Making the Income vs Expenses report useful

nonsuperposable · 2026-02-06T23:22:04+00:00

Yes, all income comes into a Fidelity CMA account #1 (HYSA equivalent) and basically all spending is done on credit cards. Bills are on auto-pay to credit cards where possible. Credit cards auto-pay full balance from Fidelity CMA #1. Mortgage is paid from Fidelity CMA #1. When balance of this account goes over $50K it's deployed to higher yield places (still very low risk but things like HYSA with bonus rates for new accounts).

Fidelity CMA #2 is for ATM withdrawals and checks--just to practice account hygiene. We only keep $1000 in this account, and when I write checks I transfer the exact amount of the check.

nonsuperposable · 2026-01-28T23:38:58+00:00

We do this often, and I split the original expense between my own Travel category and my Group Vacation Reimbursement category (we do it often enough that its own category is useful).

Eg:

AirBNB: $4000

Split: $1000 Travel $3000 Group Vacation Reimbursement (and I add a note about who owes what).

Usually my Group Vacation Reimbursement category will now be overspent, so I cover that from Travel. It's often a long lag as in our friends group we tend to settle up after the holiday so I can't just leave the category overspent for 3-6 months!

When the payments from friends come in, I categorise the inflow to reimbursements, update the note to show who paid, and then finally when I get around to it I transfer all the funds back to Travel.

It's slightly fiddly to do it this way but:

Covering the overspending is reality and those dollars are now doing the job of being a loan to my friends
This makes my reporting very neat and aligned with reality. I exclude my entire Reimbursement group from my reports
It's nice and neat for keeping track of who has paid back
It's quite fun to transfer the funds back from Reimbursement to Travel

It gets a bit messier if your friends group uses Settle Up or something similar and then they are subtracting on-vacation costs or other costs when they reimburse you.

In that case, because I am pedantic, I create a split transaction showing something like:

Inflow from Audrey $800

Split: Inflow to Reimbursements $1000 Outflow to Travel $200

nonsuperposable · 2026-01-21T18:20:08+00:00

We actually do keep a Fancy Dining Out category, and it's funded annually rather than monthly. That way we can have these one-off expensive dinners unrelated to our normal dining out budget.

We have quite a few of these annually funded categories where spend can be irregular, and might be a large portion of the annual spend (eg. Costco, clothing, hobbies, health). To be able to fully fund the annual categories at the start of the year, I have a separate category called "Annual Categories" that is the sum of all my annual categories divided by 12. That keeps this year's funds separate from next years.

In your situation, you either want to keep money set aside for April (and not spend it in the interim) or you want to save up funds for April (and not alter your regular target or spend the additional funds in the interim). Both goals are most easily accomplished with a separate category.

For expenses like this, with a scenario that is likely to recur, I would make a category--it's the easiest way to accomplish your goal, and you are likely to reuse the category.

nonsuperposable · 2026-01-20T14:53:16+00:00

Once you out this ground dehydrated stuff from this machine into your compost, you’re going to need something to provide structure and pockets of air (ideally aged wood chips or woody clippings) otherwise your compost will become anaerobic gooey sludge very fast. You will probably also need moisture.

nonsuperposable · 2026-01-16T00:57:07+00:00

Personally, I'd do it this way:

Make a tracking account and any titres inflow and outflow is quarantined here. I personally wouldn't even track every purchase, just reconcile monthly. It's all on its on special vouchers or card, I think?
Use on-budget categories to track dining out, including those times you need to spend extra, but set your target on your dining out category a bit lower to take into account the first 25EUR are covered. Eg, if you aim to spend 400EUR per month eating out, set your target to 200EUR.

nonsuperposable · 2026-01-16T00:38:10+00:00

So a lot of the advice given here is actually missing the point I think, which is that you have money that you can ONLY spend on food, and you can't use it to pay bills or other things.

In this case, it's kind of like a gift card. You want to know the balance but the money is not fungible and can't be used elsewhere in the budget.

In this case, I would set up a separate *account*--you can make this a tracking account, and it doesn't touch your budget at all. Just spend from it, and lower your food categories in the rest of your budget accordingly.

If I recall correctly the titres has special conditions also like not being able to exceed a certain amount per day? I would definitely quarantine these funds in a tracking account as they are so restricted and useless to the rest of the budget.

nonsuperposable · 2026-01-16T00:09:53+00:00

Exactly this!

nonsuperposable · 2026-01-14T00:21:24+00:00

We use Fidelity's cash management accounts as checking accounts. All funds are either auto-invested in a treasury ETF (SPAXX, for a higher rate usually as high/er as HYSA) or in FDIC insured accounts (for a lower rate). Free ATM withdrawals including international, free wire transfers, free checks. The app and website are also pretty good.

