your credit card payment than you had budgeted.
- Starting Balance. If you had an outstanding balance on a credit card when you set it up in YNAB, and you paid that in full but didn't budget for it in the Credit Card Payments category, it'll show your Credit Card Payment category as overspent. Budgeting for that balance in your Credit Card Payment category lets the budget know you plan to take some of the money you have and use it to pay off that existing balance. Here’s a video explaining how this works.
- Overpayment. If your payment created a positive balance on a card, the positive balance is treated like cash and is added to To be Budgeted. Budgeting those dollars directly to the Credit Card Payment category will bring it out of the red.
- Returns/Refunds. If you had any returns/refunds on this card, and you had already paid for those purchases, you might see that your payment category is short and goes red.
For all of the above scenarios, the solution at this point is to budget directly to the Credit Card Payment category until the Available number matches your next payment amount. If you don’t have any dollars To be Budgeted, you'll need to move money from other categories.
I'm going to go ahead and mark your question as answered, but feel free to tag me if you have any questions about this! :) -
Hi Janelle at YNAB !
I appreciate the reply -- I definitely had some returns this month -- but I'm still confused as I accounted for those returns in the app on my credit card. I've done what I always do with my credit card as I've used this app for the past several months and I've never encountered this.
So in the end, I don't know how it says I paid more than I budgeted when I tracked everything in the app and paid off my credit card like I always do. I also don't understand how budgeting extra money to my already paid off credit card somehow fixes the issue.
Is there any way to just zero it out and start fresh for the month? Or will it go away next month? I don't see the value in the warning.
-
Purple Foal (8de9c4efb5e2)
Purple Foal (8de9c4efb5e2) said:
I also don't understand how budgeting extra money to my already paid off credit card somehow fixes the issue.When you pay the credit card more than you had available to pay, that means you no longer have the money in your cash-based account but your budget thinks the money is still in your categories. You effectively overspent your credit card payment category. and fixing it is just like fixing any other category overspending. You have to reassign money from your other categories or TBB to the CC payment category.
-
nolesrule I'm still not following and I don't understand how, at this point, assigning it money from another category solves the problem.
-
Purple Foal (8de9c4efb5e2)
You paid off the card, but you didn't have enough money in your payment category to pay off the card, due to one or more of the causes that Janelle at YNAB listed earlier. That part still needs to be figured out.
But let me give you an example:
Let's say you have $1000 in the bank. You have a $400 balance on your credit card, but the CC payment category shows as having $200 available to make a payment. Since you have $1000 in the bank and $200 in the payment category, that means you have $800 in your regular spending categories (the sum of all money in your budget is equal to the amount of money in your cash-based accounts).
You then pay off the entire $400. You now have $600 in the bank, $0 on the credit card. But you still have $800 in your regular spending categories. Where's that $200 difference between the bank and the spending categories? You sent it to the credit card. So now you've overspent on paying your credit card by $200 and it shows -$200 in the category. You have to fix your budget by taking $200 from your spending categories and putting it in the CC payment category. When you do that you'll have $600 in the bank and $600 in your spending categories.
Again, that's the mechanics. It's important to fix the budget first to eliminate all category overspending so you can again rely on your category balances.
Once you've fixed the budget, we can then go back and figure out exactly what caused the mis-alignment in the first place so you can learn to avoid it.
-
nolesrule - I guess my issue is that I've been diligently tracking every expense for the past several months -- so while your example makes sense with the balance and payment being off... I'm not sure why mine would be since I track it 1:1.
So I went ahead and put money towards my credit card payment to 0 it out... but I would like to know why it happened in the first place. Again, I get that I paid more than the app tracked... but I don't understand how that's possible since I track everything. -
nolesrule So I went through the last 2 months of my credit card statements and checked through item by item and matched to my records in YNAB. I also watched the video linked to by Janelle at YNAB.
At this point, I still have no idea what went wrong. At this point, I feel like I'm digging myself deeper into confusion and it's giving me a bit of anxiety as to whether or not this will work itself out or if it will be a persistent issue. I can't make sense of where numbers are coming from... I know that things used to just work as I kept track until this month. I wish I knew how to audit myself to figure out where the mistake was to avoid it in future months.
