Skip to content

Insights

This is one of six groups these docs use purely to make Claude's capabilities easier to browse — every Planner deployment gives Claude all of them together. There's no setting to turn a group on or off individually.

Beyond month-to-month budgeting, Claude can surface two longer-run signals YNAB tracks: Age of Money and net worth.

What you can ask

  • "What's my Age of Money been doing over the last few months?"
  • "What's my current net worth?"
  • "How has my net worth trended this year?"

Age of Money

This is YNAB's own measure of how many days, on average, pass between when you receive money and when you spend it. The general idea (in YNAB's own framing): once it's comfortably over about 30 days, you're effectively living a month ahead of your income — paydays and due dates stop mattering as much, and financial surprises become minor inconveniences rather than emergencies. A rising trend is generally the goal. A sudden drop usually just means an unusually large expense outpaced income that month, not necessarily a problem by itself.

Net worth

"What's my net worth right now" is a current snapshot — the sum of all your open account balances, split out by assets vs. liabilities. "How has it trended" is a reconstructed history: YNAB doesn't keep a record of your net worth over time, so Claude works backward from your current balances through your transaction history to build that picture. It's a longer-run view than month-to-month budgeting — you can be right on track in every category for a given month and still see net worth dip, for example if a large scheduled expense clears that month.

What this can't do

A couple of things a longtime YNAB user might expect aren't possible through Claude, because they're not available through YNAB's own public API at all — not a gap specific to Planner:

  • Full goal authoring. Claude can set a goal's target amount, target date, and whether it needs the whole amount funded up front, but it cannot set a goal's type or how often it recurs.
  • Any net-worth or reporting view beyond what's described above — YNAB doesn't expose a broader reports endpoint for Claude to draw on.