Frequently asked questions

Earmarkr uses the same zero-based method — give every dollar a job — but it does two things YNAB doesn’t. First, it makes credit cards transparent: you can see exactly how a card charge moves money into a payment reserve, how much of a charge is funded versus debt, and how the earmark reconciles. Second, it turns debt payoff into part of the budget — your loan and card payments are funded budget categories, not a separate calculator. It also treats money as integer minor units, so there’s no float drift. We’re not here to disparage anyone — we just show our work.

Yes — and that’s a core focus. Debt calculators don’t know your budget, and most budgets don’t plan your payoff; Earmarkr closes the loop. Every loan and credit-card payment is a real, funded budget category, so the plan to get out of debt is the same money you’re actually assigning. Loans and mortgages get a payoff projection that replays your real payments and shows the interest you save by paying extra, and the credit-card reserve keeps new spending separate from old debt. A guided snowball/avalanche planner that ties these pieces into a single funded payoff plan is on the roadmap — the payoff engine it builds on is already here.

Yes. Export your budget from YNAB and drop the resulting .zip (which contains the Register and Plan CSVs) into Earmarkr. Your accounts, categories, transactions, transfers, and every month’s budgeted amounts are imported. Before anything is written, an interactive preview shows your projected Ready-to-Assign, every category’s Available, and card reserves so you can check the math, and it flags any loan balance that needs confirming. Earmarkr produces a per-account balance reconciliation so you can confirm the migration landed correctly, and the import is idempotent — re-running it won’t create duplicates.

You never share your bank password with Earmarkr — Plaid handles the secure bank connection on your behalf. Any provider secrets we do hold are AES-256-GCM envelope-encrypted at rest, passwords use Argon2id, two-factor (TOTP) is mandatory, every sensitive action is written to an append-only audit log, and we never sell your data. Nothing sensitive is ever logged.

No. Earmarkr is fully hosted and managed — you just create an account in your browser and start budgeting. There’s no server to run, no software to install, and no updates to babysit.

Bank sync runs through Plaid, which connects most major banks and credit cards in the US with a one-click, in-app flow, then syncs automatically every day. If Plaid doesn’t cover your bank, you can import the OFX, QFX, or CSV files your bank gives you — statement after statement, with duplicates matched automatically. You can also add and manage accounts entirely by hand.

When you spend on a credit card from a funded category, that money moves out of the spending category and into the card’s payment reserve — the cash set aside to pay the card. If a charge exceeds what you budgeted, the extra is tracked as card debt: it shows in the category for that month but doesn’t reduce your Ready-to-Assign, because it’s debt, not a cash shortfall. The payment ledger shows funded charges in, payments out, and how the earmark reconciles to what you owe.

Yes to all three. Credit cards use the transparent reserve model. Loans and mortgages store their terms and get a payoff projection that replays your actual payments; mortgages model a fixed principal-and-interest payment with the escrow portion derived from each payment.

Accuracy is the whole point. All money is stored and computed as integer minor units (cents) — never floating point — and the core budgeting, credit-card, and amortization engines are property-tested against their invariants. A one-cent discrepancy is treated as a correctness bug, not a rounding quirk.

Earmarkr is $5/month or $50/year (about two months free on the yearly plan) — every feature is included in both. As a launch offer, the first 100 subscriptions get 50% off during beta: $2.50/month or $25/year. See the Pricing page for details.

Click any “Get Started” button to create an account. From there you can import a YNAB budget, connect a bank, or add accounts by hand, then start giving every dollar a job.