-
I also went back and viewed last month and I didn't go over any of my budgets.
-
Purple Foal It sounds like this had something to do with the returns. How did you categorize those when you entered them into the register? Did they go back to the original category or were they categorized as Inflow: To Be Budgeted?
-
Janelle at YNAB As far as I can tell, it likely is something to do with the returns since I had so many in October/November... some towards the end of October that carried into November.
That being said, when I got the money refunded, I assigned it to the original category. -
Purple Foal Got it!
If you're categorizing back to the original category after making a payment on the credit card, this can cause some discrepancies between your account balances and payment category. Here's why:
As you make budgeted purchases on your credit card, cash is moved from whatever category you assigned it to (let's say, Clothing, for example) and it's added to your Credit Card Payment category. This sets that money aside for payment.
If you then use that cash to pay your card off, the cash has officially left your budget. Your Credit Card Payment category is $0.
Later on, if you receive a refund for that purchase and categorize it back to the Clothing category it's not considered new money. It feels like new money, but it's actually money that already went towards paying down your credit card. So in order to put that money back into the Clothing category it needs to come from somewhere. That somewhere is where it last was - the Credit Card Payment category.
This is likely why you noticed a red negative amount in your Credit Card Payment category in your first question, and it may also be why you were seeing discrepancies between that and your account balances.
Moving forward, you can:
1. Categorize returns as Inflow: To be Budgeted. That reduces the account balance, and gives you control over where you move the "extra" dollars in the Credit Cards Payment category since you may not need them for the payment if you always pay in full.
2. Categorize them back to the category anyway, but just be aware of what can happen and make adjustments before your next payment goes through.
What do you think? -
Janelle at YNAB This makes sense to me -- and I really appreciate your explanation.
I guess in my head, it went like this:
- I budget $100 for shoes.- I buy shoes for $100, and take it out of the shoe budget
- I return the shoes, and get $100 back, so I put that directly back in the shoe budget.
It makes more sense for it to go back to the pool of "to be budgeted," and then re-budget for shoes.
Should I go back through my credit card budget and correct this behavior for last month and beyond? Will that fix the current discrepancy? -
Purple Foal You don't need to go back. You'll just need to move money back to the Credit Card Payment category until you have what you need for the next payment. So if those dollars were categorized back to the shoes category, you can move them to the credit card. If this goes back a few months, you may need to move some money from other categories, but you should be all set going forward with the awareness of what can happen when you categorize back to the original category.
-
Janelle at YNAB How does this affect the reports? If you record the purchase using the shoe category and categorize the return as money to be budgeted instead of returning the money back to the shoe category, then doesn't it incorrectly show up in the spending report as money spent when it actually wasn't?
-
JDSille It's true that your reports wouldn't be as accurate if you always categorize returns as Inflow: To Be Budgeted. So if you want super accurate reports you can absolutely categorize back to the original category -- as long as you're keeping an eye on the Credit Card Payment category and making any necessary adjustments before your next payment, particularly if you had already sent a payment which included the original purchase.
-
Janelle at YNAB I definitely want accurate reports... what's the point of having the report to analyze your spending habits (e.g. I'm buying too many shoes!) if you can't trust the numbers? Plus, sometimes you need to report your expenses to others (gov't) where accuracy is important. So I plan to continue to apply the credit for a return back into the original category, because inaccurate reports are useless to me.
That said, I pay most of my monthly bills by credit card in order to earn the cashback bonus they offer and they are set up to automatically pay off the entire statement balance each month (my AOM is currently 235 days, so I'm not riding the float). What prompted me to read and comment on this thread, is that the cashback bonus recently applied to my account was larger than my statement balance, resulting in my budget showing a negative credit card payment balance with the warning that I've overspent.
I don't understand the reasoning behind the advice to budget more money to 'pay' that account when it's not actually deficient. YNAB automatically budgets the payment amount when you make a credit card purchase, so shouldn't it reduce the budgeted payment amount when you have a credit/return? What will happen if I just ignore that warning that I've overspent - will it correct itself as more transactions post?
