YNAB You Need A Budget

[MacGuy]

What the heck happened? My YNAB 3 budget was balanced. Been using it ever since 12/2009. Now I switch to YNAB 4, open the same budget, and I'm almost $15k overbudgeted! I don't want to go back through 2 1/2 years of transactions and have to figure out what's up. I know I had this problem before when I turned on error checking, so I turned it back off. Now I can't turn it off. YNAB is suddenly useless to me. I think I'll go back to YNAB 3 and ask for a refund. This is too much of a headache.

[Joel]

You must not have had error checking turned on in YNAB3.

Unfortunately, your YNAB3 budget was not balanced.

Go to your All Accounts view, and search for all the transactions with errors. Then categorize them all as Income: This Month.

Going back to YNAB3 will not fix your budget. You will just continue ignoring that your budget is not accurate.

You really need to keep Error Checking turned on, and FIX your budget. It is a very easy fix within YNAB4, and I would highly recommend fixing it and moving forward.

[kmorgan221]

YNAB 4 has error checking turned on by default (and only option as I understand) for exactly this reason. There is an error somewhere in your file and by turning error checking off all you're doing is hiding the error.

You may want to consider a fresh start for YNAB 4, and keep YNAB 3 around for when you want historical data. Or find some other solution that would work for you, which could be somewhere between finding the error(s) or making an adjusting entry to correct the (rather large) error.

Good luck with whatever you end up choosing.

[woolmonkey]

I'm in a similar boat. However, I wasn't in too bad a shape and was able to fix all but one warning. The starting balance on the credit card I use and pay off each month has no where to go.

Here's how I do things.
Everything that gets charged to the card gets a category. The card is then paid off each month (a transfer that requires no category). When I started this budget, I was starting fresh and all the charges were assigned categories. So essentially, that starting balance was already paid with the prior month's income, I just needed to do a transfer (no category) and be done with it. I have no idea what category to select to make that happen.

Does that make any sense? Since it was already accounted for with each transaction in the prior budget, I don't understand why I need to assign it a category. Halp please!

[Joel]

I'm in a similar boat. However, I wasn't in too bad a shape and was able to fix all but one warning. The starting balance on the credit card I use and pay off each month has no where to go.

Here's how I do things.
Everything that gets charged to the card gets a category. The card is then paid off each month (a transfer that requires no category). When I started this budget, I was starting fresh and all the charges were assigned categories. So essentially, that starting balance was already paid with the prior month's income, I just needed to do a transfer (no category) and be done with it. I have no idea what category to select to make that happen.

Does that make any sense? Since it was already accounted for with each transaction in the prior budget, I don't understand why I need to assign it a category. Halp please!

The starting balance should be categorized as something. I would recommend Income: for this month. Ultimately, that money was not subtracted from your prior month's income if it did not have a category initially.

[RandomHandle]

Preface: I may not be understanding your question entirely.

Your credit card is an onbudget account. All activity is categorized and transfers to pay off the balance are uncategorized (on both sides).

When you first set up the account, the beginning balance needed to be categorized. This begininng balance would be categorized the same as what you categorized the beginning balances in your bank accounts. Likely, Income.

[MacGuy]

I think I'm seeing where the problem lies. YNAB 4 treats pre-YNAB debt differently than YNAB 3 did. When I originally entered my credit card debt in YNAB3, it automatically entered the opening balances as uncategorized transactions. Now YNAB4 categorizes those balances as "Pre-YNAB Debt" with subcatagories for all of the various card accounts. Now that I'm switching those over, the problem is working itself out. I think I'll have it figured out soon (or at least I hope so). Thanks for all the quick replies.

[woolmonkey]

The starting balance should be categorized as something. I would recommend Income: for this month. Ultimately, that money was not subtracted from your prior month's income if it did not have a category initially.

But the money was subtracted from my prior month's income, because every charge I made to that credit card was mapped to a category that had budget in it. Essentially, that starting balance was already paid by the prior month's income.

Preface: I may not be understanding your question entirely.

Your credit card is an onbudget account. All activity is categorized and transfers to pay off the balance are uncategorized (on both sides).

When you first set up the account, the beginning balance needed to be categorized. This begininng balance would be categorized the same as what you categorized the beginning balances in your bank accounts. Likely, Income.

You understood my question exactly. Your answer is a little fuzzy though. Can you use really small words like I'm 5 please? Why would this be categorized as negative income?

[davjon]

I'm lost on this too. Prior to using YNAB 3, I apparently had $838.23 on two different credit cards. So when I created the credit cards in YNAB 3, the starting balances were entered, uncategorized as $616.97 and $$221.26. Since then, all transactions on the CC's were deducted from categories, then paid for, via a Transfer, every month.

I pull up my budget in YNAB 4 and I'm $838.23 overbudgeted for June. Going back and categorizing them does nothing to get rid of the overbudgeted amount. I don't have a 'Pre-YNAB Debt' category, tried creating one but it won't let you name it that. Thought that maybe if it was categorized as that, it would treat it differently.

If I delete those starting balances, my budget normalizes but then I show a credit in the Credit Card accounts, which throws them off. I tried doing a 'Fresh Start' but since I have one credit card with a balance, which has been deducted from categories, YNAB 4 then treats that as 'Pre-YNAB Debt' and puts it in the budget as that, as if it's really pre ynab debt.

I thought about starting a new budget file but I want my YNAB history without having to pull up my old YNAB 3 file if I need to reference something, not to mention the finagling(sp) that I'll have to do to handle the credit card with a balance.

I've read some of the other posts where someone found a hidden category but that's not my issue here. Any suggestions? My YNAB 3 account matches to the penny what my bank has (excluding uncleared transactions).

[Hazmatic]

I'm having a wee bit of a freakout session over here. I might have been doing something wrong the past year, but my money was increasing, my budget was rocking, and I was making good progress.

I started up the new version am I'm so overwhelmingly lost. I was about 18k over-budget. I tried turning all the pre-ynab entries into income as noted. Now I'm 21k over budget.

And I'm lost as to the error-checking thing! I have categories for all the cards I am paying down, which also (unfortunately) get used occasionally because I budget money every month to pay them. Now every one of those categories are red and flagged.

Do I just start over? I love YNAB. I'm not going to stop using it. But I'm really bothered by this.

[litterbug]

Did you have error checking disabled in YNAB3?

[Luna]

I would do a fresh start and move on from here. Error checking is a big deal, and if the case is that it wasn't on, let's move on and make it right from here on out. Please don't freak out. Think of it as an opportunity to refine your budget and make it better.

[Hazmatic]

Truth be told, I totally ignored error checking. So.. moving forward. Man...
I have to start a new file.
I'm off to find out how to deal with the credit card/category issue, unless someone can answer that in a couple sentences.
I feel a bit defeated, but thanks for the quick responses.

[litterbug]

I'm off to find out how to deal with the credit card/category issue, unless someone can answer that in a couple sentences.

I certainly can't, but if you haven't done it yet, check out the credit card article; hopefully that will help. You'll get a lot of advice, but the YNAB articles are really well written.
http://www.youneedabudget.com/support/article/setting-up-your-credit-cards

I feel a bit defeated, but thanks for the quick responses.

That feeling will pass. A lot of people are feeling the effects of not having had error checking on. This may sound a little obnoxious, but the change will be good for you, and your experience of the YNAB method might get even better than it was.

[rodeoclown]

Having error checking off meant your budget could be broken and you wouldn't even know.
So many support cases were fixed with a simple "turn on error checking" and then walking through the errors it brought up that we decided it was better to just always have it on.
If you don't have any issues in your file, then turning it on doesn't hurt anyway.