Does anyone know why YNAB allows you to assign more than you have available to assign? It doesn't really fit with the envelope method comparison and is annoying to then have to fix it.

It doesn’t let you do that. Unless you are one month ahead. If you are one month ahead, and you over assign it will make the next month negative. If you do not have money in the next month, it will make ready to assign negative and red at the top.

Ya that's what I'm referring to - if you have $0 to assign and then go to a specific budget item and "assign" money to it, YNAB will "assign" the money to that specific budget item but then make the "ready to assign" negative and ask to fix it. It just seems strange to allow me to assign money to a budget item if I don't have any or enough money ready to assign.

Well it still takes human insight for this. The benefit is that it shows you that if you over assign you will automatically be overspending. Just because it ‘lets you’ do that, YNAB is showing you by a negative red that you do not have the funds for it.

Ya I get it. I guess it was a little bit more of a rant than really having a practical solution. I'm also curious if there's a benefit to this approach - I figured since they go with the envelope method then just as if you have $0 of physical money ready to assign you can't assign any more money to a particular envelope, it would be the same on the app. But again, practically it is what it is unless they take feedback.

i think you need to be able to overassign to show that you when you must be missing something in your accounting

Great rant @broad-australia-98095 lol. I don’t think I’d like a solution to this IMO. I like knowing if I overspend so I can compensate from the appropriate category. Now if you’re specifically putting more money than you have, there’s no reason for that really. But to overspend it’s pretty nifty when it shows the red

lol ya I agree if you overspend it should be red, it's not like they can enforce you to actually only spend within what you actually assigned. But when you assign I would think it wouldn't let you over-assign. Tbh it wouldn't be too big a deal except that the functionality of moving money (at least on mobile) is very annoying to use IMO. I mess up putting in the correct amounts all the time.

@broad-australia-98095 why is it annoying? If you want to take a loom video and show me I’d be curious. I find most of it to be intuitive now. But I’ve also been using it for a while now.

I'll try to send a recording but here's a scenario - I have category A which I need $100 for. In the first week I decide to only assign $50. A week later, say, I want to assign an additional $20. If I type in $20 it overwrites the initial $50 when in my mind I should be assigning an additional $20 - especially when the there is a button to automatically assign the rest of the $50 needed for the category. There is at least one other scenario where I always make a mistake and mess up the assignments.