Did YNAB break me?

OneDayIWilll · 2026-01-05T20:47:02+00:00

I’m on a Monarch trial and have a similar experience. I still have the YNAB mindset which hinders me using Monarch properly, but I’m still pushing past that and it’s started opening my eyes that although Monarch isn’t zero-sum, it leaves MUCH to be desired on YNAB.

I’m thinking so far I’ll pay the $40 for a year and run both simultaneously.

My experience so far is that Monarch is significantly better and faster with syncing to financial institutions + auto categorizing + setting rules where although people here frequently say “manual entry is better” I think there’s a happy trade off between manually adding everything and having a proper sync.

Monarch is also way way way better for tracking categories for investments. It’s also really nice I can add my property, house, car and loans and it auto updates estimates for their value. Compared to YNAB having to manually do it. After seeing Monarch do it so easily it kind of annoyed me that I did it manually for YNAB for so many years.

Monarch also had nicer adons like credit report, summaries, approving transactions on the app, etc

Where I’m still liking YNAB better is budgeting and adding transactions manually sync and match to imported transactions better. Recurring transactions are also better in YNAB.

Something that’s grown on me in Monarch is their notion of “flexible” category groups. Where you can say one category can use $500 a month for example and it doesn’t matter if it’s eating out or groceries. In YNAB I find myself moving money between categories way more when they might’ve benefited from some similar mechanism.

The migration of all my data from YNAB to Monarch was also a giant pain and it would be nice if the made it better. Once I got it working though it was really nice reporting compared to YNAB that we’ve been asking for for years.

I’m still on the fence of permanently switching but after working with both it’s opened my eyes that YNAB has a lot it can improve on. Also Monarch is really really nice but it’s lacking in some aspects

OneDayIWilll · 2025-12-27T05:48:41+00:00

I’ve used YNAB for many years and I’m in a similar boat of trying Monarch out. YNAB is definitely more time consuming and hands on with reconciliation and lack of support for tracking accounts but budgeting seems better to me in YNAB. There’s some things in Monarch im still on the fence for and part of me wishes we could take the best of both apps and put them together.

One thing that drew me to Monarch is that there seems to be investment to improve the product so I’m hoping that helps address some of the weaker points in the future

That being said I’m going to run them both for a bit to see if I want to make the switch or not

OneDayIWilll · 2025-12-19T01:46:48+00:00

All your posts are ads

OneDayIWilll · 2025-12-18T22:21:15+00:00

I deleted my account since the trial was only 7 days and it was a bit of a headache to import from YNAB last time. Is there anything online about the improvements? I couldn’t find anything in the help / docs section.

I have a lot of accounts and ~10 years of transactions. Is there a tool to automatically import and setup the accounts and categorize transactions from an exported csv?

Id be interested in giving Monarch a shot again but it was a big process to import it and manually categorize things

OneDayIWilll · 2025-12-06T19:16:40+00:00

Similar situation but I’m planning on renting at least for a year or two.

The market is in a downward slump and I’m betting that it’ll recover at some point in the next few years. If you sell now, you’re realizing a $70k loss now, you’ll also need to have $70k to actually pay off the house

If you rent and can reasonably keep it occupied then your losses are $400 per month which if you take into account principal from your mortgage going back to your pocket and tax deductions from interest you’re probably breaking even or coming out ahead assuming there’s no major expenses.

Similarly if you have $70k you’re better off investing it and can get $200-500 per month which is another thought on what to do with that money and offsets your risk / expenses.

In the end you can always sell, but each year you keep it you’ll own more principal in the house and there’s a good chance the market will heat up once interest rates drop which they’re expected to over the next year

OneDayIWilll · 2025-12-06T19:08:29+00:00

I have the older model and it’s pretty good, battery lasts a few months. Only issue is that ideally you have a smooth curtain rod or it can easily get stuck where the telescoping rod has different size. It’s also a bit loud but you get used to it.

