
YNAB doesn't carry forward negative balances and this screws up everything
I've been using YNAB since their version 4 Desktop App days, and quite frankly the Desktop App is still my favorite. I have an almost constant problem with the web app version because it will not carry forward negative balances, and this screws up all my tracking.
Yes, yes, I'm well aware of YNABs rules and why they think this is a "feature" but it's not. It's a limitation that doesn't allow one to properly account for reality.
Just about every month, at the end of the month, various bills are due, and when those bills are deducted from the account can vary by a few days, and I don't have any control over this.
Sometimes a bill will be deducted on the 31st but then the next month, it might happen on the 1st. My lease payment is particularly fickle in this regard, but without going into all my personal finances, suffice to say I have a handful of bills for which it is normal for the bill to be withdrawn by autopay either on the last day of the month or the first day of the next.
The problem arises when a bill is taken on the 1st day of the month but then again on last day of the same month. That causes the budget in question to be overdrawn, with a negative balance.
If I don't catch this, YNAB rolls over to the next month, and suddenly none of my numbers make sense. The money listed as available is less than it should be, and....well I this plagued me for months until I realized what was going on, and now I know that after the first of the month I have to go back and change the dates of a hand full of transactions to make this work. This is very frustrating.
There are other realities of life that cause negative balances to occur as well, such as needing food for the weekend, but the months budget is spent, but the weekend is next month, but you have to buy the food today. Again the budget gets into a negative and I have to go manual edit the date to fudge things to balance out.
THIS SHOULD NOT BE NECESSARY. Simply rolling over the negative balance into the balance of the budget in the new month should be normal behavior. This is why we are all a month ahead in our budgets. It allows things to be seamlessly transition from month to month. The desktop app did this correctly. The web app does not and so causes the end of each month to be a constant hassle instead of a seamless transition.
I'm posting here because I have reported this issue multiple times via YNAB support and have been politely ignored by support telling me this lack of functionality is a deliberate feature.
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Having a negative in a category makes the money in your other categories unreliable, because the sum of the positive category balances does not equal the sum of your cash-based accounts. it is a violation of YNAB rule 3.
The problem is that in YNAB4 people were abusing the red arrow. Instead of paying themselves back as soon as possible in the category to eliminate the overspending, they were carrying the negatives from month to month, which means they were lying to themselves about how much money they really had.
Silver Inspector said:
There are other realities of life that cause negative balances to occurYes, these are realities. So why do you not want your budget to reflect reality? The reality is that YNAB is an allocation budgeting system based on the envelope budgeting method. When was the last time you went to the grocery store with an envelope of $50 cash, and were able to spend $100 from that envelope?
The money's gotta come from somewhere.
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Brandon said:
when those bills are deducted from the account can vary by a few days, and I don't have any control over thisOne solution is to budget for them assuming they will occur at the end of the month. Funds will carryover to the new month if unused.
A second solution is just date things for the 1st and call it good. It's not like you're using these categories for "spending guidance", so any implicit error due to this timing simply doesn't matter.
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Brandon said:
if you can't spend more than is in the envelope, why does YNAB allow this?YNAB can't possibly know the other envelope you implicitly stole from, and therefore leaves it up to you to correct. If you don't, it does take it out of next month in a natural fashion, since you will budget less (assuming you stop when TBB is $0).
I always notice any cash-based overspending (the type you're describing), because it's right at the top of the screen (next to TBB).
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Brandon said:
YNAB allows for negative balances to persist in a month, with no warning, or indication of any kind - yet rolling that negative over into the next month is considered a violation of the rulesThe red category is the indication there's an issue. It's not the rolling over into next month that's considered a violation, it's not correcting the overspending immediately that's a violation. YNAB gives you until the end of the month to fix it -- again, because it can't possibly know where that "extra" money came from. If you violate Rule 3 and don't fix it, YNAB says, enough is enough and forces the correction.
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Brandon said:
Well that is what I said I do. Every month now I have to go through and change the date on a handful of item - when I shouldn't have to do this.I offered two solutions, so I'm not sure which it is that you're saying that you do.
If you want to use the actual dates -- which could be at the end of the month -- then you need to have the money in the category at the end of that month. The "double-budget" appearance is only present in the single month in which you switch to this practice.
Yes, this has a large impact on "being ahead" / "living on last month's income". It's precisely because of this that I just leave the transactions dated for the 1st. (These are entered by the scheduler.)
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Brandon said:
nolesrule Ah ok. I see what you are saying, but again, I'm bringing these issues up because they should be automated, and not something users have to track manually.How would YNAB know that the payment date is going to vary? If your payment dates aren't automated, how can the software automate it? If it randomly withdraws the funds earlier and even you didn't know it was going to do that so you could plan ahead by ensuring funds were there at the right time, then how should a software which is literally just a computer program?
The reality is you have to have some manual control of your budget. If you know this month your rent is coming out on the 1st AND the 29th, then you have to make sure you have enough money budgeted to cover the spending on the 29th in THIS month. If you don't budget both payments in the month they are coming out of, then it will be overspent and YNAB will automatically reduce your amount you are able to budget next month. So you just don't budget your rent payment next month.
