Purple Hammerhead Budget categories are for spending (or for savings... aka deferred spending). That one could be used for some sort of interest charge, such as a credit card finance charge.

By the way, you don't have to use any of the default spending categories that come with a new YNAB budget. You can customize as much as you want to align with your own priorities and spending/savings.

Khaki Network Yes, give it a category. 🙂 I suggest Inflow: To Be Budgeted. Your eyes are drawn to it by design so you'll fix it.

Bruce 

Bruce said:
income into my Christmas category. 

 This skews your reporting, because it hides how much you actually spend on Christmas.

nolesrule Yes, I've heard that argument, but you know how many times I've used the reports?  maybe twice, just to see what they looked like.  And another time or two when I was trying to hit "All Accounts" tab and actually hit "Reports".  So for me, that makes no difference.

However, I realize you have to say that, so other people, who may actually care about the reports will know not to follow my example.

Bruce It also skews your averages calculated on the budget screen even if you don't look at reports. So when deciding how much to budget in the future based on the averages, your average spent will be lower than what you actually spent.

nolesrule  I can live with that.  This is the only category I do this with, and I have a specific amount per month that I budget to the category in addition to this abnormal, divergent abuse of my budget.  I don't use averages for this category.  

Anyway, I suppose I could put it into TBB and then directly into Christmas.  But Still...  shrug.  Thanks for trying to rescue me from myself.  I'll see how I feel when I get my next interest income.

Bruce 

Are you kidding us?  No, really, are you kidding us? 🙂 (Not asked disrespectfully, but in frank and sincere surprise.) 

One of my biggest joys with YNAB has been looking at the reports and seeing the steady growth, year over year, and one of those growth markers has been my annual interest income.

In 2019  I felt so accomplished when it added up to a 4-digit number. That's a number with a comma in it, a long, long way from my first year with it's piddling $2.85 interest earned for the entire year.  I even got a T5 tax form from my bank that had to be filed with the Canadian tax man because I crossed a reporting requirement threshold in 2019.  I know that I'm in a rare group of people, feeling smug about having to report interest income and pay taxes on it. Truly, it's one of very few pleasures I've ever had as a result of taxation.

Now, granted, inflowing direct to category wouldn't change anything. I'd likely still have the same bank balance. I know I would have paid the same in taxes; that's unavoidable. I guess I can see why you wouldn't bother using the reports; there's nothing particularly useful (or wonderful) in them.

Bruce There are certainly things I can think of to make them more useful (show hidden categories, rearrange category groups to compare for just the reports, drill down into categories in multiple groups and "all other categories," showing graphs of budgeted and available amounts, and making it easier to change the date range, to name a few - all of which I've requested at least once). But Net Worth has always been nice to watch, the spending trends/proportions are moderately interesting, Toolkit's balance over time is interesting, and the Income vs. Expense report has given me good information that was a bit unwieldy to get in All Accounts (like real data for split transactions).

Like any statistic, take them with a grain of salt. They're moderately interesting, but maybe not earth-shattering.