Hello! Today’s review is on Jesse Mecham’s budget program, YNAB (You Need A Budget). Most users, as well as the website itself, refer to it just as YNAB (pronounced “why-nab”).
Note: I have the classic version of YNAB and cannot speak to the updated one that syncs with your accounts and comes with a monthly subscription.
I’ll be honest: sometimes Mike and I struggle to manage our finances appropriately. We’ve sometimes succumbed to too many impulse purchases in the beginning of a month and had to resort to a credit card to make sure we made it to our next payday. We’ve had months where we’ve spent over $1000 eating out at restaurants. We’ve had months where we look at our bank account and ask each other where the money went.
For a few years now, I’ve been keeping track of our bills using Numbers from Apple’s iWork suite. I created a spreadsheet where I enter both of our paychecks as income and then put the amounts of every bill into their own box and it magically does the math and tells me how much money we have left over after everything important is paid. Unfortunately, that doesn’t account for spending money, fuel, eating out, entertainment, classroom expenses, and impulse buys.
In short, it tells us how much money we should have, but not how much we actually have.
That’s where YNAB has helped us.
YNAB helps users follow 4 simple rules for managing their money:
- Give every dollar a job.
- Save for a rainy day.
- Roll with the punches.
- Stop living paycheck-to-paycheck.
I have used YNAB for the entire month of March and have started using it in April, and I think it is definitely an answer to our problem. I still use my Numbers spreadsheet and use it to calculate how much our bills add up to, but YNAB is the perfect companion. I like that it syncs via Dropbox so that all devices are updated–we have it in a shared folder–and that there is an iOS app so we can update it on the go.
When I first set it up for the month of March, I did go through the budget section and tried to give every dollar a job and wanted to follow the 4 rules as best as I could. I failed pretty miserably in some categories (namely random spending, eating out, and groceries), but I did try. This month, I’m focusing on solely using the register section of the application to keep track of charges. I update the app via computer or phone a few times per week and make sure it matches our bank account to the penny.
The very thing we benefit the most from is at the bottom of this screen, where it says:
Cleared Balance $XXXX.XX – Uncleared Transactions $XXX.XX = Working Balance $XXXX.XX
That’s what we needed, right there. That little “Working Balance” part. In previous months, we’d log into our bank account online, ask each other how much was coming out for certain bills, and trust the number on the screen (which would be equivalent to YNAB’s “Cleared Balance” number). It was those uncleared transactions that would bite us in the butts every month. We never had a “Working Balance”; we had a “looks like we have enough in our account to cover it” balance.
Not a good idea.
It’s a simple thing to some, but it never clicked for us until we started using the program. We’ve already fared better this past month than we have in a long time, and I predict April will be the even better. I highly recommend it, and they offer a 34-day free trial on their website if you want to give it a shot.
Disclaimer: This review was not solicited or paid for in any way by YNAB. I just wanted to share a tool that I use to make my life easier.
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