Ooooh. I’ll investigate.
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I was also This-Thread-Old when I realised I could use emoji in my categories and now YNAB is even more wonderful than before 
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I also wanted to say, on a more serious note, that I had two failed starts with YNAB and the whole thing didn’t really click for me at all. Yesterday I took part in two of the free online workshops and it helped me SO much. I’m always suspicious that a webinar is pre-recorded and there’s no-one at the other end, but I asked questions and got answers so can confirm they’re legit!
As someone whose relationship with money has been screwed for a long time, it’s really helping me to see things differently. Would recommend. 
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I’m grandfathered into the $50 annual price, so it’s a little easier to make the case for me. I love spreadsheets also and I was always too cheap to do YNAB, but I’ve been hooked for a couple years.
Things that make it worth it to me:
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I have a high interest account that I have to use the debit card 10x to get the bonus rate. Seeing it in YNAB makes it easier for me to hit that. Previously I would miss it at least once a year, maybe more. So that $60 in interest really pays for it. I know I should have just been more organized before, but it would just get away from me once in a while.
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If you combine income and accounts with your partner, this makes life SO much easier. I was “in charge” of the money, and he is not much of a spender. It wasn’t horrible before. But now we are both on the same page. We both know what we have, what we’ve allocated to different things. Not being the only one in charge of the money has lifted a burden from me.
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When you make a credit card charge it takes the money out of the account. We always paid our CC bill in full. But sometimes the end of the month would come and I would be surprised at what we had spent. Now we always know day by day.
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To get around the CC bill shock, I tried cash envelopes. They have downsides, like: losing cash, less flexibility, and no earning points. Now I charge everything but still get the same kind of accountability as cash.
I held off for years because I was too cheap to pay. That’s the downside of the YNAB business model, I think. The people who would like it don’t want to pay. The people who need it can’t spare the cash.
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In case this applies to anyone, YNAB is free if you are in education/are a student. Their workshops are also all free and have been super helpful to me (I am becoming more and more evangelical about YNAB as time goes by.)
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It looks like it’s more of an extended trial, where you get one year for free plus a 10% discount on the annual plan after that.
I’m trying to set up my YNAB budget for October… I’ve read the articles on Credit Cards but am still extremely confused. It may be that I’ve just not used the system much and still need to play around with it but… Damn I just can’t wrap my head around this.
-Do I need to “budget” for the credit card payments? Like say a minimum on one of my cards is $30. Do I put that as my budget for that card payment?
(I tried the above and then when I input the transaction, transferring the $30 from my checking account to the card as an inflow, it didn’t affect my budget at all… Said I still had the $30 available for that category).
-as I’m trying to get out of debt, I consider at least the minimum payments on my cards to be fixed expenses that I have to pay every month. I am trying not to use my credit card at all, so the grocery money I’ve budgeted will be coming right out of my checking account as I use my debit card. So some of the credit card articles have been confusing to me.
Maybe I’m just overthinking it. Has anyone had trouble on this point before? Can you offer me any advice or suggestions on how to organize this and make it useful to me going forward?
YNAB doesn’t really treat credit card payments as a budget item. Like you say, when you make a payment, that amount is deducted from one of your assets (checking account) and reduces one of your liabilities (credit card account), but there’s no budgeting impact.
It does depend on how you set up your debt accounts in the program, though. For example, my credit card accounts work as you’ve described. But I don’t have my car loan set up as a “loan account.” I just list the loan company as a payee and treat it as a normal expense, like a utility bill. I do this so that it will show up as an expense I need to budget for. It annoys me slightly that it means the total loan balance and car value aren’t part of my net worth calculation, but it works better for me this way.
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My job gave us new perks one of which is 3 months free of YNAB. They have another for budgeting software called CountAbout. Have folks had experience with CountAbout? It is less than half the price of YNAB at $40 a year.
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Ohhh never heard about it! Try it and let us know!
OK so I’m tempted by the emojis of new YNAB and put off by having to pay $50 every year… but I’m getting used to subscription fees, sigh. If I do trial it, I’m concerned about the mucking around with a credit card. Is my best bet to treat it like a debit card that I top up every month when I pay off the full amount?
(not replying to Jenny specifically but hers was the post with the cute emojis)
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That’s how I use mine. Most non-food expenses go on my credit card, and they’re already budgeted for.
I enter everything manually (although I might switch back to auto importing again) and account for the budgeted purchases, then pay the “credit card payment” budget amount at the end of the month.
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I’ve been a YNAB user for ~5 years. Income was very spiky so it was great for getting a longer-term sense of things.
I just started trying out Tiller. It’s a Google Sheets plugin that syncs your accounts and auto-generates some nice graphs. It’s a little less opinionated than YNAB, can handle investment accounts, and generally might be a better match for people who love getting hands-on in spreadsheets. No mobile interface though, which is why I might keep YNAB.
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Ooh, that sounds interesting, though it would be hard not to have on mobile as I pretty much live on my phone.
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Has anyone tried QuickBooks for Self-Employed people? I got it free because I did myt axes through TurboTax, and so far I like the idea that it would automatically pull my tax deductible stuff, but I’m wondering if it’s worth it at this point to switch over to something new.
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I’m seriously considering finally switching to the web based ynab. Quick questions:
- can I manually upload data? My bank is not gonna let me link it and I wouldn’t feel comfortable anyway.
- Will seeing up my credit card work how I expect it to, or should I set it up as a spending account that happens to get overdrawn?
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Yes, you can manually upload. The thing I don’t know is whether it will let you upload from a desktop, but complete the tedious-satisfying part (categorizing & approving each transaction) from mobile.
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I was able to upload manually from both desktop and my phone. I loved having the full function on my phone!
Credit card handling (at least for me with more than one card I use for different spending categories/rewards) did not work well at all, and I could never find a workaround that made it great. I ended up making them each “checking” accounts instead, and exactly like you’re thinking, just let them run in the red.
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Me neither! I thought I was the only one who couldn’t get credit cards working. They have all sorts of documentation on credit cards & YNAB, but I always got too impatient before figuring it all out.
It was easy to get to sync the account so all transactions show up in YNAB, and we pay the full balance every month. For actually knowing where the money’s going, that’s good enough.
Every month I go back and delete both the withdrawal from my checking account + the payment to the credit card so in YNAB-world my credit card is in the red forever. :shrug:
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You can pry YNAB4 from my cold, dead hands.
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