The goals tab will be the new home to tracking long-term progress in YNAB. Not for day-to-day decision making, not for weekly nor monthly budgeting. Think long-term like:
  • I want to retire early and live abroad
  • I want to save 6 months of emergency fund
  • I want to save for my very expensive anniversary vacation
  • I need to pay off my $50K of credit card and personal loan debts
  • I want to pay off my new mortgage in 15 years instead of 25 years.
These are a sample of the challenges and dreams many YNABers have.
Solutions:
  1. Offer a common place to track these important and big goals: the “Goals” tab.
  2. New shiny and addictive features that make it hard to resist giving dollars to these “goals” categories and offer clarity about progress and possibility. What kind of features can be put here are TBD but we can start with summary metrics such as in current General Income & Expenses. I want to see how much was assigned and available and how much increase since last month. Then clicking into a summary metric card can open up some details (percentage progress, history of contributions, time series chart that shows rate of progress. Forecast to when it can be reached or target date / required contributions if specified.
Currently, Lumy has nice features such as Spend Trackers and Net worth but they do not solve the above needs. Spend trackers is for budgeting and Net worth is vanity metric that is not attached to any specific job other than a generic “Savings” goal.
For reference: Undebt.it is a perfect example of web app that serves similar tracking purpose for long term except its sole job is to pay off all debt.
Brandon's edits below
  1. A user here mentioned the idea of "negative goals", where you are aiming to spend
    less than
    a specified amount over some period of time. We would want to allow for a custom amount and duration and would want to show pacing bars or similar so users can adjust their spending to be on pace to meet their goal.