When I crowdsourced my friends on Facebook about the best budget tool- YNAB or You Need A Budget was the clear winner and I now see why! I was in a personal development class for personal finance and they gave us 4 weeks to track our expenses (on paper) before looking into budget tools like Mint, YNAB, Quicken, and EveryDollar.
I got a free trial month from a friend and decided to check it out, this is where the app and desktop features start to work together so you can keep your budget tool with you wherever you go. Their website also has a robust training library so I could watch the videos, get questions answered and help to work on the tool itself and my budgeting back in order.
Before this, I was an Excel girl, it did the math for me! But now I can adjust quickly from one category to another, add categories easily and link it to my bank accounts- checking, savings and credit cards. With this budget tool, you can assign each transaction under a category and reconcile your accounts at the end of the month.
For 34 days, you can try it out– the initial set up of this budget tool will take a little bit of time to get the categories and subcategories set up plus your most recent bank balances and transactions but after that, it takes only a few minutes a day to use YNAB and stay on top of your money.
The goal with any budget tool or system is to get ahead of your money and budget your dollars as they come in so you can see where they are going throughout the month. If you have an odd pay schedule like once or twice a month, you will want to make sure to know how much to assign to each line item. With construction, pay is either feast or famine so our goals are to save up enough for 6 months. Once I started using YNAB, I was able to get to the point where we could assign our budget a month or two out and working on getting it further. This was a huge sigh of relief after being out of work for a bit and getting back to budgeting with what we could.
Favorite Feature: Goal Setting!
You can set a goal for savings or pay down debt and it will help you track those goals with this YNAB budget tool.
Cost comparisons of other Budget Tools:
Mint: Free. This is great for seeing your transactions as they happen but didn’t work for me for budgeting purposes.
YNAB: Billed annually or monthly after the trial.
Quicken: 1-year subscriptions range from $35 and up based on the functions you need for your personal and business expenses.
EveryDollar: Basic is free but does not link to bank accounts, you will enter everything manually. Plus is $129/year (comes to $8.25/month).