If you want to fudge reality, then you need to do what's suggested: change the dates on the entries to coincide with when you want to budget the amounts. Otherwise, if you want your budget to reflect reality, the reality is that you paid rent twice this month and won't pay it next. -
Brandon said:
My bigger concern, though the inconvenience of manually performing what should be automatic is a concern, is that currently YNAB allows for negative balances to persist in a month, with no warning, or indication of any kindI use the toolkit, so I don't know if this is what shows in toolkit or YNAB without it, BUT when I went in and added a second rent payment it immediately showed me that I am overspent in rent by making the category red. It also turned my "budgeted in future" red showing that it has removed the $1350 from April. Doesn't your YNAB do either of those things?
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Brandon said:
For instance, right now I'm waiting for a refund, so one budget item is negative. This will be rectified in a couple days. If I roll forward, to next month, April, it doesn't say I've over spent, it says "-$0 Over Spent in Mar" So that gives me no indication.Are you 100% sure you are spending on CASH accounts and not credit accounts of some kind. When I put in my fake overspending in my checking account, everything goes red. If I put it on a credit card or line of credit, then the category goes red but there's no indication in the header or next month because YNAB treats it as credit spending that I didn't mean to cover.
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I agree with needing the ability to carry forward an over spent category. But I got the same response when I brought it up.
I don't agree with the fact that if you over spend on a credit card, the negative category balance just disappears, and so your credit card amount just goes up. I would rather see it roll forward in some instances, so I would rather be able to switch this feature on and off.I understand the reasoning, but when you're close to the red line, sometimes you have to do what you have to do. Not being able to see the negative balance makes it trickier when figuring out how things will flow. YNAB doesn't trust that I can handle the issues that arise if I am working with an over spent category. Sometimes payments for products I have ordered for other people leave me over spent across a month. Then when I finally get paid, I have to remember to put the money somewhere else instead of back into the correct category. It should be MY problem to work out what to do if the money doesn't come in for what I over spent on, not YNAB to assume what to do with it.
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OP is talking about timing issues. I still use YNAB4 for this very reason. I admit I'm a devotee of the red arrow. I have a number of items that come out at the first of the month and depending on what day that may fall, the payment may come out at the end of the month. Therefore, Personal Training may have a transaction on the first and on the 29th or 30th. So I flip the category t I'm buffered so when I go to work on the next month's budget, I flip the indicator to carry over to next month's category balance and it's zeroed out. My next use case is airfare. I fly several times a year to see family. I try to stuff my airline category but sometimes when a good airfare comes up, I may be a couple of hundred dollars short. So I will red arrow that difference and make it up within the next month or two.
My final use case is reimbursements. The red arrow is a stern reminder for me to get that expense report submitted in a timely manner.
I know the "good girl" approach should be to take money from my Income Replacement fund or other funds to cover that instead of red arrowing. But I don't WANT TO DO THAT. I'm a grown up. I am buffered, I have an income replacement fund. If things got ugly I could easily cover the red items in my budget.
I highly disagree with nYNAB parental approach. I get some people are not responsible, but I'm being punished because nYNAB doesn't want to have grown-ups manage their money.
Ok, rant over!
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I really see this as a perception issue and dragging along a different budgeting methodology into YNAB. When I dove into YNAB I made a concerted effort to embrace the entire methodology. I soon found that dealing with overspends in this month meant reorganizing my money across categories in the same time period rather than containing the overspend within a category but going way out into the future and penalizing my future spending in that category, which somehow never happened because I kept kicking the can further into the future.
After the initial pangs of discomfort and reluctance, not to mention annoyance, I found the results very effective. I used to be a nickel-and-dime overspender, going over each category in inconsequential small amounts which added up to bigger amounts. Forcing me to confront the reality that every extra $5 has to come from another category in this same month is what finally cured my wishy-washy spending decisions. I am incredibly decisive now. My results with YNAB have far outstripped all other budgeting methods. As a consequence, I tend to be hardcore on implementing the zero-tolerance for any red in my budget.
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I don't like how the overspending isn't obvious once the month changes. One the things I like better about the mobile app is that it shows you right away how each transaction affects the category balance, and how many categories are overspent. I have to search for the overspent categories on the web app. If the web app had that (& prompted you to cover them with existing funds), and a display saying "you overspent n categories by $x in cash/checking, and m categories by $y in credit last month" it would at least make people aware of what was happening.
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adriana01 said:
I don't like how the overspending isn't obvious once the month changes.It's worse than "not obvious" -- it's flat out misleading. "Overspent in Feb" shouldn't say $0.00 if you did, in fact, overspend. One of the many reasons I despise the new credit card mechanics in YNAB.
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HappyDance said:
I soon found that dealing with overspends in this month meant reorganizing my money across categories in the same time period rather than containing the overspend within a category but going way out into the future and penalizing my future spending in that categoryGenerally speaking, I'd say that containing the overspending in a category is exactly the wrong thing to do. That's sacrificing something that clearly has a high priority -- important enough to overspend, at least -- rather than something with a low priority. I think handling overspending by shifting within the same month better aligns the budget with priorities.
