Credit Card Payment
I feel like I should be able to figure this out, because I have been using YNAB for many years, but I am stumped. We have multiple credit cards on budget. We only charge items that are budgeted for and we pay the balance in full every month. Ever since switching to the "new" YNAB a little over a year ago, I occasionally have a discrepancy in the amount available for payment and I really do NOT understand why.
The payment amount was correct for February, I have NO overspending in any category in March, and no money is budgeted to a future month. I only have a few transactions on this credit card, so I thought it would be easy to figure out. YNAB shows that my payment available is $46.85 short. I do not have a transaction for $46.85 in any of my accounts.
I could easily move money from another category to cover this, but I really want to understand WHY this happened so that I can prevent it from happening again.
Screenshot shows the sidebar when the CC payment category is selected.
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Are you moving money out of the payment category. You have a negative in the average budgeted bubble which is why I’m asking.
when you moved to the new ynab did you budget for any balance due on the cards?
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satcook The only time I ever moved money from the payment category is when I redeemed rewards. In July I used points to "pay myself back" for $149.04. I entered it as an inflow transaction in the account with a category of "income to be budgeted" and then subtracted it from the budgeted amount for the credit card.
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Yes. That is correct.
dod you budget for any outstanding balance due when you started using nYNAB??
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If you negative budgeted $149 in July, that the average is -$12 suggests that either you had almost nothing charged to the card when you moved it to nYNAB, or that you did not budget for the starting balance.
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satcook When I started my new budget in January 2020, there were no charges on this card so I started with a $0 balance. The payment amount has been correct up until this month.
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When you say “the payment amount was correct” do you mean that “at the end of February, the payment category exactly equaled the balance on the card”? Or just that there was enough there to make the payment?
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WordTenor The payment amount in the category matched the total balance on the card.
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I found it! It was operator error. :-)
The error actually occurred in January. It was tricky because there was a transaction (in subscriptions) that was only partially funded, so the amount that was overspent was not the same as the amount of the transaction. I guess I missed the red in the category and because when I move to February it does not show that there was any overspending (because it moved it to credit card debt) I did not catch it.I wish that when there is any overspending in the current month it would show up at the top of the budget - or at least when you roll over to the next month, I wish it would make it more obvious that you have added to credit card debt.
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chicagouser If you are a paid in full user, one way you can tell quickly is that the payment amount will no longer be the equal and opposite of the credit card account balance. If they are out of balance, then you may have added to the debt or have issues with rewards that are redeemed. I use it to make sure that I have funded everything.
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Navy Blue Pegasus I agree - I need to check this more closely for every CC every month. We use a handful of credit cards (to maximize points) and since I *think* that all of our spending is budgeted for, I probably don't check that as carefully as I should.
I use scheduled transactions and obviously make sure that I have enough in the checking account to cover the full payment before it goes out, but I need to check the budgeted amount too. This is where having many well-funded categories lets me be a bit too lazy. -
chicagouser do you reconcile your accounts? I generally double check my CC vs category balances whenever I reconcile, which is generally at least weekly.
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Vibrant Yes, I reconcile them several times per month to make sure that my balance is the same as what my cc account shows online. I didn't always check to make sure that the cc payment category was equal to the account balance. Because I overspent a category (and did not notice), the next month YNAB removed the portion of the transaction that was not budgeted for from the CC payment category.
If I did not pay my cards in full every month I would have to pay much closer attention to how much I have available to pay on the card. I just need to make sure that no categories are red at the end of the month AND double-check that the payment category equals the account balance. -
chicagouser The other thing to do is make sure that you also check back on the previous month in the first week of the current month. Sometimes transactions will come in that you missed entering manually that comes in with an import. That can cause an overspend unknowingly in the previous month and lead to this situation.
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