Spent 6 months using a budgeting app wrong because I never read the instructions

I downloaded YNAB back in January after seeing it recommended everywhere. I kept entering my expenses but getting confused why the numbers never matched my bank account. Last week I was sitting at a coffee shop in Portland complaining to my friend Dave about how the app must be broken. He looked at my phone and said 'dude you're not assigning money to categories, you're just typing numbers into the void.' I had been treating it like a spreadsheet instead of actually using the envelope system it's built for. My budget showed $2,000 available for groceries but my bank account had $50. Now I feel like an idiot but at least my spending finally makes sense. Has anyone else spent months using a tool completely backwards before realizing the basics?

3 comments

3 Comments

corah7519d ago

oh my god, TWO THOUSAND dollars for groceries?! that's insane! i would've had a heart attack looking at that number knowing i only had fifty bucks in the bank. i mean i get it though, i spent like three months using a meal planning app that was literally just for saving recipes and i kept trying to log my workouts in it (you know, like a fitness tracker). i felt so dumb when my sister finally asked why i was putting 'ran 3 miles' into the notes section of a lasagna recipe.

emma_wells8319d ago

and that grocery thing is way too real honestly, i did something similar with a todo list app once. i downloaded this app called TickTick and spent 2 months putting my grocery list items in as "tasks" with due dates and everything. i kept wondering why the app kept sending me reminders to "buy milk" every single day and marking it as overdue. my boyfriend finally watched me do it one morning and was like "why are you assigning a low priority to bread, that's not how this works." i was literally using a productivity app as a passive notes pad and getting mad at the notifications. anyway now i just use a sticky note on the fridge like a normal person.

mark_green19d ago

and the really funny thing is those productivity apps actually have a feature for recurring tasks, so you could've set "buy milk" to repeat every week and it still would've confused you because it's not really a task you need to check off. i swear our brains just don't work the way apps think they should.