What’s the most practical way to handle installments in YNAB? Specifically, I’m asking how to input each month’s payment into the account. There’s an article on this, but it doesn’t seem practical to create a new category for every purchase I put on installments—I regularly split expenses into 3 or more payments. Until now, I’ve just matched the monthly payment to the appropriate category. For example, if I spent 1000 on clothes and split it into 4 payments, I’d enter a 250 payment each month under the “Clothes” category. The issue is that, typically, for credit card charges, you record the date as the actual purchase date, and the money moves from that category to the credit card category to be paid off on the due date. But with installment purchases, the original purchase date is several months ago, and each month there's a new charge on the card that needs to be budgeted for and paid off, even though it's part of a single past purchase.

If this is something you regularly do and plan to keep on doing, this is the way I would do it. 1. Create a new fake account called "Buy now pay later" 2. Say you put 1000 of clothing on a specific date, create a new transaction for that FULL amount in the tracking account. 3. Categorize your "fake" transaction with the proper category so you make sure you have enough budgeted for it at the time of purchase. 4. As each of the 4 installments come in as charges, categorize those as transfers instead of charges by trasnfering it to your fake account. Don't record a separate move, rather just categorize it as a trasnfer to that fake account. 5. After 4 months your Buy-now-pay-later account will be paid off and you made sure to budget for the whole thing up front

I do something more or long the lines of this 1. A loan account for each credit card called "Tashlumim for XXXX" 2. I set the balance of the loan to the full amount of the purchase 3. as each one comes in, I do a transfer to the loan account, and write in the memo (payment 2 or 12 {merchant}) since the the date of these from the bank is the original payment date, I manually set the date to 2nd statement date (ie., if paid on the 10th, i'll set it to the 11th)

@mysterious-tomato-10057 are you sure you mean a tracking account? Those are off-budget. You'd need to use an on budget account like a Line of Credit one

the account doesn't affect the budget, the category does

it sounds like avi and I are saying the same thing, i might be wrong about it being a tracking account through since yeah i think those can't be categorized

@great-appointment-99249 do you have the money available at time of purchase to budget for it? Or will it only become available during the payment months?

or maybe it doesn't matter bc you are categorizing the transaction only in the non tracking account

You can't assign a category to outflow transactions from tracking accounts

then yeah don't use a tracking account 🙂

for a loan account you can

@mysterious-tomato-10057 I appreciate the dan l'kaf zechus, but why would I put it on installments if I had the money available at the time of purchase?

Yes. If its a zero interest loan and want to invest in the meantime. I think the YNAB answer in this scenario (maybe its not possible...) is to not make the purchase if you can't budget for it at the time, since our answers require you to assign the full transaction at the point of purchase

right, I would like to be there at some point, but if I decided to start living like that this minute, the downside wouldn't be worth the benefit

understood, keep up the good work!

is there a solution that doesnt require me to assign the full transaction at the point of purchase?

you could do nothing, and just treat it as one new purchase every month in some category but then you lose insight into how much you really owe

I think you should go through these resources here to see how to get your lifestyle to adjust to work with YNAB isntead of trying to force YNAB to be able to handle your lifestyle https://frumfinance.slack.com/docs/T04EHDDPGTY/F07JDNTEGP4?focus_section_id=temp:C:PIR879142cea85749e39cbcdd3fb

you could do nothing, and just treat it as one new purchase every month in some category

That's what I was doing until now (i.e. the past month and a half). I got stuck because I wasn't sure how to handle the transaction date

but i think creating an account to track all your outstanding debt is cirtical if right now its just in your head

see how to get your lifestyle to adjust to work with YNAB isntead of trying to force YNAB to be able to handle your lifestyle

I agree in principle, and part of the goal is for YNAB to help me gradually adjust the way I spend to be in line with YNABs philosophy. Right now I need find balance between making my lifestyle match YNABs philosophy as much as possible each month, while figuring out how to force YNAB to handle my lifestyle to the degree I can't change it yet.

keep up the good work, don't give up, i know this is tough, just hold on we are all here for you!

@great-appointment-99249 ynab has a good api :)

I just started using caspion, but I guess I'll have to add my own script between caspions json export and YNABs api 😄

But i guess feeling the pain is good too

if you have time to focus on developing on top of the YNAB api, please use that time for frum finance instead since we need more help with our YNAB integrations 🙂 and feel the pain by doing the rest manually

you don't want me to vibe code your frum finance work 🙈

the whole UI is vibe code currently, idk react haha

I've been working on something, although for now just focusing on visacal The secret is that the while IBS tries to get you the last X transactions, there's an api used internally by the visacal website to get transactions by statement date

I have as much spare time as I have spare money. There are currently two half done projects I have for automating my budgeting 😄

And yes, I've been using a lot of AI for this...

@mysterious-tomato-10057 this assumes that I have the money available for it at the time of purchase. If I don't, how would I modify this?

definitely don't do nothing. worse case scenario, set it up as a recurring payment

then that means making a new category for each purchase

no...

but only part of the category is going to be recurring

a 1000 BNPL payment today for clothing is the same thing as a recurring payment of 250$ for 4 months for clothing

Lets say I have a budget of 600 a month for clothing. I spend 1000 and split it into four payments. Now for the next four months, 250/600 of my clothing budget is a recurring expense, but the remaining 350 is not. So how do I make clothing a recurring expense?

sounds like you are confusing budgeting and transactions

ah, could be. I'm not looking at the UI right now

you make the 250 a recurring transaction, that is disconnected from how much you have in the clothing budget