I also don't understand why the credit card account register shows the correct balance of -$12, yet the budget screen shows a payment balance of -$66? I'm assuming that it's because there was an additional purchase & payment made after the credit applied but I can't figure out how it's coming up with this amount.
Now assuming someone will educate me on how this works and I do need to add money to the budgeted payment category to correct my 'overspending', what amount should I use? The $66 to bring the payment balance to $0, or the amount of the actual cashback bonus? Should I be trying to get the budgeted payment amount to be (the accurate balance of) $-12? But if I do that, it will still be telling me that I've overspent. I'm confused.
-
JDSille This all sounds overly complicated to the point of maybe there needs to be a fix in the software.
I ended up just starting fresh this year on january 1st, but I am worried that somehow I will run into this problem again since I still don't completely understand why it happened. Here's hoping! -
Purple Foal (8de9c4efb5e2) This. After a year of trying to untangle this insanity I have come to the point that it's an issue in YNAB. I am having the exact issues you are (I diligently track my CC, pay them off every two weeks, yet consistently have "Overspent" on my credit cards which makes NO sense)
-
Janelle I think there needs to be a more intuitive way for the software to deal with returns on credit cards. This is bonkers to have to know this intricate thing otherwise my credit card looks like it is red and needs more money put to it when all that may have happened was I made a return? This feels much more difficult than it ought to be IMHO. I'm having the same trouble as OP.
-
Alice Blue Robot YNAB made a choice that the budget is strictly cash-only. A return merely reduces debt. That's the "why" behind it and also why something more intuitive will likely be a long time coming (probably never, IMO).
Hopefully a helpful tip: If this is a paid-in-full card, it's advantageous to NOT pay the account (and therefore the CC Payment category) to $0. By paying only the statement balance, that leaves money in the CC Payment category that can hopefully absorb most returns without issue.
If this is not a PIF card, you might consider accepting the additional debt reduction that occurred and move funds to inform the budget of that fact (e.g., from the category that increased from the return).
-
-
I've had the exact same issue; I only noticed it because there is a difference between imported transactions and manually added transactions. I imported some credit card refund transactions, categorised them back to their original category; they don't show up in the credit card payment category - working as expected. Then I manually added a credit card refund, categorised it back to the original category, but it insisted in classifying it as a credit card payment that I made and needed to budget for - when it wasn't! It's definitely a bug - it shouldn't behave that way.
It's not a payment I've got to budget for, its a refund that should just go back to the category.
-
I have the exact same problem. I feel like OP is doing a really good job at thoroughly explaining the problem and the YNAB workaround doesn't make any sense. I'm really bothered that this is marked as "answered". I'll be following this post to see if there's any further response.
-
Tomato Sidewinder Actually, I think I'm still just super confused. Here is what I'm seeing on my end. How does this work? My payment is exactly what my balance was, but YNAB is saying I overpaid. Can anybody explain this to me? (Just to clarify, the only uncleared balance is my payment)
-
Tomato Sidewinder OP here -- I agree. In the end, I just had to start fresh January 1st. I have no idea, based on the feedback I received, why it happened or how it happened... and I'm not entirely sure how to avoid it happening again. I don't want to keep having to start fresh, so if it happens again, I'll probably end up just cancelling my account and trying a competitor.
-
-
I am 100% convinced this is an issue with the software setup itself. I have been pulling my hair out since they made updates to the CC portion of YNAB.
-
Blue Jackal It’s an issue of trying to represent a debt instrument in a cash-based allocation system. There are some things the software that could be MUCH more clear, ie returns and cash back, but the basic deal is, if there’s red, you must cover it. If you aren’t covering it, it will reappear.
-
WordTenor I get it. But I still don't see why it is red when the money was allocated to the budgets the money was removed from.
-
Blue Jackal Because after the fact, something happened that changed the amount that was allocated to those categories (in the case of a return) or the amount of debt on the card (in the case of a reward applied to the statement balance). This then requires user intervention, because the amount allocated to pay the card has changed.