However, in this case, the OP is talking about timing-induced overspending, so the relevance of that "cover from lower priority categories" view would seem to be greatly reduced.
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farfromtheusual said:
It's JUST as easy to ride the CC float by removing the over spent categories as it is if they stayed there.If you cover overspent categories from other categories -- excluding the CC Payment category, of course -- then that's not riding the float. Those purchases are backed by cash, albeit after the fact.
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farfromtheusual said:
But if you leave a category over spent at the end of the month, and it shows up as over spent on day 1 of the following month OR returns to zero as an unfunded category then that's floatActually, that's an increase in the amount being floated. One can ride the CC float without any overspending at all.
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farfromtheusual said:
I know I won't be able to play it back right away, like the unexpected car repair last month. I don't want to stare at that over spendingI would simply cover it from the CC Payment category. I don't need to be nagged for the rest of the month for choosing to finance something.
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farfromtheusual said:
Sometimes payments for products I have ordered for other people leave me over spent across a month. Then when I finally get paid, I have to remember to put the money somewhere else instead of back into the correct category.There are approaches that make this fairly obvious -- a green category, for instance, means you have to move money. Not a lot of "remembering" involved.
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farfromtheusual said:
I just want the option for how to handle it myself. I don't want YNAB deciding that it doesn't think it's a "good practice" and zero out the category so that the over spending just disappears into the ether.YNAB wasn't built for you. It was built for people who are so on the edge and require an accurate budget that lying to themselves in this manner would be hugely detrimental. Their research based on YNAB4 found that people were lying to themselves all the time using the red arrow, but didn't really know what that meant in the big picture. As a result, it was eliminated. They aren't going to add options that would potentially allow that, because it would hurt the very people who really do need a budget.
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I have a handful of bills for which it is normal for the bill to be withdrawn by autopay either on the last day of the month or the first day of the next.
The problem arises when a bill is taken on the 1st day of the month but then again on last day of the same month.
I have several bills like this also. If a payment straddles the border between two months, I enter it as a scheduled recurring payment that -- as far as YNAB is concerned -- always occurs at the end of the earlier month and is budgeted for in that month. So my cell phone bill that can autopay any time between the 28th and the 2nd, is set up as a scheduled payment that shows up in my register and is accounted for in my budget on the 28th of every month. Then whenever the autopay actually occurs, it gets imported and the transaction is matched in the software. It doesn't matter to my budget that the autopay happens a few days after the scheduled payment.
I use the memo field of my scheduled transactions to note information about the bill, including the true due date (which is usually a couple days later than the date in the "Date" field), the amount of the next bill, the closing date, and whether it is manual or autopay. For my cell phone bill that I used as an example above, scheduled in my YNAB register for March 28th, the memo looks like this: 4/01| |Autopay|102.33|Closes 8th (budget in previous month)
If you've been including such bills in the later month's budget (for example you have a lease payment that is due on April 1st, and you would normally use funds from your April budget to cover it), you'll initially have to come up with enough funds to get ahead of the bill so you can budget it in the earlier month. It's absolutely worth it though for the convenience.
As it see it, the reality is that if a bill sometimes comes out at the end of the month and you have no control over this, then it makes sense to budget as if it is always going to come out at the end of the month.
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What I don't get is that the YNAB budget should be a hard copy of all your finances in your life and real finances don't go red unless you spend on credit and then the credit goes up next month and everything returns to '0' in your real life accounts. I'm therefore confused about the argument, can you explain how you manage to pay for these things if you can't cover it from any other budget line?
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Another perfect example of this is medical reimbursements. Many times they take a while to come back if your employer requires you to submit medical expenses to get reimbursed from a HSA or flex spending account. It's gotten much faster than it used to be, but it can still take a little while. For many of us we put that onto a credit card, rather than spend our own personal cash. It would be nice to be able to roll those balances into the next month as over spending to know that you're still waiting on that money to come back to you.
Just another example of why it would be helpful to have the flexibility of choice in this situation. -
It occurs to me this seems the opposite of what ynab claims they are doing in the new online version of removing walls from months. Whereas if you float a purchase at the grocery store made on say the 10th of the month until you get paid again on the 12th ynab has no problem just complaining of the overspending, but from the 30th to the 1st it handles it differently which is essentially a walled off month.
Now I am not saying using floats like this is a good idea, though I think if we are all honest we have at some point done this very thing, probably even after we started using ynab.
I am not sure what the "fix" would be. I don't know that ynab really wants to not reset overspending though I would say for consistency it should just carry over the overspending like it would between days in the middle of the month. Or perhaps it resets daily not letting you carry over at all? I don't know that there is a good answer but the current system is not consistent in how it handle this across months. Maybe the fix is to allow overspending to be carried over for x days then reset whether if it is across months or within the same month. But then there will be disagreement as far as how long ynab should let you be able to carry over overspending. I would argue that it should be use configurable defaulting to something short like 3 days. But we all know how the powers that be feel about user choice.
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lindsay_g said:
Everything confuses some people, and some people are confused by everything.Isn't this the same thing, just said two different ways? Are you confused? 😈