1st*toright
DIS Veteran
- Joined
- Mar 1, 2017
I'm not expecting to find a free program that will have all of the functionality I want. One of the reasons why I'm doing this now is because we are sort of starting over from scratch. We moved into a new home right before Thanksgiving and we finally sold our previous home. We also are making some major changes to how we manage money and are moving our everyday money to a different bank. We're unhappy with the customer service at our current bank. Those two events happening at the same time makes it the perfect time for us to do this since this is as close to a clean slate as we've had in a long time.
I pay a little less than market for YNAB (they have grandfathered the price I paid originally for my subscription), and it is worth every penny to me. I'm a CPA, but don't have the time to dedicate to manually entering everything (like you, there are certain things that I have to enter manually, but most transactions auto import, and YNAB's first pass at categorizing is pretty accurate, and its super easy to quickly correct categories as I approve the import). I started using YNAB because I wanted to see why we weren't saving more (I was "budgeting" by making sure there was enough in the checking account to cover our monthly spend and putting everything else into savings). YNAB is zero-dollar based budgeting- as money comes in, you allocate it to the category where it will be spent. It takes a little while to get the hang of budgeting this way (rather than saying "I expect to spend $1000 on rent and $500 on groceries", you say "I just got paid $2000, $1000 of that goes to rent, $500 to groceries, $200 to savings and $300 I can spend on jellybeans" or whatever). That means that I now take all of our income and proactively decide how I want to spend it, and put everything in categories. Including savings, travel etc. Sometimes things get moved around after I've done my budget for the pay period, its very flexible, but I can see that by choosing to get random takeout 'cause I didn't feel like cooking, I'm taking money away from being able to have a nice date night with my DH (because there is one line item for "eating out/takeout" in my budget.) I'm more likely to eat scrambled eggs when I'm feeling lazy and enjoy a nice dinner out with that money. There are nice reporting features - I can pull a report that shows my "necessary" spend (mortgage, gas, groceries), the amount we are spending on important extras (the gym, activities for the kids), or everything (including travel and other truly discretionary items).
I know some people don't find the functionality worth the money when they can use excel or a free service, but for me, I know I'm definitely getting value for what I pay. I use credit card points for travel, and therefore have a lot of different cards (see the I love credit cards thread), and there is no way I could keep it all straight without YNAB (and I get way more benefit from my cards than the annual cost of YNAB - setting aside all the other benefits of having a good budgeting system).