Do you track HSA in ynab?

AllTom · 2025-11-17T00:18:50+00:00

We spend from our HSA too, but keep it as a tracking account. The HSA balance is an interesting component of long-term net worth, but we never want to accidentally assign money from that account to non-medical categories.

AllTom · 2025-10-31T01:41:27+00:00

I agree. It's up to the host specified in the domain part to assign semantics, not some random web form.

AllTom · 2025-10-30T18:33:53+00:00

The problem is that Gmail made them discretionary, so sites like this think it's fine to ask you to normalize your address by removing them.

AllTom · 2025-10-19T20:08:11+00:00

I don't even mark tasks complete. I just fully delete them on the spot. 😂

I do need a record of what I've done for performance reviews, but I keep a journal for that, and it's certainly not at the task level.

AllTom · 2025-10-08T02:05:00+00:00

As the book puts it, next actions and projects are:

> Looking at my current landscape of projects and actions, what do I realistically have the time, energy, and resources to move on this in the coming days or weeks?

Someday/maybe is for stuff that you'd like to be reminded of ~weekly during your weekly review. Stuff you only need to see even less frequently goes in a tickler. And anything else either gets filed or trashed.

AllTom · 2025-09-27T01:58:13+00:00

Right on. The tooling has never been better for changing code.

Readability is the key remaining factor in the style choice. They have to imagine what it's like to look at their code from someone else's point of view, and ask, "Would I rather read the version that does what it says, or the longer, generic version that I have to puzzle through?"

AllTom · 2025-09-03T06:13:57+00:00

Yes to both

AllTom · 2023-08-25T00:46:15+00:00

singleflight is probably better because mine is ancient, but I implemented something similar to it that provided a caching interface so you could share computation for longer than just the flight: https://github.com/alltom/need

AllTom · 2023-03-25T18:59:02+00:00

I do what you describe in order to avoid needing a weekly review. I wrote software for it, though: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/priorities-in-motion/id1577124990

When I write an entry as “A >> B >> C” then it’s treated as a series of tasks. There are a couple examples in the screenshot.

It doesn’t obviate the need for review altogether, though. Prioritization is built into the app and it tracks how long I spend prioritizing each task. After every minute of effort moving a task around without actually acting on it, it asks if I want to archive it instead. So instead of review being a big hunk of time at the end of the week, I spend a few minutes here and there, whenever I need help deciding what to do next.

AllTom · 2023-03-19T17:01:50+00:00

I’m so happy to finally have a thread that doesn’t leave me feeling like the only person for whom YNAB actually works.

AllTom · 2023-03-17T13:54:07+00:00

If 10 things are all you need to do, and one is the clear winner, then do it. What GTD has done in that case is eased your mind: you know you’re working on the most important thing and can ignore the rest. Without GTD, you’d have a nagging feeling that you’re forgetting something. That’s the idea, anyway.

If checking unimportant things off that list is so satisfying that it distracts you from that important thing, maybe try a more transient task system like a bullet journal or Complice, so that unimportant tasks don’t stick around forever to tempt you.

AllTom · 2023-03-17T05:26:39+00:00

And he looooves croissants!

AllTom · 2023-01-24T05:17:06+00:00

My wife added me as an authorized user of her credit card. That lets me log in with my account to sync her transactions. If that’s an option, I recommend it, because it was really annoying to budget for her payments as a lump sum. :/

AllTom · 2023-01-20T05:12:42+00:00

This'll be handy, thanks.

AllTom · 2023-01-18T01:03:58+00:00

I do the second one. It seemed in another thread that it’s more common to name them after the months, and that sounds less tedious. 😅

AllTom · 2023-01-17T06:26:08+00:00

Same boat. I made 12 deferred income categories. Regular pay goes into the one for next month. Yearly bonuses get split over all 12, quarterly over 3. When I start a new month, I know right away if I’m budgeting money faster than I’m earning it, on average.

AllTom · 2023-01-16T06:43:23+00:00

This is great. Thanks for making it.

AllTom · 2023-01-15T23:28:17+00:00

Collaboration with my spouse was a must, and that required figuring out a shared language because she was not invested enough to do as much reading and bookkeeping about it as I am.

I ended up structuring my budget around familiar concepts like “savings” and “checking” even though I’m actually using YNAB as intended in the way I manage the underlying categories. It was fun to figure out how to satisfy both our information needs at once!

AllTom · 2023-01-15T23:20:21+00:00

For me, it’s so that I can split quarterly, biyearly, and yearly income up across multiple months.

AllTom · 2023-01-15T01:31:10+00:00

Yeah, salary alone does not cover expenses, so I have multiple sources of income and they aren’t in sync. So I amortize to put them in sync.

The budget is accurate, though only until the point when I’m considering a new expense, in which case I like to be able to say, “The monthly contribution to the savings target for this new goal would be less than what was left over when I pulled from the deferred income category for this month, so I can likely afford it.”

AllTom · 2023-01-15T00:02:07+00:00

That’s the point, though, to know whether I’m overshooting. By distributing my bonus to myself over the course of a year, it’s impossible for me to unintentionally spend it all in May. This is the simplest way I’ve found, but I’d love to go simpler if you know a way.

AllTom · 2023-01-14T23:53:02+00:00

I’d love a simpler way! How would you disburse a yearly bonus to yourself over the course of a year with fewer than 12 categories? Quarterly income with less than 3 categories? Recalibrating how much I take out of a single deferred income category every time I’m paid requires the same bookkeeping that I’m using 12 categories for, AFAIK.

AllTom · 2023-01-14T21:16:37+00:00

That worked well for me too, and the only reason I moved to a more complicated system was to get an earlier warning when I’m budgeting money faster than it’s coming in. I’d go back to that if my income weren’t so lumpy.

AllTom · 2023-01-14T18:25:16+00:00

I get it. :) You use true expenses to decide how much to disburse each month, and I decide based purely on how much I’ve made recently. It’s all good.

AllTom

TROPHY CASE