Credit cards inconsistency?? Don't understand
I have two credit cards.
One is behaving like I expect credit cards to behave.
- budgeted is zero (because I don't want to add an additional payment)
- activity is positive $564
- available is positive $564 (because I have properly funded all categories that credit card transactions have come out of)
The other one confuses me. I've properly categorized and budgeted for all transactions but it looks like this:
- budgeted is zero
- activity is negative $115
- available is negative $115 and showing red
WHY is this different?? I've properly filled all my budget categories. I can't for the life of me figure out what this $115 is referring to. In order stop the "available" from being red, I have to add $115 to the budgeted bit. I didn't have to do that for the other credit card. What is going on??
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Available is negative because you sent more than was reserved for that purpose. The exact same thing will happen if you send the Electric Company more than is in the Electric category.
Sooo, why did you send more than was in the category?
I'm being a little obtuse here to emphasize how YNAB is designed to work. It's up to you to arrange for categories to have sufficient money available before the outflows.
Very often, people forget to reserve (budget) money to pay off the starting balance. YNAB only keeps up with (automatically increases the payment category for) budgeted purchases after that.
These seem to be cards that you regard as being "paid-in-full", so each CC Payment category should match the associated account balance (as a positive number). Move funds from elsewhere in the budget to achieve that.
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There is a less common case where a return has decreased the available payment amount after you actually paid it. In that case, you can reallocate from that other category (which is now higher due to the return) to cover the overspent CC Payment category.
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What is the actual balance due on both cards??
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did you accidentally transfer money our of your CC to somewhere else?
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