Has anyone used the YNAB (youneedabudget) tool before? I’m looking into getting my finances on track and I don’t know where to start.

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I’m someone who budgets every month and tried YNAB. Honestly, it seemed overly complicated. I use the free version of EveryDollar and am pretty happy with it.

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I use mint, helpful if you really need that visibility/wake up call

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I’ve tried mint before. I felt bothered but it didn’t change much.

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Subscription I think is $60/yr

Also love YNAB

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YNAB seemed too complicated. I use Tilller with a custom setup in Google Shees

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Love YNAB. I’ve used it for a few years and it really forces you to stay on top things.

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Its $50 per year

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Mint and persona capital are free and can be used to implement the same system.

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YNAB is zero-based budgeting (the digital version of envelope budgeting, where you would keep all of your money in cash and then put it in different envelopes depending on what it’s for - rent, groceries, lunches, shopping, etc.).

Mint is more of an abstract tracking tool that doesn’t specifically tie your budget amounts to your cash on hand. It will categorize your purchases into different buckets, but you can set the budget amounts to whatever you want - it’s not a zero-based system where every dollar you have gets allocated to a category.

In my experience, I switched from Mint to YNAB because Mint just felt like it was a tool to track what I’m spending money on - it imports transactions and shows reports of what I did. It’s not unlike your credit card’s built-in spending tracker, except it would combine all of your accounts from different banks into one dashboard. YNAB has that too, but it really adds value as a planning tool. When you get paid, it pulls that in as a budgetable amount, and you distribute it across your categories based on what you plan to spend. In Mint, if you go over on a budget category, oh well, try and be better next month. YNAB makes it so that if you go over in a budget category, you need to subtract the overage from one of your other categories and move it to the overspent category in order to pay for it.

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I was looking for similar tool and thinking of going with Personal Capital..

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Love YNAB, but I'm a huge data and money geek. I use Excel for forward looking modeling and YNAB to track what happens. Plus ZBB was a great philosophy that helped me figure out my financial goals.

YNAB toolkit is a good browser extension that ads more functionality.

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Thanks for the rec on toolkit. Adds a bunch of legacy YNAB4 items.

Also a YNAB user. I started in college (when my budget was maybe $5k a year) and then took a few months off about a year after I’d graduated since I wasn’t so sure it was necessary.

Still using it today making six figures - I just hated not having any idea what my money was really there for. At this point I basically just check it 2-3 times a week and categorize all my spending, but it’s incredibly helpful to force saving and I feel much more financially secure. It’s worth every penny since it’s automated as well - id never bother to keep up with something manual in excel.

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I use mint and also @debtfreecharts for my savings and fundings goals. I’m really visual and I find these help.

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YNAB is great. You can do similar in Excel though.

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Do you know where I can find templates?

Man I tried so hard to like Ynab but you have to set it up properly or else you're asking for trouble. I think it's helpful if you're looking to create a monthly budget and save money. Turned out I was looking for a expense tracker so I went back to mint, which is perfect for that.

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Wow! Thank you everyone, please keep them coming. I’m going to research the pros and cons of all the suggestions that are provided.

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Definitely agree with others that it stands alone, different from mint and personal capital. These three tools def have different design intents, assumptions. Next closest to YNAB is every dollar, though I don’t like because it doesn’t carryover budget category state from month to month. YNAB “punishes” you next month in a category if you overspent and rewards for the next month in that category if you underspent. Tiller is perhaps better than Everydollar and I think is free.

Love YNAB; improved the marriage, household finances too of course.

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