Coming up on the end of my free trial and YNAB is just not clicking for me. Do I have to log every transaction?

Waiting until two weeks of transactions have accumulated is too long. Ideally transactions are entered as they are made.

find out exactly where our money is going every month

How do you expect to do this if you don't log transactions? You'd be painting an incomplete picture.

I think YNAB is probably overkill if all you want from it is those three things. I certainly think you can make it work, and of those three, I think it's great at planning spending for big ticket items, and it can be used for the other two. But if that's all you want, something like Mint and a little manual planning are probably better suited for you.

I wonder though, why do you want to find out where your money is going every month? Because YNAB is great at addressing one of the underlying reasons people sometimes want to track and categorize spending: having control over your spending and making sure it's aligned with your goals and priorities. It just doesn't do that by retroactive tracking (although it can track retroactively).

YNAB seems to me to be good for people trying to get off the paycheck-to-paycheck cycle -- I certainly wish I had it early in my career -- but there are plenty of reasons for high earners and people who are not on that paycheck to paycheck cycle to use YNAB too. Again, it's about making sure your spending is aligned with your goals and priorities and about having a plan. For some, that might be about FIRE and saving aggressively. For others, it could be about treating yourself, or investing in travel. For lots of us its about a balance we can be comfortable and confident in.

Speaking personally, it's helped us tackle buying a home, doing a bunch of renovations, doing some surprise repairs, all with minimal money-related stress and with confidence that when the budget said we could order food or go on a date or afford that new washer/dryer, then we could and we wouldn't be in trouble.

Anyway, if it's not for you, that's fine, but I figured I'd share my perspective.

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Yes. Guessing folks are going to downvote me for this but here goes....

After about two years of setting everything up and knowing my categories and amounts intimately, yes, a lot of the time I touch it mostly biweekly in pretty much the way you describe. At that point I (a) reconcile everything between software and my bank (b) budget biweekly paycheck (c) check in on progress to long term goals (d) categorize any transactions that need attention from auto-import and move money around if needed.

Getting to this point took: (a) putting everything possible on scheduled transactions. From bills that happen monthly to yearly renewals. (b) Doing an annual rough plan using total income and allocating into rough category goals per biweekly pay period. These are my target biweekly budget amounts. I know I need X for bills, Y for discretionary, that there's W for fun stuff, Q for true expenses and Z for savings goals. I intentionally only move money within categories whenever possible. Each pay period I take those targets and make them concrete in terms of looking at what is happening in life, like toilet springing a leak, or annual bill coming due. (c) keeping regular spending on bank card / account that syncs well with auto-import so there is minimal time lag. This means that if something happens between my biweekly budgeting, I am generally up to date and can use the software to make informed decisions, like about whether to do optional auto repair or something.

I know I give up a bit of the precision I could have if I was one of the "check it with breakfast" people, but I consider that ok in that it keeps me using it. I get a lot of benefit in that it keeps me making conscious decisions about each paycheck and staying focused on long term goals. Even if I'm not always looking at the software every time I decide whether or not to buy a latte or not as YNAB orthodoxy would say. By this point, I have a general sense of how my behavior and category totals correspond. In the beginning you might watch more closely if you want to change behavior.

You might email YNAB and ask about an extension on the trial.

If you have your accounts linked, you can have your transactions imported, or do a regular file import. YNAB is about mindshifting and only spending what you have on hand, and not relying on the credit card float. I've been using YNAB since September and still adjusting to this. The process of setting up the budget really opened my eyes up to where my money was going and is helping me pare down (I had a lot of streaming subscriptions).

On the YNAB podcast, Jesse spoke with high income earners using YNAB:
https://youtu.be/MZXimyzCrnE

The general idea behind YNAB encourages you to manually log your transactions… but if you do get behind (I do too!) you can import them directly from your credit card/bank account. Go to your bank and “download transactions” in Quicken format. Then drag them directly onto the YNAB screen and it automatically imports. Then you just categorize the transactions. You can do this every two weeks/whenever to make sure your accounts are reconciled properly. That’s what my partner and I do every time we feel like we’re falling behind.

There aren't any real rules of how to use YNAB. You don't have to follow YNAB's 4 rules. You could simply just use the software as a tracking sheet. One of your goals is to "find out exactly where our money is going every month". You're looking to find where your money is going every month*.* You don't have to track your spending every day since you are looking monthly. You could set up a connection to your bank with electronic import and simply let the bank automatically import. From there you can reconcile once a week or once monthly and then your first goal would be achieved, wouldn't it? Your second goal would be achieved as well. Your third goal of planning spending would be better achieved through at least 2-3 times a week entering your recent transactions but again, there are no rules. I personally would stick with YNAB.

