It’s The Second One I Purchased – Web Based Personal Finance Software Review

It would definitely benefit from some more efficient programming (e.g. I think a well written C++ implementation would be way faster and more efficient). At the end of the month I expect to have an additional $500 left over, ear marked for a slush fund, and paying for medicines and such. Also, I set aside mad money for my wife to use on herself, not me, or clothes, hygiene, just on stuff of $150.

This allows you to tell your money what it should be doing in advance, rather than finding out after the fact where it went. Unfortunately, the software doesn’t enforce this rule, and if you don’t enforce it yourself, your totals will never balance. I can easily import transactions from my bank and categorize them to come out of the correct budget accounts. Oh, I’m also a fan of Dave Ramsey and am working on my debt snowball (almost done, too!) and the zero-based budgeting and “rainy day” savings philosophies of this software support the Dave plan. YNAB helps by providing that approach. In addition, YNAB provides some of the best support I’ve ever seen in a software package. I exercised a 7 day free trial with the intentions of buying the product. I’m a long time quicken user of quicken on windows, which I run in parallels on a mac. Before buying YNAB, you must understand what it is and, perhaps more importantly, what it is not. YNAB is not an accounting system, it’s a *household* budgeting system. But if you have multiple credit cards, checking, and savings accounts, hand download each month of data from each account and hand importing it, is rather painful. It’s more time than I want to invest a couple times each month to follow my transactions by downloading from every account each time.

YNAB is the best friend you’ll ever have if this is your goal. The very best feature of this software, in my opinion, is its ability to be 100% personally customized to your unique budgeting needs.

With most software programs the software is just given to you for you to figure out how to use it. But YNAB provides a system to teach you how to manage your money guided by your budget.

I can transfer transactions between accounts. I could go on and on!

I saw my parents struggle and argue in regards to money. I’m 31 and I have been struggling with money my entire adult life.

As someone who has not budgeted before, I find this software great for showing me where my money really goes, but I don’t find it intuitive to use. It shows nifty bar and pie graphs of my expenditures by month – I find the budgeting portion of the software confusing and not intuitive. The budget now is almost a living thing as I can download transactions every couple of days and begin preparing for next month’s budget as I’m paid and pay off this month’s bills. It does take some getting used to, but I don’t see much way around this.

The instruction manual answered any questions I had after setting up my budget. I like that I can add or subtract categories and sub-categories according to my personal plan, as well as develop a budget a year at a time, but still make adjustments as life happens.

And I’ve not yet come across a program like YNAB to do just that: Create and maintain a budget. pool landscaping pictures.