YNAB - views

StressedSteph · 27 September 2014 at 4:57PM

YNAB has helped me turn our finances around. Never before have I made so much progress tackling debt as I have since starting YNAB.

During your 30 day trial you can often find special offers or vouchers for YNAB. I got mine for £17 from a MAC offer.

£17 one off fee isn't bad after all the rubbish we have wasted money on. This is money well spent.

It's main plus point for me is to stop me looking at my bank balance to decide if I can afford something. I now check my budget balance now, as so often your bank balance will look like you can afford something when in reality you have a load of direct debits coming out next week that you need to pay.

AMAZING SOFTWARE. xxxx

maggiecon · 27 September 2014 at 5:32PM

asparagus1968 wrote: »

I use "spending tracker" on my phone, the free version, it does all the above. I love it. it also shows you a graph or pie chart of your spending.you can budget daily/weekly/ monthly. add as many "accounts" and categories as you want. you can input repeating amounts to automatic. it's just fab.

Another vote for this app. I applied the YNAB philosophy to my budget but use this much simpler software to implement it. Add it's free. I like it better as I get paid on a Thursday every week so I set it up for my budget to run from Thursday to Thursday. YNAB works on a monthly budget and I found it quite hard to tweek it to suit my needs.

In response to firewyrm's comments it does allow you to budget and it allows you to set up extra categories and accounts. For instance I have 6 accounts on mine. For groceries, electricity, emergency fund, etc. then when my wages come in the money is automatically allocated to each acc as per the way I have set it up. Then my spending is tracked and it show what money is left in each pot so I don't go over. Since starting it 7 weeks ago I have managed to both kill a lot of debt whilst still managing to save as well. That is not to take away from YNAB but it is the philosophy which is the key, not the software.

longtermplanner · 27 September 2014 at 7:01PM

Another vote for YNAB. It will transform the way you think about your money (I should be paid for writing this sort of stuff!).

Try the 1 month free trial and see if you like it. Or love it. It's cheaper if you get it via the Steam website in the UK.

Debtfree2018_2 · 27 September 2014 at 7:27PM

Wow amazing to hear all these raving reviews.

As a result I got it and thought I downloaded drop box to connect to the phone, but it doesn't want to connect, says I haven't downloaded Dropbox, but I can see the icon on the laptop.

I will persevere!

Thanks so much everyone

AliBee16 · 27 September 2014 at 11:27PM

Another vote for YNAB. I would also recommend doing the tutorials (you can access them after they have run if you dont want to do it live) as they are very helpful. Good luck in your budgeting

abby1234519 · 28 September 2014 at 12:11AM

I don't bother with connecting to my iphone anymore, just don't see the point. As long as you download your transactions you are fine. If we withdraw £10 for groceries, I don't need to track it on the phone I just make sure that the £10 is allocated to groceries. If some of it goes on something else then it still goes against groceries.

I would probably be bankrupt if I didn't have YNAB. True story!

getmore4less · 28 September 2014 at 6:41AM

Debtfree2018 wrote: »

Thanks so much everyone! I am already using spreadsheets to track income and spending and debts. However this sounds much easier with the app that you can use straightaway, rather then logging spending once a week. I do think YNAB would make me think aa bit harder on whether I needed something!

That just indicates you don't really have a budget/plan of where you want to spend your money.

If it is not on the plan it should not get spent.

The tracking seems to be well sorted, what is needed is an up front plan that includes these "need somethings".

I am still a fan of MSMoney(free) can do proper planning, cash flow, account managements and category tracking all in one tool.

Debtfree2018_2 · 28 September 2014 at 9:51AM

Thanks so much for all your help! I have now successfully downloaded and synced everything.

Just one more question.

I have my own account and a joint account with the my partner, I want to keep them separate but YNAB adds them together, do you know a way around that?

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