YNAB settles what every dollar is for. A weekly forecast takes that same plan and stretches it across the calendar, so you can see when each dollar actually leaves.
Your paychecks and bills run on different rhythms
If you’re paid every two weeks and rent’s due on the 1st, you know the feeling.
Two months out of the year have a third paycheck. In some months, the rent falls two days before payday instead of two days after. The month always comes out fine, and the weeks inside it are where you actually live.
A week is the unit Moneylight forecasts. Each one runs Sunday through Saturday in your own time zone and ends on a projected balance.
That balance is your starting funds, plus the paychecks that land in the week, minus the bills due, your everyday spending, and any savings transfers.
| One week | Amount |
|---|---|
| Starting funds | $1,240 |
| Paychecks | +$1,800 |
| Bills due (rent, electric) | -$1,320 |
| Necessities (groceries, gas) | -$180 |
| Savings transfer | -$200 |
| Ending balance | $1,340 |
Every week in your horizon gets the same treatment.
You carry a balance on a credit card
Your checking balance isn’t fully yours if a credit card already has a claim on part of it.
Moneylight asks how you handle each card. A card you pay In full each month has its balance subtracted from every week’s ending balance, so the number you’re looking at is what’s actually left to you.
A card you’re paying down over time you mark I make payments instead. Its balance stays out of the ending balance and shows as card debt, and each payment counts as cash leaving in the week it falls.
Charges YNAB has queued but hasn’t posted yet are netted against the money already sitting in your categories, so something you’ve funded doesn’t get counted against you twice.
You want warning before the tight week
Every forecast has a lowest point, and Moneylight marks it.
When that low week falls under the thresholds you set, the chart labels it your Tight Week. Warn Below turns it amber.
Danger Below turns it red, and any week that falls under it gets a “low” badge. When your lowest week is comfortably fine, the same marker reads Lowest Point.
Four weeks is the default view. You can push it out to 104 if you want to see a year and change from here.
When something big is coming (a car repair, a vet bill, a trip you haven’t booked yet), you can drop it onto a single week as an ad-hoc item. It ripples through every week after it.
Personally, I keep mine at 8 weeks.
Three weeks’ warning is enough to move money on a Tuesday night calmly, rather than at 7am on the morning a bill clears.
You already keep a spreadsheet next to YNAB
I ran one alongside YNAB for nine years. Every bill cycle, I updated the budget, then the sheet.
If you’ve built your own forecast tab, you already agree with everything above. You proved the need by doing the work by hand.
How this fits the YNAB method
Does this change how I budget?
No.
YNAB asks you to give every dollar you have a job, today, with the money already in your accounts. That rule is the reason the method works.
Moneylight leaves it alone. It never assigns a dollar anywhere, and it can’t: its YNAB access is read-only, so it can’t write to, edit, or move anything in your Plan.
You keep budgeting exactly the way you do now. Moneylight reads the plan you’ve already made and shows you when each piece of it leaves the account.
What happens to my scheduled transactions?
They stay where they are, doing what they already do. Your register shows the next occurrence of each recurring bill and paycheck, and each one rolls onward as it posts.
That register will even project a running balance for you, one account at a time, if you turn it on. It’s a good trick, and it’s covered in how to see if you can afford it before payday, using only YNAB.
Moneylight keeps its own list instead. You import your bills straight from your YNAB categories, and from that list it projects every occurrence out to your horizon, several paychecks deep.
Limitation
The import seeds each bill's name and amount from your YNAB categories. You set the cadence and the next due date yourself, once per bill, and paychecks you enter by hand.
Twelve cadences are available either way, from daily to every other year.
Try this
Open YNAB and answer this without doing any arithmetic: what will your balance be the week of the 28th, after rent, before the next paycheck?
Most people work that out in their head, or in a spreadsheet. A forecast just keeps the answer in front of you, every week, built from the plan you already made.
See the week of the 28th before you get to it
Moneylight reads your YNAB data, read-only, and rolls the plan you already made out into weekly balances, so a tight week shows up while there's still time to move money. The guide walks through setup and how to read a week.
Demo data, no account needed.