You need a budget (YNAB) advice thread

ShirePiskie

I've been using YNAB4 for almost 18 months and have just got on a free trial for New YNAB/ nYNAB/ YNAB 5.

Thought it might be useful to say, if people weren't aware, that a new version is being rolled out, so if a question is asked we know which version someone is using, before offering advice that could have no relation to what they see on a screen.

If that makes any kind of sense.

FireWyrm

Well, I managed to snag an invite the other night and spent what I thought was going to be an entertaining evening playing with it. Sadly, I am horribly disappointed. I have been using YNAB 4 for years, it has revolutionised the way I handle my finances and I dont mind boasting that our household has gone from many thousands in debt to many thousands in the clear very much due to YNAB.

Unfortunately, the new YNAB is just a kick in the teeth for it's loyal fanbase and I cannot recommend anyone use it. If you just want a check register and very limited functionality, it will probably do the job but at $60 a year, it's a steep price to pay for sure. nYNAB just doesnt have anything like the features of YNAB4 and some features that most people need are just deprecated with no explanation from YNAB towers.

YNAB towers say that they are busy rolling out new features but I cannot get past the idea that I will be paying a subscription for a product while I wait for them to put in the features I already enjoy with YNAB4. The current version allows for flexibility in budgeting, nYNAB doesnt. nYNAB doesnt have in cell calculators (seriously?) or reports (!!!!!!?) or the ability to assign future transactions to a category and have them represented by the category balance (what?).

The biggest deal breaker for us in the UK however, has to be the inability to either a) import your existing budget from YNAB4 or b) to import a QIF from your bank. They have clearly focused heavily on the dynamic import functionality but only for US banks which does nothing for the rest of the world. The truth is that in the UK, giving your bank details to any institution is a breach of the Ts&Cs and none of the banks will ever allow direct import in this way. Money Dashboard gets around it by being an aggregator, but strictly speaking, if you ever tell the bank that you gave your login details to Money Dashboard, expect them to hang you out to dry if you consequently report a fraud. Other than physically eyeballing the transactions in your bank against those in YNAB, you can forget anything approaching an a good user experience when it comes to reconciliation.

There are even more disturbing omissions to the initial release which make it practically useless for those of us who have used YNAB4. Gone are the multiple month views - so, no forward planning. I know that this is not strictly the YNAB philosophy, but that doesnt mean that it wasnt a good idea in certain circumstances. I have a few months of rocky income due to maternity leave due shortly, and I could come up with a coherent plan easily in YNAB4 and know for sure, that if I stick to that plan, I will be just fine. I know the money isnt here yet, but that's ok, because I can be fairly sure it will be since I am contracted to be paid on the 25th of the month. If by some off chance, that changes, I'm big enough and ugly enough to make the necessary amendments without ending up gibbering in a corner or being treated like a 2 year old. Just because it is not YNAB philosophy any longer does not mean that I should be prevented by the software from doing something if I want to.

I cant import an existing budget so all of my historical data is beside the point. Actually, I think it is very much the point. Having sweated blood to get out of debt, I am damned if I am going back again and the key to this is a deep and meaningful relationship with historical data. It gives you insight into what to expect in future and helps you make rational decisions about spending and saving. Yeah, I want that Kindle, but my food budget has been steadily going upwards for the last year due to inflation and frankly, I could do with that £100 elsewhere right now. Worse yet, to start with nYNAB represents a significant overhead as I have to recreate all by budget/category structure by hand, then fund the pots that need funding (because I've been saving hard for the last few years and some categories are heavily funded) and then, I can just look at one month - this month. No forward planning, no discussion. The goals functionality while interesting doesnt seem to work all that well with limited functionality (again!).

The fact that it is purely web-based and there is no export functionality is another deal breaker for me. My finances are my own business, not theirs. I wouldnt mind so much if I could be assured that I could at least back the finance file up if ever YNAB went off line, but that doesnt appear on the roadmap yet. I cant use it on a Windows phone (which means, no quick input for transactions) since there is no mobile app. I could just about deal with that if I could get to it through the web browser, but again, no such luck. Like it or lump it, I have a windows phone and I do not have the time or the inclination to invest in a brand new phone just to get YNAB supported. So, I'm back to inputing transactions manually (no import) on a semi-frequent basis and reconciling by eye. The whole point of a web based system is negated. If you try to use IE on your computer, forget it.

