What do you use for budgeting apps?

Lomcevak

My assessment then was: YNAB might be fine if you have just one or two accounts. If you have dozens, including investment accounts, it's totally useless. Investment accounts aren't supported at all

I have the usual collection of current accounts, savings accounts, etc. - probably close to 20 in total - and have no problems with YNAB4 (aka classic) with that number of accounts. However, two points

Firstly, the purist YNAB approach is to look at the budget, and not the account details. This way, as long as there's money in the budget, you can't go overdrawn and are free to spend up to the budgeted amount. However, this doesn't automatically work if you have multiple spending accounts, so you have to do additional work to monitor balances, move money around, and ensure that any account that money comes out of stays above a zero balance, YNAB won't do that for you. It's straightforward to do though, and YNAB classic lists a running balance to help, but strictly speaking it's outside the core methodology.

The absolute YNAB purist would have one current account and one credit card account that's settled in full each month (you might have off-budget savings too, but the purist would frown at that and keep savings on-budget).

As for investments, YNAB won't ever do this - it's a zero-based budgeting tool ("give every dollar a job"), not a complete personal finance package, and almost by definition, equity-based investments that change in value on a day-to-day basis wouldn't be relevant to your budget. I just track outgoings to the investment as a budgeted expense, and any incoming funds as money to be budgeted.

Cosycat

I like goodbudget which is the envelope system, we save loads now! Easy to add transactions and have multiple accounts. We don’t track isa,pensions and mortgage balances in it though. Money to those just goes out like an expense.

tempus_fugit

colsten wrote: »

Question to YNAB fans. Last time I looked at YNAB is several years ago. Has it improved on the shortfalls I identified back then?

My assessment then was: YNAB might be fine if you have just one or two accounts. If you have dozens, including investment accounts, it's totally useless. Investment accounts aren't supported at all. It also doesn't offer import from MS Money or AceMoney, so migrating your existing data would be a nightmare.

It's not "useless', no. I have about 20 accounts in total and it works fine for me. I use it to drive the budget, and also keep track of what's in each account. As Lomcevak says, though, you do have to do some work in addition to this to keep track of what is in each account, but I don't mind that as I am a spreadsheet freak anyway. But I think that YNAB is primarily aimed at people with only a small number of accounts, using it with a multitude is a bit work, granted, but it's not useless by any means at all.

The other thing with YNAB is it's not intended for importing large amounts of data into, it's best used by starting afresh with a snapshot of your accounts at the time you start using it. I did this and after 2 years did another fresh start and even with all my accounts it was easy to do.