
Spare change YNAB automatic savings?
For awhile I was doing cash envelope budgeting and at that time I was letting my change collect into a jar. It ended up being a pain because it's hard to spend change and I didn't want to pay for it to be rolled at the bank. But I really like the idea. Acorns and some other apps do this, but they charge you for it. I'm already paying for YNAB and, as many folks made abundantly clear to me recently, in YNAB it doesn't matter what account the money is, your categories are KING, so I don't need the money to be moved, just reallocated.
Is there any way to do this already, right now, without having to do it manually?
I believe it would be fairly easy for YNAB programmers to add a feature which we can select or unselect (or maybe select which accounts to apply it to?) where it rounds our transactions to the nearest dollar and puts the "spare change" into a savings category we select, if there's no way to do this now. I would love to have this feature! It wouldn't be a game changer, and I realize most people would just say "just lower your category balance a little and put the difference into savings", but I just know it was neat having ~$30 of change after several months of saving my spare change without even noticing the loss. I was already following a very tight budget, but that allowed me to squeeze even more out of it.
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Hi PhysicsGal !
We actually have a great blog post about why we don't typically recommend those round-up savings accounts. You're exactly right - your categories are king, so we rely on those rather than additional accounts just for change.
If you still prefer keeping that account, you can enter them as split transactions to show the funds moved to Savings, but you'd then have to manually adjust the category balance like you mentioned.
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How would this be implemented in practice anyways? Many of us almost exclusively use debit or credit cards to make our purchases. Why on earth would I want YNAB to automatically move the rounded up change to some random category? And how do we determine how much is "change". Even if we look at the money that is physically coins, that changes from country to country.
YNAB is not a mind reader so the logic behind sweeping extra "coins" into "savings" has giant holes in it. It would be basically impossible to program that.