YNAB (5 or online)

[MarioMario]

I have used YNAB 4 (desktop) before and it has never really clicked for me.  Every couple of months I try to get back in the swing with it but it doesn't seem to catch for me.  I feel like if I can just get in the swing of using it a few months in a row it will really help me budget.

So that bring me to the new YNAB (5 or online or just YNAB now).  The idea of mixing the desktop functionality with the online functionality of MINT is really appealing to me.  And I think well, trying to for the free month sounds great.

The problem: Isn't it anti-mustachian to spend/waste $5 a month or $50 a year in perpetuity on a piece of software for budgeting?  It seems absurd to me that a budgeting software would hurt your budget.

So now I am kind of discouraged to really get in and get my hands dirty budgeting:
-Support for YNAB desktop will be discountinued
-There are online security concerns with YNAB online
-I don't want to pay for YNAB online forever

What are your thoughts?  What do you guys use?

[Rocketman]

Whatever tool you use for budgeting make it work for you to help control those times when you want to spend money in the moment - but you should not.

I have used  no real budget, cash envelope system, excel spreadsheet, and YNAB4.

Each was better ( for me and wife) than the previous one.  Once YNAB 4 no longer works I will start spending the money each month on YNAB5 - because for us, we save way more money when we have our budget on our iPhones.  It helps to to think how We have to classify a unplanned purchase and is it really worth buying.

Now will that help you - I don't know.  You have to run your own budget in ways that work for you.

Good luck

[meep]

Since you have YNAB 4 it should be $45/year for you :P

I`m sticking to YNAB 4 till it stops working. I can`t justify upgrading while it still works.

[laka]

I switched over to YNAB 5.  I was really displeased about the ongoing subscription, but honestly? Worth it. 

Pros (from my perspective):

No more dealing with Dropbox, and no more lag for syncing (I use a couple of different Dropboxes for work clients, and it seemed like YNAB's authorization got dropped pretty frequently).  The sync time is SO quick.

Direct import. I still enter all of my transactions, but this makes reconciling accounts a breeze, and I never have to go search through to find one or two missed transactions. Transactions that are already in YNAB match up, new transactions are there waiting to be categorized.

Credit card handling.  YNAB 5 makes it easy to use your credit cards for purchases and then pay them off right away. You categorize your purchase as usual, but if it's on a credit card it automatically moves the spent/budgeted amount to be budgeted to your credit card. So I always know exactly how much I've spent and how much to pay. It took me a bit to fully grasp it, but I really love it. (I know I can just pay the balance in full each month, but I like to see it in YNAB. And if I need to extend the payment over more than one month, I can rebudget some of the credit card money somewhere else. Not that I do that.)

Budgeting for the next month works better. And if you need some of that next month money, you can get it back to the current month easily.



There are a few things I could think of to improve, but overall I think this is how YNAB was supposed to be. It's worth it to me to pay the subscription (and I don't say that lightly).

[wombat]

I've been using YNAB for about 4 years. I like it and I completely understand why they've gone to a subscription model - after all growing the single user base is hard, having them pay monthly helps cashflow and product development.

But I'm not sure if I can/want to justify (with 10% discount) $45 a year. I've got my spending down pretty low, have a real good idea of where the money goes so tracking and budgeting is really just habit now. If YNAB 4 falls off a cliff after December I might look into it, but more likely I'll just drop that part of my financial life altogether.

[Kaybee]

I'm interested in hearing what others have to say. 

YNAB was recommended to me but I didn't realize it had switched to the subscription model.  I'll be starting the free trial shortly but I'm curious to see what it does that my own DIY spreadsheets don't do.  I have a budget but review it every month and adjust things if the category amounts are no longer working, I track every penny that passes through my sweaty little hands (it gets listed next to the budget as I update my "amounts left to spend"), I reconcile all my spending/income every 3 days (simply because I often go several days without spending money).  I haven't worked up the excel-fu to create a worksheet that shows my annual spending in each category but that was never something I tracked in the past (I had a year's worth of worksheets and would overwrite each month onto the previous year's corresponding month).  I'm still going to give it a try, just to see how their system works for me and if I think its worth the subscription fee.