If all you ever do is use your card to make purchases that are budgeted, and pay no more than is budgeted to the card, and never overspend, make returns, or get cash back, you'll never go red. Red happens when more has been sent to the card than was available in the budget. The problem is that what is available in the budget can change after you've sent the money to the card, and the system does not deal with that scenario in an obvious and intuitive way. Nevertheless, it's fixable. -
WordTenor Thanks for the response.
Let me see if I can break this down to make sure I understand:
If I have $50 budgeted for, lets say, 'Taco night'.
And I spend $52.00 for 'Taco night' on my credit card.
Then I just move $2 from another category (let's say "To be budget") into the 'Taco Night' category to cover that extra $2..... instead of compensating for that extra $2 like it would in my bank account, I have to then go to the credit card and move an extra $2 to the CC? It doesn't just take from the original budget I took from? Is that correct? -
Blue Jackal You would only need to do one of those two options -- either move money from another category to 'Taco Night' or move an extra $2 to the Credit Card Payment category. Either one will cover the overspending and give you what you need for the next payment.
Moving funds to the overspent category is the way to go if you're still in that same month but, if you're covering overspending from a previous month, budgeting directly to the Credit Card Payment category will take care of it. -
Janelle But..... this is what I don't understand? Yes I spent an extra $2 in Taco night. But the whole purpose of the flexibility of moving finances around is the ability to add that extra $2 to Taco Night to cover the overspending in the budget. Why does that then throw off all my credit cards and say they are red, when ultimately it all comes from the same credit card, and then that credit card is always fully paid off from the same bank account? It just seems like my credit card is taking extra money that was already accounted (budgeted) for when I added the extra $2 to taco night?
-
Blue Jackal I apologize for the delayed response -- we've been on a company retreat this past week. Hmm..this sounds more complicated than what I originally interpreted from your post. So when you add the extra $2 to the Taco category, all your credit card categories suddenly go into the red?
-
-
I am having the same problem as others here, where my Credit Card balance has gone into the red twice in the last 3 months (Feb $37 and Apr $416) with no explanation. It has never done this before and nothing has changed in the process for how the credit card is being used in YNAB.
The difference with the others in this thread is that I have had no refunds on the credit card.
Essentially every transaction has been allocated to a budgeted category, and the payment is an automated payment (by the bank) for the full balance of the statement.
Janelle said:
1 Overspending.Nothing is overspent since all transactions have been budgeted and categorised, and at the end of the month all categories are green
2. Starting Balance.
Starting balance is $0
3. Overpayment.
No overpayment, all payments are for the exact statement total amount paid on the day it is due.
4. Returns/Refunds.
None
-
Maroon Guitar For 3., "overpayment" means that you sent more to the card than was budgeted to it, not that you are paying more than is owed on the card. If you are paying the statement balance on the due date, generally you should have more money (in my case, it's usually almost twice as much) in the category than what you send, because you will have been doing budgeted spending after the statement date but before the due date. When you send the statement balance, are you checking to ensure that at least that amount is budgeted to the card before you do?
-
WordTenor said:
When you send the statement balance, are you checking to ensure that at least that amount is budgeted to the card before you do?This is the bit I'm not understanding. If every transaction has been categorised, and none of the categories are in red, then how would the amount budgeted towards the card be less than the statement balance?
-
Maroon Guitar AGREED. This is my absolute frustration. It feels like my CC is taking money that was already covered.
-
Maroon Guitar All of those reasons above. But if you aren’t checking the category before you send the payment, it’s really hard to figure it out post hoc. Usually the problem is the starting balance.
Right this minute, if you are in paid in full status, with every transaction budgeted, and no overspending, then your credit card payment available should be equal and opposite to the current amount that is charged on the card. If that’s not the case, then you need to move money from other categories until they are equal. From that moment on, everything should stay in sync unless you do one of the other things above.
-
Also my apologies. I see that Janelle's post does say that overpayment as she is using it is related to the card balance. Nevertheless, the rest of my comments still stand. If you aren't looking at the category before you make a payment, you've probably missed one or more of these things happening. The credit card handling hasn't been entirely bug free, but at this point most of these errors where the available is less than the card category are user-introduced, especially if you haven't been doing returns or cash back. It's not perfectly intuitive! It may take a second to track down. But if overspending and returns aren't happening, then budgeting money to the card category will fix the issue.