The final thing that is baffling is the 'permeable' months concept. Gone are the days when you ringfenced income to a month, now you can assign income to any month in the future by funding categories but you cant assign income to a month by 'available next month' category. I cannot carry expenses for instance, because there is no concept of 'turning the arrow right' any longer and debts show up one month and not the next. No one understands the age of money concept either. I understand that the credit card handling is causing some consternation but since I dont use credit cards any longer it doesnt bother me that much.

To my mind, when a company releases a major version, you should be getting everything you had with the previous version plus something added to make it more useful. Sadly, what we get with nYNAB is a cut-down, hobbled beta of YNAB3 which is about as much use as a chocolate teapot. How they expect people to pay the $60 a year which effectively doubles the price from YNAB4 is beyond me. I really wanted to love it, I would have given them money if it had been at least as good as YNAB4, but I cannot see where the value is in this new product.

For me, I'm staying with YNAB4 for the forseeable future. I might look in on it again in May just to take a peek and see if they are back up to something approaching YNAB4 functionality, but I'm not holding my breath.

It is a bitterly disappointing pill to swallow after months of anticipation.

hiddenshadow

I completely agree, FireWyrm - I excitedly told DH the other day "I got into the new YNAB!" and was excited to spend Wednesday evening while he was out trying it out. An hour later and I was yelling at my computer about basic UI issues and very angry - and that was ignoring any of the new functionality, just entering transactions and budget info. Haven't tried any of the new "features" yet, though as you say Goals seem to be the only thing useful to us in the UK as direct import is US-centric.

I don't mind direct import not working as I don't want to give my bank details to anyone and I manually enter transactions (or rather, set everything up to be a scheduled transaction), but if that and goals are meant to wow me...that didn't happen.

FireWyrm wrote: »

The final thing that is baffling is the 'permeable' months concept. Gone are the days when you ringfenced income to a month, now you can assign income to any month in the future by funding categories but you cant assign income to a month by 'available next month' category. I cannot carry expenses for instance, because there is no concept of 'turning the arrow right' any longer and debts show up one month and not the next. No one understands the age of money concept either. I understand that the credit card handling is causing some consternation but since I dont use credit cards any longer it doesnt bother me that much.

^ this, so much. Looking on the YNAB forums everyone seems to have asked for "I would like to have [income this month] and [income next month] and [income for X month that I specify]" so that you can handle variable income, or a lack of income for a period, or what-have-you. Their response seems to have been "ok, no income! spend money whenever [but with broken indicators of what you have available and when]!" which doesn't actually give you confidence in the money you can spend (nor does it behave consistently). I (kind of) understand what they were shooting for, but it seems much more complicated (and broken) than just saying "you have £10k, you can assign any/all portions of it to any time period now or in the future" and then having each month behave independently of others (aside from carrying over category balances, obviously).

Also couldn't agree more on the (very) basic functionality that seems to be missing - search, running balances, etc. When I was entering my transactions it kept refusing to remember that it had created an "Amazon" payee - presumably because I had an account called "Amazon Gift Card" that it kept wanting to use, but it meant that for all 30+ transactions in a month I had to manually type Amazon for all DH's fun money spending. Ugh.

Like you, I really wanted to love the new version. I don't mind web-based, not massively keen on subscription-based but YNAB has helped our finances so much that I was willing to pay them back in that way. They've really unimpressed me with this "release", though - they keep reiterating that this is NOT a beta and yet so many things are missing/broken. More worryingly, a lot of things seem to be deliberately removed/broken, so I don't have faith that the "frequent updates" of the subscription model means that updates will contain anything I want (or not contain things I hate). (Also, as an aside, I've worked in software for over a decade and the lure of "you can respond to customers' needs with lightning speed!" is always overpromised/underdelivered. Everyone thinks they can roll out sooo many features so quickly when they can get instant feedback, but generally it means that you still spend the majority of your time fixing bugs with the stuff you rolled out last week/month/year and you still don't have time to work on anything new and shiny.)