You can auto-import your transactions. They import 2-5 days after the transaction and you can categorize as they come in.

I highly suggest getting into the habit of trying to log daily if you don't do it at the time. I know it's annoying at first, but, particularly with the app it's usually just a few seconds for me now when I get into the car/grab takeout from the porch. That immediate entry does two things: 1) It helps you remember what categories to put things in 2) it will make you consider purchases a bit more because you'll have immediate entry vs having to log after 2 weeks have passed and you can't even remember why you bought "X" in the first place.

That is where YNAB excels, and it is AMAZING to use with Credit cards (it's one of my favorite features on the app actually). But it's a proactive budgeting tool, not a spending tracker, so if you're trying to only track spending, it will feel restrictive, but that is because it's doing something it's not really designed to do.

When I first started, for the regular purchases I had just a few categories (Food, entertainment, gifts) because I hated having to deal with splits and the like. (regular payments all had schedules so I didn't have to manually enter them). As you become more comfortable with entering transactions, you can start splitting categories (groceries, takeout) until you get to a level that makes sense to you

Honestly, just stick with it. I'm in a country where you cannot link your bank account so I've had to manually enter every single transaction and let me tell you....it was NOT easy at the start!

Its hard work to get the hang of but like all worthwhile endeavours, once you get the hang of it its amazing! (And this is coming from someone who suffers from severe dyscalculia, soooo...)

I tend to take five to ten mins at the end of each day just to enter in my transactions, so its easy enough to keep on top of. Word of warning,...don't leave it too long to input transactions or the monotony of entering in every transaction for a full month (or more!) will dampen your spirits quicker than a bucket of ice water on a fire.

Honestly, if you're interested in knowing where your money goes id stick with it a while longer. The results and figures you get from it (especially using the YNAB Toolkit) are invaluable when it comes to home budgeting.

My husband and I got YNAB for exactly this purpose. At first I was a little confused by it all, we didn’t need as a debt payment tool, or to get out of the living check-to-check cycle, but really wanted to know how much of our salary we actually spent and how much we saved.

I’m the end it was great for setting adventurous goals (trying to save 50% in a year), and it became a kind of game to see how much we could put away and invest each month.

I would say every two weeks is too long to be manually inputting spending. At first I would do it every time I purchased something, but found my husband wasn’t, so we decided on doing it a couple times a week. I do manual input because it’s helps me see where the money is going and change my habits (for example when you sit down to enter your spending on a Monday and you realize you went to a 5 coffee places over the weekend…yeah, that really shames you into not doing it 😄).

But ultimately, if it’s not for you, then it’s not for you.

Yes, except net worth, I don’t use it for anything in a mutual fund or brokerage account. All my bank and credit card transactions are imported. I just gave to verify or change the category.

If you are a high earner maybe it would be better to put your long term goals and significant expenses into a few categories like mortgage/rent, savings, retirement… and then just have a big “slush fund” category for the rest?

Not sure how to help, I’ve never run into the high earning problem 😑.

I will say that at least in my experience there is no real way to get around entering all of your transactions or at least approving them.

I have all my accounts unlinked and I enter every transactions manually. It takes 30 seconds or even less to enter your transactions, all my accounts are matching YNAB.

It all depends on your will to get your shit together

Auto import, my dude. I'm too add/lazy/whatever and just won't remember to put it in manually. All I have to do is just categorize and or approve it once it syncs in and It's smart enough to learn the categories after you assign it the first time. There's an alert that tells me when there are new transactions to import/approve.

Time for a mindset shift. Yes: log evrry transaction as you spend. AND make sure there are $ ready to ise in the category before you spend. This is the fast track to financial freedom.

Are you outside US? Or have many cash spendings? Logging manually really annoys. I'm outside US but my bank provide ofx export and ynab supports ofx format. My goals are like yours. I log every Sunday for several years. All goes well.

Same boat as you and still love YNAB.

I let the credit card do the thing. I categorize and accept transactions once a week and it works for me. It's specialty good to coordinate spending with my SO.

The thing is, I really like the budgeting method of YNAB. Giving money a job, and having a set pool ready for every expense.

But logging weekly is good enough. If I'm $100 over, I can balance from other budgets and that action alone curved my spending in the right direction. I do enter large expenses (1K+) manually to reduce the chance of going over by to much.

I used mint for years without success. It kind of sucked. I would forget to three point where mint would give up, stop loading my transactions and forget my budgets (that happens if you don't log in for three months... wtf mint). With YNAB I really know where every dollar is going (I mean REALLY know, not just have it in a sheet somewhere) and that hasd helped save thousands.

At the end of the day, it's really about finding your Matthias that worked for you