-
-
I agree with the initial posting. This question is not answered! I have run into the same problem more than once which has inevitably lead me to starting fresh. I always thought it was a problem with my budgeting but I noticed this time convincingly that the problem has a huge gap or bug. I entered items into the same account that was giving me a red margin and it happened again, totally a bug in the account. This credit card only has a starting balance and a paid balance which are of equal values but the budget says I owe some variable amount of $930.00. In fact I have restarted my budget 3 times over the past 2 years and this is probably the bug back to bother me.
YNAB, before you lose sight of the program and initial reasons you made this program, please mark this question as unanswered, stop the automatic importing, and fix this bug!
-
Tomato Robot If you had a starting balance on a card, then you should have budgeted for the entire balance on the card before you paid it. So if you began with $1,000 on the card, the first act in budgeting should be to budget $1,000 to the card payment category. Did you do this on your most recent restart?
-
-
I have the same issue as well. It started after I added a new checking account and started payment of the credit card from that new account. No prior incidences, now it's happened two months in a row.
-
Hi Gold Wrench !
If you check your previous months' spending, do you see any categories with yellow Available amounts? Have you made any returns on that credit card? When you added the credit card, did you budget to pay the starting balance off in full?
Let me know and we can go from there! :)
-
-
No yellow, no returns, and the credit card was brand new and at $0 starting balance when I added it. Thanks
-
Gold Wrench I'll reach out via email so we can take a closer look at things! :)
-
-
Hello, I am having this same issue. Can someone from YNAB Support please reach out to assist. Thank you.
-
Hi Purple Packet !
Since this thread was created, we've changed things just a bit. If you’re up for it, go ahead and enable Support Access for your account. I see you've written into support via email, so I'll respond there, too! :)
-
-
I am also having this issue, probably because of returns, and it's beyond frustrating. If I charge $200 on clothing on my credit card and categorize it as clothing, then return $100 worth, I want to categorize the return as clothing so that my clothing budget is accurate. But then my credit card "budget" appears in the red. How on earth are you supposed to keep track of individual categories and be able to run reports if returns throw everything off? It makes zero sense to "cover" the made up blown budget with money from to be budgeted.
I'm on the verge of canceling YNAB over this issue.
-
Salmon Sun I will point out, that if you have other money reserved for your payment (CC Payment category is green), YNAB automatically reduces that, effectively keeping some of the cash originally reserved for other purchases.
The only time a return becomes an issue is if the return amount exceeds the amount of cash you still have reserved for your next payment, and YNAB is unable to hold back enough cash to match that return. That means you have more debt reduction than the amount of cash you currently intend to go toward debt reduction.
That means your intentions (i.e., the budget) needs to change to reflect the real-world. The money's gotta come from somewhere. One possibility is to move money from the (newly increased) Clothing category to the CC Payment category, clearing the overspending in the process. Maybe it would be nice if YNAB did this for you, but you may wish some other category to take the hit for the "forced" debt reduction.
This is not a YNAB-specific thing. Any zero-based, cash budgeting system will have this "problem".
-
Salmon Sun Is this a card that you consider paid-in-full? If so, then your practice of paying the entire debt (account balance) figures largely into why you have this issue. All that is required is to pay the statement balance, which typically leaves plenty of money in the CC payment category to absorb the return.
-
dakinemaui Yes, I'm lucky enough to be able to pay my credit cards in full. What this sounds like is that YNAB really isn't set up for people like me who just want to track how much they're spending, if it's optimized for people not paying their cards in full.
-
Salmon Sun It's true YNAB is not setup for people who just want to track spending. It's primary purpose is to help you plan your future purchases. Frankly, it's pretty expensive if you're not going to take advantage of the planning aspect -- there are many tools that do a better job of just tracking, some of them even free.
-
Salmon Sun Also, just because you can pay your account in full doesn't mean it's the best idea to actually do so. I don't understand why anyone would pay more than the biller has requested.