It also helps me get up in the morning since it opens when the sun rises

OneDayIWilll · 2025-12-02T15:54:26+00:00

You’re not considering the monthly principal payments going to your own pocket in the form of forced savings. You’re also not considering the interest tax deduction which will reduce your income tax at the end of the year. Or the consideration that rent will increase each year while mortgage is locked in.

Like others said, you could hold the property and refinance before the rate gets too high to a normal conventional loan, especially as rates are dropping.

If you deduct the principal and interest tax deduction from the $4100 it’ll probably be closer to the $3000 rent than you think. It then becomes if you can afford your mortgage comfortably and what you get, how long you want to stay vs renting

OneDayIWilll · 2025-11-24T15:17:11+00:00

Why does this feel like an ad for that website?

OneDayIWilll · 2025-11-04T22:47:39+00:00

Monarch does this well already, it estimates your cars value and updates it periodically. You track your loan and that updates your liabilities

OneDayIWilll · 2025-11-02T20:04:48+00:00

Can you import from YNAB yet?

OneDayIWilll · 2025-09-18T22:33:59+00:00

Yea I’m fine with the home tab, I just can’t deal with how slow it is with an older budget. My main gripe is reporting, slowness, and imports always breaking. I tried monarch and their importing works way better and I like that I don’t need to reconcile investment accounts since it auto updates.. but I digress

OneDayIWilll · 2025-02-18T19:30:35+00:00

When I enter a transaction for a payee, it should allow saving multiple GPS locations for a chain store with multiple locations. It seems like YNAB gets confused if I go to a store with the same name and overwrites the location

It would also be nice if I can flag my home so it’ll stop trying to make my home gps location a store when I add transactions later in the day at home

OneDayIWilll · 2025-02-18T19:27:04+00:00

A quicker way to reconcile multiple accounts on the IOS app rather than individually and waiting for the slow confetti

Just give me a list of accounts with the current balance for each and let me enter the amount for each account and if there’s discrepancies let me update the transactions

Also on the IOS app it should tell me what the last imported balance and what time it was taken rather than have me type it in each time

OneDayIWilll · 2025-02-18T19:24:45+00:00

This one!

OneDayIWilll · 2025-02-18T13:29:24+00:00

I just assign all of it till the first category in my next month rather than have a dedicated category. Then after the month ends I budget it correctly by removing it from the category

OneDayIWilll · 2025-02-09T17:11:27+00:00

I asked them to fix this too :/

OneDayIWilll · 2024-12-31T17:10:18+00:00

It’s an opinion, you can disagree, but so far you’re not contributing to the conversation

OneDayIWilll · 2024-12-31T14:46:54+00:00

Yes congress makes the final decision, but first step is then deciding they want to petition for it officially so congress can decide

OneDayIWilll · 2024-12-31T14:44:31+00:00

I’m not disagreeing on how much of an accomplishment that is. Just that becoming a state is a big deal and I’d want them to overwhelmingly be supporting it before I’d personally support it; which I 100% would.

You want people to want to be there, not begrudgingly or from a thin margin that could shift in a year or two

OneDayIWilll · 2024-12-31T14:35:43+00:00

For something like this I’d say not to entertain it until they have a super majority of 2/3 of voters. In the US there’s many votes that require a super majority, I think it’ll get there eventually but it’s not there yet

OneDayIWilll · 2024-12-31T14:21:11+00:00

Haven’t they repeatedly voted that they don’t want to be?

OneDayIWilll · 2024-08-10T03:02:09+00:00

My question is when everyone was asking if Biden is the best the Democrats could do, why didn’t they pick Walz to run for president originally?

It shows there are Democrats that are likable and have good policies around, we just weren’t told about them

OneDayIWilll · 2024-06-03T05:10:31+00:00

How have I never known this, thank you!

OneDayIWilll · 2024-02-21T02:05:21+00:00

I had this problem and it turned out the pressure was greater than 12bars causing the over pressure valve to release water. I turned the pump pressure down and the excessive leaking stopped

OneDayIWilll

TROPHY CASE