I used to evangelise about YNAB (did so just a few weeks ago, actually), but now I won't - YNAB4 is great (and, arguably, life-changing). nYNAB may be great in its own way, but I don't know what it's trying to achieve, nor how you're meant to manage your money with it.

(Sorry, that was a longer rant than I anticipated!)

Glitzer

I have just signed up to YNAB. Obviously I have a 34 day free trial, although I am not convinced that's really long enough to decide if it does indeed help as much as everyone here seems to think. Particularly with it being December and having an awful lot of additional Christmas expenses and treats this month.

I've got access to nYNAB and am considering that I should maybe try and download YNAB 4, as everyone here raves about it but then I assume that eventually YNAB 4 will stop being supported anyway?

I actually came to see if anyone could tell me how to change the currency. It's driving me mad seeing everything in dollars. I seem to be spending more time trying to find out how to do that than setting the thing up!

hiddenshadow

Glitzer if you're referring to nYNAB, it took me 3 days to figure that out (another pet peeve with the new software - it should be more obvious!).

My Budget [or whatever you've named your budget] in the top left -> Budget Settings -> currency/number/date format options.

Glitzer

hiddenshadow wrote: »

Glitzer if you're referring to nYNAB, it took me 3 days to figure that out (another pet peeve with the new software - it should be more obvious!).

My Budget [or whatever you've named your budget] in the top left -> Budget Settings -> currency/number/date format options.

Thank you!

It doesn't seem very MSE to have to pay for it if I decide I do like it. :rotfl: Especially being a one (low) income household. But I have signed up to all of the webinars so hopefully I might stand a chance of a freebie. I've got no hope of my husband agreeing to paying for it.

FireWyrm

Glitzer wrote: »

Thank you!

It doesn't seem very MSE to have to pay for it if I decide I do like it. :rotfl: Especially being a one (low) income household. But I have signed up to all of the webinars so hopefully I might stand a chance of a freebie. I've got no hope of my husband agreeing to paying for it.

YNAB4 itself is worth its wait in gold. If you read my previous comment, we went from thousands in debt to the complete opposite in 2 years. Our beef is with nYNAB which lacks features that we as longtime users have come to rely on. Try nYNAB and see if it suits you better, but honestly, I would pay for YNAB4 and forego nYNAB for a while. They always have a scale able buyin anyway, so if you purchase YNAB4 and decide that you prefer nYNAB then you will be given credit for the months that you have paid for already. Unlike some software, it doesn't matter if you bought the old version the week before the new version drops, you will be given credit for that if you go for the new software instead.

For us power users who have been using it for 2 years, sadly there is nothing new in nYNAB that floats my boat and lots to dislike. I'm just not ready to jump on the subscription bandwagon yet whilst my copy of YNAB4 is still working the way I want.

Glitzer

I've done two webinars and think I'm going to try and get YNAB4. It looks better, being able to see a couple of months ahead. For example, I got paid yesterday and as such a lot of our expenses are are already accounted for but I want to see what I need for next month, on the same screen as this month as I think it's probably easier to adjust things that way. (Hope that makes sense!)

Toomuchdebt

I didn't know there was a new version out-let's hope they don't drop ynab4

FireWyrm

Toomuchdebt wrote: »

I didn't know there was a new version out-let's hope they don't drop ynab4

Theoretically, it is YNAB 5. In reality, it is YNAB 3 beta.

The official line is that YNAB4 will not cease to work any time soon but there will be no updates to it. The entire development focus will be on nYNAB which kind of makes sense. The problem for me is that I cannot fathom the thinking behind when they decided that nYNAB was the release candidate because frankly, it lacks even as much functionality as the previous generation. It also has some pretty baffling behaviour around how and when transactions are acknowledged by the category balance that simply renders it useless to almost everyone. There is a pretty lively conversation going on the forum tonight about it and everyone who is interested should absolutely spend an hour reading all 11 pages to understand the problem. What is far more interesting is the resounding silence on the issue from YNAB towers. This is a fundamental problem to lots of people and how they work and I cannot understand what they were thinking when they made it behave this way.

In truth, just like Quicken, as long as the operating system will run it, YNAB 4 will work. I'm just hoping that YNAB have a fundamental rethink before the software stops running because right now, nYNAB is just slightly less useless than a chocolate teapot to me and I'm by no means the only one who feels this way.