-
dakinemaui um, to avoid paying high interest on the unpaid amount?? Credit card debt is one of the most expensive types of debt available.
-
Salmon Sun All that is required to avoid interest is paying what they've asked for -- the statement balance -- by the due date. Assuming continuing/normal usage, that's typically about half the account balance on the due date.
-
dakinemaui Jinx. I was typing the same thing.
Salmon Sun Try this link if you don't already understand how this works: https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/credit-cards/credit-card-grace-period/
-
-
I had this issue and couldn't for the life of me figure out what was happening... but then I got it. In my specific case, I had credit overspending on a category that I had made transactions with two types of accounts (cash and credit card). The first few transactions were with two credit cards, the last one with cash. For some reason, YNAB assigned the debt of the last cash transaction as Credit Card Payment for one of the cards, which confused me a lot.
-
Orange Horse Yeah, the software has issues in this area.
-
Orange Horse That's because it re-prioritizes budgeted cash to cover cash purchases, regardless of which order they occurred. So if you've spend $40 out of $50 on credit, but then make a $30 checking purchase, the $50 will be used for the $30 first, and then applied to the $40 spent with the credit card. If you haven't yet sent off the card payment, this preserves your cash position. However, if you've already sent the card payment (and paid the card all the way), the card category may become overspent as well.
-
Orange Horse Cover ALL overspending and it won't be an issue. I mean, it's a Rule, right? If you want to finance something, cover from the CC Payment category.
-
dakinemaui indeed, but this happened while I was managing the budget since I had overspent in a category. I noticed the red in the credit card payment first (since it's at the top) and that led me to try to find out what was going on.
-
Orange Horse Check categories and move the money in advance of overspending. 😉
Seriously though, one takeaway might be that issues with the CC Payment category often indicate other issues to solve first.
Sounds like you understand what's going on with this feature (prioritization of cash spending).
-
-
In my case, it was that I'd categorized some transactions months/years back as "To be budgeted" instead of a proper budget category on a credit card that I've changed to barely using. Changing those transactions to use "Stuff I forgot to Budget For" in those historical transactions ended up solving this for me.
I think perhaps YNAB could help its customers avoid this mistake by not letting a transaction on a credit card account use "To be budgeted".
-
Slate Gray Rhythm There are legitimate reasons to categorize CC transactions as TBB. Most notably, purchase rewards.
-
Slate Gray Rhythm Or purposefully adding debt if that is one's only option to get to the next paycheck.
-
-
I've got this issue.
To be clear. When we make a transaction on the credit card account YNAB transfers money from the relevant budgeted category to the credit card budget as money budgeted to pay for it.
If there have been 0 returns and the credit card account was started with 0 balance, there is no reason for a discrepancy to be there if someone pays off a credit card in full. When that is done, the credit card budgeted category should have anything remaining in it as budgeted that was a transaction made after the end of the credit card statement for that period which you paid off the statement in full.
It's as simple as that.
Anything else is a bug OR if you are so sure it is not a bug then someone needs to answer why this is happening clearly so we can adjust what we are doing wrong or else I fear I can no longer use YNAB as this is a major issue that leads me to overspend if I have already budgeted for the next month before I made the card payment in this month.
EDIT: to give more context. If you click on "View > Show Running Totals" from inside my credit card account, it shows the accurate negative balance in there (in my case -$108.93, which is the amount spent on the card since the last day of the statement period, i would expect to see this amount as budgeted in the budget credit card account). In my case an overspend of -$513.47 is shown in the budget credit card account category. If there were no returns or a balance when the credit card account was created, what's going on???
-
Violet Boa said:
this is a major issue that leads me to overspend if I have already budgeted for the next month before I made the card payment in this month.This makes me think that your issue is actually Stealing From The Future. Search that on the forum.
Bottom line solution, don't budget towards next month. Keep your money on this month's budget page with an Income for Next Month category. Or (and) use the Toolkit that has a warning about overbudgeting in the future.
SFTF bit me 3 times before I figured it out. It's most certainly a bug. I don't know why it's been allowed to persist.
On another note, there's a list floating around the forum of things that can cause the CC payment category to disagree with the balance. You could search that, too.
