New! Confusion re: TBB, overspending in categories, and syncing of accounts
Hi All,
Thank you in advance for the help. I am pretty confused. My husband and I started using YNAB this past week. We set our goals, then allocated the funds currently available into those areas. Well, there were several automatic payments that came out of our accounts that we had forgotten about. Now I see a big red negative TBB amount at the top of the screen, and am confused about how to reconcile that because we aren't actually overdrawn in our accounts (question 1)? I've moved some of the money we had budged back into the TBB category. That number has gone down, but not all the way to zero, is that because some of the overspending was on credit cards (question 2)? And lastly (at least for now) when I see a transaction appear on an account that is synced will it come directly out of that category, or do I need to do something else (question 3)?
Again thank you for any help. I am just trying to get our finances back on track and I know it is a learning curve for anything new, I just want to be doing this right.
Best, Autumn
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Yes, you need to get your TBB back to zero. I assume those automatic payments were in August, right? When the month flips over, any overspending is zeroed out and is either deducted from TBB (in the cash of cash/debit overspending) or becomes credit card debt. So you now need to take money out of your categories and send it back to TBB until it's down to zero.
When YNAB recognizes a payee in a downloaded transaction (because you approve and categorized it previously), it will automatically categorize the transaction the same as last time.
Be sure and take those automatic payments and set them up as recurring schedule transactions:
https://docs.youneedabudget.com/article/165-scheduled-transactions
Hope this helps!
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Yes, thank you. The automatic payments were due to come out the 1st of the month, but with the holiday weekend they only came out yesterday and today.
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Autumn Hmm, if the automatic payments came in during September, they shouldn't have lowered your TBB. They should just put you into overspending in the category. Like, if you have $50 in Electric but then your electric bill comes in at $100, you should show negative $50 in red in the Electric category, and TBB shouldn't change. Did you try to cover the overspending from TBB even though there wasn't any money in it?
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what's the category on those automatic payments? Is it TBB? that would explain why it went to red. What were those payments for?