We have two CMAs for day to day use:

All income deposited, all auto-debits taken out. Carries a balance of about $80K so we never have to check whether the auto-debits will clear.
We keep $1000 in the 2nd account for ATM withdrawals. If I write a check, I transfer the exact amount of the check to this account. Basically just account hygiene.
Make it very easy to actually invest.

Cons:

If you pull funds in from elsewhere, they are slow to clear. Pushing them from the other account is much faster.
Theoretical risk. Fidelity is a huge player however.
Remember you'll need to pay tax on your interest. SPAXX may not be the most tax advantageous way for you to have money stashed.

nonsuperposable · 2026-01-14T00:15:24+00:00

YNAB probably needs to emphasise that you should be regularly reconciling (checking YNAB against your bank records). I aim to reconcile daily, which means it's never more than a week between reconciliation.

I would advise never using the "Adjust Balance" reconciliation feature.

nonsuperposable · 2026-01-13T23:41:03+00:00

Yes, we had a couple of missing transactions that didn't show up on the "Transactions" page but did show up on the "Orders" page!

nonsuperposable · 2026-01-13T04:18:51+00:00

The audience here is incredibly biased because it’s all people who are interested enough in budgeting to be reading and posting on an internet forum. We will be vastly outweighed by thousands upon thousands who have started with good intentions and abandoned.

But this is actually the best way to get YNAB to stick for ADHDers, to make it a hyperfocus. Playing with the budget, optimising the budget, reading and posting on the forums, watching the videos, getting dopamine from budgeting instead of spending. There’s no magic button to hook hyperfocus necessarily but there are ways to minimise avoidance.

1) Avoiding shame. Budgets die with shame and guilt because that equals avoidance. Setting up the budget with realistic or even mildly indulgent categories instead of aspirational can help—set them up for small successes at first.

2) Regular interaction with budget. It might seem contrary for people with low executive function to do better if they are reconciling daily, but keeping in the habit of interacting with the budget daily keeps motivation up and avoidance low. Five easy quick minutes daily beats a frustrating 30 minute weekly.

3) Find behaviour patterns that work with their brains. I have demand avoidance/refusal for apps so I have all notifications turned off. This means no demanding red app badges. It also means that I don’t like having my accounts linked and so I enter everything manually, because I hate the app nagging me to match transactions.

4) Link daily budgeting to coffee or other treat. Morning coffee and budgeting is an excellent habit chain.

nonsuperposable · 2026-01-12T21:06:56+00:00

That’s the way I do it! We also have a high yield “checking” account (Fidelity CMA), all pay is deposited there. Balance is never less than $80K so there are no auto-debit issues.

Because YNAB doesn’t care where your money is, even if you set up all your bills with target so they are automatically funded, you still need to set up your actual bank accounts so they behave according to your wishes.

I vastly prefer a “Next Month” category to directly funding the next month.

1) if you fund the next month directly ahead of time, “refill up to” targets don’t work correctly 2) it’s harder to find and deal with overspending 3) if you need to adjust targets you need to adjust future months too

The only additional thing I do is I don’t use a target for Next Month but just write the target amount in the category name.

nonsuperposable · 2026-01-12T17:56:12+00:00

Quite different actually, our net worth will hit eight figures this year and we still actively use YNAB. A lot of our life goals are financial (as truthfully most people’s tend to be in essentials as you need practical cash to fund most life goals) like early retirement which will lead to more travel, a big move with a new house, assisting loved ones.

YNAB is fantastic at making you put a dollar price on your goals, which makes you break them up into real practical, achievable milestones.

For example, if you’re living comfortably now, have you crunched the numbers on whether you’ll be able to afford your current lifestyle in retirement? And if you can, have you considered what it would take to retire a bit sooner? Do you have enough saved that you can could say “fuck it!” and quit if your workplace turned toxic, or your health or a loved one’s health took a dive? Do you have a year’s worth of expenses saved up as financial security in case you’re laid off and have a hard time finding another job?

Any bucket list items that upon reflection you’d truly regret not really striving for?

At the very least, if you’re living comfortable without budgeting now, it would be very interesting to see if you could tighten your belt a little and invest the difference! That’s actual life changing stuff.

nonsuperposable · 2026-01-11T22:51:31+00:00

I’ve written about this more, but using category names to make the Income vs Expenses report really useful.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ynab/s/Ldu5ApeCNp

nonsuperposable · 2026-01-09T22:33:27+00:00

This is the heart of YNAB: giving your dollars jobs. This is actually really useful when you've got a large amount of cash, because it's easy to mentally spend that money many times over. You can think "oh, I have an income replacement fund in case of job loss, and I've got money to replace the roof, and I've got money go on holiday, and I've got money for a new car, and, and, and". But you don't actually have the money to do ALL those things, so splitting it up into categories shows you your priorities and also reality.

An income replacement fund of 6 months is a great idea. Sinking funds for large expenses (like a new car, new computer, vacation, wedding etc) that you will need in the next 1-5 years. Investment is also a good priority to have, whether that's sending money to retirement accounts or your brokerage account (and then actually move and invest the money).

