The YNAB Blog
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Always budget to zero
YNAB is a zero-based budget method. If you follow Rule One: Give Every Dollar a Job, you’ll budget every dollar to zero. It can feel tempting to leave money in Ready to Assign and bask in its green glow. It might give you a feeling of abundance. But it’s not helpful. In fact, it’s counter…
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Working with a YNAB coach
Have you wondered what it’s like to work with a YNAB coach? Erin Lowell, Lead Educator at YNAB, who is one of the fabulous YNAB employees involved with the coaching training program wrote a terrific post on the YNAB blog about it, called YNAB Coaches: A Personal Trainer for Your Finances. One of my favorite…
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Focused Views are a dream come true!
YNAB recently launched its Focused Views, which allow users to select categories that they’d like to include in a single view of their budget. It solves one of the most difficult aspects of YNAB for me, which is finding the categories I need at any given time in my somewhat unwieldy budget. If you noticed…
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End-of-the-month YNAB checklist
The end of the month is a special time in YNAB. When the calendar month rolls over, things happen. Luckily, they’re predictable, so you can prepare for them (though it took me quite a few months before I stopped being taken by surprise). Some of the things you’ll observe include: When I overspend in a…
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Look before you spend
YNAB is a terrific money tracking tool. If you enter (or import) and categorize all your transactions, you’ll have a great record of your spending. And that can be very informative. But YNAB starts to become life changing when you actually change your behavior and start checking your budget before you make an expenditure. Notice…
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YNAB Broke – it’s a thing
After I’d been on YNAB for a year or more, I experienced the phenomenon known as “YNAB broke.” This happens when you have a bank account full of money — in my case more money than I’d ever had in my bank account — and still feel like you have no money to spend. YNAB…
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How I paid a large tax bill without going into debt (thanks to YNAB)
On April 17, the day before the tax deadline, my CPA give me some bad news. We owed $8903 for federal, state and local taxes for 2022. In addition, I needed to pay $4900 in estimated taxes for the first quarter of 2023.
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Give EVERY dollar a job, including savings
Rule One of YNAB is Give Every Dollar a Job. And that means every dollar in every on-budget account. Even savings accounts. We’re accustomed to thinking of savings accounts as something important everyone should have. And that’s true. But “savings” isn’t really a job. By all means, have a savings account, especially if it’s an…
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