Yeah, before we picked up YNAB more than a decade ago we never had issues with $3k of candles disappearing in the budget, but we still struggled to save money.

When we started using YNAB and entering our spending into it, it was like a hockey-stick diagram on our household net worth.

And this isn't even double-entry accounting (which I've adopted for my own personal spending). One thing I'll say is that the way we use YNAB seems different from most other people: we hand-enter every transaction, we don't import it afterwards from the bank. Then we reconcile what we thought we spent vs. what the bank says we spent.

In this way we have to be a bit more intentional about what we're spending money on since there's not some kind of big monthly exercise to make the numbers line up and then a "we'll try to be better next month". Instead it's more like an envelope system where we are tracking budget categories as the month goes by.

I used to use YNAB and I think this was its whole point: you allocate money in different envelopes (budgets) and as the month goes by, you enter your transactions and see how your envelopes deplete.

I didn't actually do this that much, I was much more interested in where my money was going over longer periods (say a year). It was nice enough, but I dropped it a few years ago when they had big price increase and became more expensive than it was worth to me.