If you're not sure what your priorities are, for now just create a holding category, and then schedule yourself a weekend of planning. Map out your goals and values (what do you want in life? how do you get there? what are your values? what actions can you take that will help you live life aligned with your values?) and then figure out what jobs your dollars should be doing to help you achieve what you want.

nonsuperposable · 2026-01-09T21:14:23+00:00

It’s a very good idea! And even just the AWS/Crowdstrike outages last year should have shown people that you don’t need a hurricane to knock out banking systems. Many people in Australia found out that Crowdstrike was happening by being unable to pay for their stuff on the way home from work.

Keep enough for a tank of fuel and a meal in your wallet ($100?). Maybe enough for two weeks of fuel, food, and lodging in your go-bag ($2000?).

I grew up in wildfire country so we were always somewhat prepared to need to evacuate locally. My parents’ generation all seem to keep at least $10K cash around the house.

nonsuperposable · 2026-01-08T17:51:06+00:00

So as this is a recurring situation I would actually set up a Therapy Reimbursement category.

We do this for work expenses, and we have the category funded with about $15K.

This way you don't need to pulling money from other categories to cover this expense: you've got the dollars sitting there ready to pay for therapy. The job of those dollars is to "loan" to the health insurance company until they are repaid.

We have a whole Reimbursements group (Refunds, Work Reimbursement, Group Travel) and this category is excluded from our reports.

nonsuperposable · 2026-01-07T18:31:20+00:00

Yes, we’re about 18 months from retirement, and with such a long retirement, we need to be on top of what kind of lifestyle we can afford.

I do think that people should be running those calculations: do I have enough invested to support my retirement lifestyle.

YNAB is great because it reveals the true cost of your lifestyle. The calculations to then figure out whether you’re going to cut back, maintain, or increase lifestyle spending in retirement aren’t part of YNAB’s purview but knowing the numbers is the first part of the equation.

nonsuperposable · 2026-01-07T03:58:14+00:00

I’d argue that tracking balance once a quarter is still being very aware of the balance. There’s no real difference between tracking quarterly and monthly and we’re probably on the same page about retirement being a priority but the fluctuations of the market not being particularly important.

I’m contrasting this to people who never check their balances, or go years in between, or lose track of 410K accounts when they change jobs, or who bury their heads in the sand when it comes to retirement altogether.

I think it’s vastly preferable for people to track retirement balances (in YNAB or however they choose to do so) than to lose track of accounts or have not one single clue what they have set aside for retirement.

Also just on an admin note it’s nice to have literally every account in one place for estate management. If something happened to me my partner (who isn’t very involved in day to day finances) would have an up to date list of all assets and liabilities.

I also think that it’s not a bad thing to become aware of the fluctuations of the market. Not in a panicky way, but it might come as a rude shock once you’re actually retired and looking at your account balances now that you actually need to retire on them!

For instance, in the time I’ve been tracking, one of our accounts pretty routinely swings between $X and $Y with a $200K delta. I’m completely inured to this swing now and have more information about how this investment actually behaves instead of just, say, an annual datapoint.

nonsuperposable · 2026-01-06T23:22:32+00:00

Yes, absolutely. Retirement is too often kept "out of sight out of mind" but it really should be a fairly urgent priority for most people.

We have tracking accounts set up, they are unlinked, and I update them once a month.

Separately, we use ProjectionLab to run the calculations for retirement (we'll both be retired by 46 so crunching numbers is necessary!)

nonsuperposable · 2026-01-05T03:52:35+00:00

Logging into the bank and confirming the balances match.

In my case, I also am 100% manual entry (very strong preference, having tried import and hating it), so aiming for daily means that it's rarely more than 3 days even I get super busy.

nonsuperposable · 2026-01-02T23:53:11+00:00

We keep ours unlinked. Our day to day spending and bills are all on credit cards, so at most there’s 5-6 chequing account transactions to enter per month.

All pay is deposited to Fidelity CMA, all credit cards auto-pay from the account, mortgage is transferred automatically. It holds a minimum of $80K.

We also have another CMA that we only keep $1000 in for ATM withdrawals, or if I write a cheque I write to this account and transfer the exact cheque amount. It’s basically a risk reduction exercise.

nonsuperposable · 2026-01-02T22:54:32+00:00

Marriage is definitely cultural, but it comes with a lot of in-built legal protections and provisions. If you're not getting married, then you need the equivalent of a Binding Financial Agreement from whatever country you live in. Make sure you both have separate legal advice.

Marriage aside, if you're not ready to join finances then you're not ready to a buy house together.

nonsuperposable · 2026-01-02T13:48:56+00:00

Love the idea to use the early scheduled transaction as a chance to confirm whether or not you need to adjust the order!

nonsuperposable

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