YNAB useful or useless?

ozzage

getmore4less wrote: »

No houses have typical months, the SOA approach is an average month.

The trick with a budget/plan is the longer term(min one year) thinking and managing cash flow.

if you live to the money in your accounts you are not budgeting
(the multiple account envelope/... approaches gets part way there)

if you plan where your income goes and track your spending at the planed level(with any tool) and keep to the plan balanced then you are budgeting.

I looked at YNAB and I can see why it works for people but preferred MSMoney(free) for the tools included but that is not into the new world of mobile/connected... if you want that

The bottom line with budgets is they are a plan for where you want your money to go, any tool can track that even a piece of paper, do a year not a month, and then track spending to plan.

How hard is it to plan £240(£20pm) on clothes for a year and track that is all you spend on clothes.

YNAB works for a lot off people that need to change the way they think.

I'm not sure I agree with this.

Yeah in theory "any tool can do" what YNAB does, but in practice they don't. In theory anybody can record their expenses and keep track of their position against their different budget categories and ensure that they are saving up for known bills and holidays and Christmas and house repairs in the right amounts etc... in theory they can have a difficult month this month and adjust things manually to compensate in their spreadsheet...

Based on that I don't even need Excel because I can do it on paper...

YNAB is excellent because it makes it all so EASY and also acknowledges that things happen and constant change is part of budgeting.

If people use YNAB properly I doubt that it would take more than two months to pay for itself for most users.

MS Money (which is/was excellent for OTHER things) has very little overlap with YNAB and such a comparison shows a lack of understanding of what YNAB offers.

I've never had debt, have always been responsible with money, have good savings rates and consider myself very sensible with budgeting etc. but YNAB has still added massive value to my life in relation to how much I understand and control my outgoings. I've been using it for about 15 months now and could not recommend it more.

Giraffeseeker

YNAB has revolutionised my life and I simply cannot imagine my life without it. I certainly would not be in the debt that I am if I had discovered YNAB 7 or 8 years ago. It paid for itself in weeks, literally. Right now I have the biggest mid-month bank balance I think I have EVER had, and I have paid off an average of £200 per month additional to my debts since I started using it. I cannot recommend it highly enough :-)

TrustyOven

They dont write their software for Linux, so I wont be wasting the £30 or whatever it is.

I use KMyMoney, which is free and open source. There's also GnuCash. There's also Excel / OpenOffice spreadsheets one can use.

Their methodology could be useful if you apply it to your finances in general - I will have to read and think about it tonight.

FireWyrm

TrustyOven wrote: »

They dont write their software for Linux, so I wont be wasting the £30 or whatever it is.

Pretty sure you can run it under Wine.