YNAB Rocks! In a truly frightening kind of "I spend that much money on THAT!" way but in a great way because you can see the impact of your daily coffee habit on your car insurance payment 6 months away.
YNAB allows you account for all your annual bills in 1/12 increments and then when they roll around the money is there to pay for them.
The heart of the YNAB system is a "buffer" which is comprised of last months paychecks in order to allow you to save this months paychecks. You can only live on last months money that you have budgeted into categories beforehand. The premise is that you are never broke and will not have to worry about fluctuations in income if you are living on what you have ALREADY earned.
So the buffer is one full months income. So I'm earning May's income and it is just pouring into my checking and sitting there. Also sitting there is all of April's income. April's income is what I'm paying my current bills with. May is accruing. And I'm budgeting for June's expenses with an eye to leftover April income instead of instantly using Mays.
The way I'm beginning to think of it is: Quicken is a snapshot of yesterday. YNAB is a crystal ball showing me the future.
This is a stand alone piece of software that can download transactions right from your bank so if you use a debit card you don't need to enter receipts for things. I can also say the tech support is the most amazing I have ever dealt with. I sent in a bug report and within 15 minutes had email waiting for me telling me to delete a particular font and then it worked perfectly.
Two thumbs way up but only if you want to see all the leaks in your money handling. You Need A Budget (YNAB) - Personal Finance Software
I earn a good living. Yet earlier this year, several months after buying a house and getting settled back into the swing of things I couldn't escape the notion that my family was living beyond its means.
And we were. And YNAB helped me see it.
I'd previously used Quicken and Microsoft Money in an effort to do budgeting to no real effect. The truth is, Quicken and Money are more about having fancy checkbook registers than they are about helping you identify and conform to a budget. This is where they fail.
YNAB is straightforward and it does one thing, and one thing only -- it helps you create and manage a budget. With careful record keeping, you can do the same thing YNAB does with a pen and paper, or with Excel -- but the software is simple and easy-to-use and readily imports transactions (without fail) from my banking institutions.
I used to worry that the number in my checking account may not be enough to make everything come together. I can unequivocally state that now... I just don't care. Because of YNAB, I absolutely know that there's always money enough for anything that's going to come along.
YNAB has helped me exercise some discipline and do so without significant data entry or long, tortured sessions at the computer. If you're looking for something to help you manage your budget this is the software you should get. Ignore the name brands that simply aren't up to the task.
If you are like me you have copies of quicken and money on your shelf, plus hours invested in trying to make them work for you all ending in frustration because you didn't have a working budget...the money still disappeared the same way. Like me you may have taken excel and spent hours developing a custom model. And that sort of worked but took tinkering all the time, but you had given up hope of ever finding anything that worked like you need it to work. That was me and then one day google magic struck and YNAB came to the top of the list, I don't know what search terms I used, why I hadn't used them before, but I found a program that sounded simple and just like what I had been trying to create. The 4 rules had sounded like the discipline from one of my professors in school. The fact that it was an application assured me that the tinkering had been done by someone else, and so after searching the forumns and seeing that the owners where even participating; I bought the program.
Well, I have never looked back. This program does everything you need it to do, It allows you to track through the months those major expenses like tuition, property taxes, and insurance, while tracking the small stuff too. The object is gradually build up a buffer so that you are constantly living on last month's income which is what over financial gurus would have you do they just call it different things. The budget, once setup is very easy to use...Setting it up only requires picking a starting place, naming your budgeting accounts,getting your bank balances entered, and oh yeah, i would recommend reading the quick setup guide at least. Once there you can enter transactions manually or download from your bank accounts or credit cards. Enter paychecks in as much detail as you like or just enter your net, it is not nearly as complicated as other programs I have dealt with in the past.
The best part about this software is that new features are constantly being added. There is a new Features forum on the bulliten board and believe me, the programmer and owner are taking notes. Even in my short time I have seen several things added to the program, with many more on the list to come soon.
This software is worth every penny.
I love the concept of YNAB: spending money from the previous month, planning ahead, etc. I had switched from MS Money to Quicken, and then tried YNAB. Yes, the tutorials are great, but they're really time-consuming. However, I spent the time, took the tutorials, and set up my finances in YNAB.
After a couple of months, however, I went back to Quicken. I found that Quicken also has good budgeting features, and while not in the same vein as YNAB, I just find Quicken easier to use. All of my accounts get automatically downloaded to Quicken, a feature not available in YNAB.
All in all, I just found that YNAB requires way too much manual entry. I might try it again at a later date, when I have the patience to do so. - Financial Software - Finance - Money Management - Budgeting'
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