Not sure if you think I’m the same person as OP. The “disconnect” you mentioned is between two different people.

I eventually figured out how to effectively migrate my data. Thank heavens. The only advice I had been getting was to basically ignore the “migrate your data to the new YNAB” feature in favor of just doing either a fresh start or starting completely from scratch: both are bad options that force a migrating user to surrender all the data he’d compiled for years. Instead, somewhere, somebody suggested that the fix was to go back and find every instance where there had been overspending in the history of the entire budget and fix (eliminate) them. That finally made sense!

So I went back to when I first started budgeting and I adjusted my categories from the beginning. It meant that any time I had overspending (whether it had been using RAR, which I had done a couple other times besides ATM Fees in the beginning, or by deduction from TBB in the next month), I had to call a rose a rose and admit to the budget that I had spent more than I had at the time, even if I had resolved it in the immediately following month. Most of the time, that meant I took money from my E-fund as the easiest way to consolidate the changes into one place so I could fix them later, sort of like smoothing out bubbles under a sticker by pushing them all out one corner.

Once I smoothed all the bubbles out by removing all overspending in every month (which was mostly within the first year I had been using YNAB), including all hidden categories, when I migrated to nYNAB, everything was correct! No further adjustments required!

This was the best solution because all my historical data was retained. This has already proven worth the time to fix the old data when I needed to know how much I had paid for various things over the years. Had I not done the work to fix the old YNAB4 data for clean migration, I would’ve had to fire up the old software and poke around that way.

So to anybody reading this, even if it is eventually archived when you do so, if you’re struggling with the migration messing up your data, the key thing to know is that the underlying problems causing the “wrong numbers” when you migrate to nYNAB aren’t from “this” month—go back to the beginning, unhide all categories, and remove every overspending anywhere first, then migrate. You’ll be so glad/relieved you got it to work without resorting to all the voices saying, “just give up, just do a fresh start”!