I’ve used YNAB for 5+ years. It’s kept me roughly in check, but I’ve always struggled with discretionary spending, especially restaurants, fast food, and takeout.

It wasn’t until I set up YNAB for my girlfriend (who is now CC debt free!) that I saw the suggestions YNAB makes during initial setup and realized I’d been setting my targets up all wrong.

I had targets for the obvious stuff: savings, essentials like rent, and debt payments like my car loan. But I also looked at my historical discretionary spending and set targets for those categories too, usually a bit below what I was actually spending, hoping I’d cut back.

That never worked. I treated the target as free money I was allowed to spend, so I always spent all of it.

So I removed every discretionary target and raised my savings targets instead. The mindset shift has been huge. Now I fund the important categories first, and whatever’s left just stays in Ready to Assign. I can still spend it on eating out, but nothing is assigned there. No target, no money sitting in a category “telling” me to spend it.

Seeing one number for what’s left overall also makes it easy to gauge what I can afford until next month. It works incredibly well, and I can’t believe it took me this long to use YNAB this way.

Anyone else budget like this?

For the life of me I can't understand why your credit card is tied in to your overall overspending. Is it possible to just set a $200 target every month and then assign $200 then pay it off actually and have it record this and then show it as green paid. Why does my other category overspending and overall my cash overspending get grouped into it and accoutned for and thus shows my credit card category as now overspent even though it was green before. I have large car repairs I used my credit card for and it seems there is no good way to track this in YNAB very accurately due to it wanting your credit card paid off every month. For people who have a running balance on their credit cards how do you stop it from showing as overspent all the time?

Yeah, I know it doesn't mean that much, but "number goes up" is always fun.

And before anyone says I need to invest the surplus, it's mostly a house down payment that I expect to use in 6 months or so.

Why, when I select another category to pull from which has more than enough money to cover overspending, does it randomly decide a smaller amount to move over?

I overspent $43 on gas, selected a category to cover it with that had $55 in it, and it only pulled $4.92 over. Why does it do this??? Where did it get that amount?