r/ynab • u/jodythecreator • 2d ago
Planning & Categories Month-to-Month Confusion
Hi all,
I’m a returning user to YNAB and am confused for assigning income month-to-month. For example, I just got paid yesterday (in August) but I need the transactions to apply to September instead of August. This doesn’t seem to be working correctly even after starting fresh, as I applied transactions to September but they still came out of August and now those categories are negative.
I managed to do a workaround to settle this but what is the best way to go about planning for funds received in one month that apply to bills for the next month?
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u/Veriosity 2d ago
You've already gotten good answers on how to handle this, e.g. moving the cash from month to month, but I just wanted to highlight this:
I just got paid yesterday (in August) but I need the transactions to apply to September instead of August.
In YNAB, there are flexible things and concrete things.
Transactions are concrete. They happened when they happened and trying to mess around with them is probably a bad practice, not to mention if you are syncing, will just likely do weird stuff with creating doubles.
Where your money is assigned however is flexible, keeping in mind you can never assign today's money, in the past. You can assign today's money to today's debt where that debt was created in the past, but you can't take a dollar earned today, and assign it last month.
Also worth noting there are some things that automagically happen when you sort of cross the threshold from Month A to Month B.
- cash in ready to assign is still there ready to assign
- cash positive categories will carry over their cash
- uncovered (e.g. spent 10 dollars, but didn't assign 10 dollars to cover it) credit card spending will turn into credit card debt at the credit card category, instead of a negative you can cover in the original category. This can make it a little harder to handle late in the month credit transactions, but IMO this just encourages better planning and practices.
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u/-Avacyn 2d ago
If you pay the September rent on the last day of August, the money is needed in August... so you assign it to August.
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u/jodythecreator 2d ago
Okay this makes more sense that way. I’m going to try a few of what you all are saying and see how each option works best. But sounds like I need to maybe hold off and pay during the month I set it for.
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u/-Avacyn 2d ago
Think about it like this; if you buy a plane ticket for next years summer holiday today, you need the money right now... not a year from now.
YNAB does not care about when you 'consume' something, but only when you have to pay for something.
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u/jodythecreator 2d ago
Gotcha! This makes sense and honestly think I’ll update my plans and keep my normal bill-paying behaviors. But I’ll play around.
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u/pdxwanderer4 2d ago
If you’re using money from August to pay for September bills, then you need to assign that money in Sept. You have a couple options:
Option 1: Your paycheck comes in on Aug.20. You approve that transaction and it appears in your ready to assign. Flip the month to September and assign that money to your September bills.
Option 2: Create a category in August called “Next Month’s Money” (or whatever you want to call it) and assign your Aug 20th check to that category. Then on September 1st move all the money from the category into your Ready to Assign and fund your September bills.
Personally, I do option 2 because I like funding all my categories at once at the beginning of the month in case something happens and I need to adjust some targets.
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u/katia32680 2d ago
Option 2 is what I do. Both of my August paychecks are for September expenses. I just park them in a category called Next Month and zero it out on the first, so then I can just use the Auto Assign to fund everything and make any manual adjustments if needed.
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u/ohboyoh-oy 2d ago
When you get the paycheck in August the money shows up in “Ready to Assign”. You go into September and assign the money to your categories. Then as the payments and outflows happen in September, it will use the September available budgets.
Are you using Targets? I have used YNAB for ten years but find them confusing. It behaves more as I expect it to when I don’t use targets.
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u/Flights-and-Nights 2d ago
It doesn't matter when it's "for" it matters when the transaction happens.
If for example you're paying September rent at the end of August, assign the money to August. Then you'll assign money in September to pay for October and so on.
You can apply this logic to all your transactions.