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Personal Finance: Is the paid online version of YNAB worth it?
Athenor
Battle Hardened OptimistThe Skies of HiigaraRegistered User regular
Battle Hardened OptimistThe Skies of HiigaraRegistered User regular
Hey everyone.
New years is coming around.. and with it, a raise at work. This last year, my finances have gotten pretty bad in terms of debt thanks to a combination of car troubles, eating out too much, and spending too much on my hobbies. So suddenly I'm presented with a fairly significant increase in monthly pay, and I don't want to squander it.
I currently have 3 financial goals going into the next year:
1) Paying down my existing credit card debt (around 15k, 2/3 on high apr store cards and 1/3 on a bank card with a low APR).
2) Getting a new car that won't cost me a few thousand every month to maintain.
3) Getting my own home.
I know that if I'm going to accomplish these goals, I need to do my finances properly. So I'm turning back to my old stalwart: You Need A Budget.
Thing is, I -have- the classic version, but I am not the best at maintaining it. The Wirecutter's article recommends the paid version for its syncing between my bank and such, so I don't need to keep... as close.. an eye on things. But it's also like a ton of money each year.
Does anyone have any experience with YNAB classic (4) versus the cloud one (5)? Is it worth the cost? Are there other options?
(For the record, I've had a Mint account for a while and it doesn't really do what I'm looking for. I have been debating closing it for a while.)
New years is coming around.. and with it, a raise at work. This last year, my finances have gotten pretty bad in terms of debt thanks to a combination of car troubles, eating out too much, and spending too much on my hobbies. So suddenly I'm presented with a fairly significant increase in monthly pay, and I don't want to squander it.
I currently have 3 financial goals going into the next year:
1) Paying down my existing credit card debt (around 15k, 2/3 on high apr store cards and 1/3 on a bank card with a low APR).
2) Getting a new car that won't cost me a few thousand every month to maintain.
3) Getting my own home.
I know that if I'm going to accomplish these goals, I need to do my finances properly. So I'm turning back to my old stalwart: You Need A Budget.
Thing is, I -have- the classic version, but I am not the best at maintaining it. The Wirecutter's article recommends the paid version for its syncing between my bank and such, so I don't need to keep... as close.. an eye on things. But it's also like a ton of money each year.
Does anyone have any experience with YNAB classic (4) versus the cloud one (5)? Is it worth the cost? Are there other options?
(For the record, I've had a Mint account for a while and it doesn't really do what I'm looking for. I have been debating closing it for a while.)
He/Him | "We who believe in freedom cannot rest." - Dr. Johnetta Cole, 7/22/2024
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You'll have to decide how to balance your allocation of money toward your goals, but paying off high APR debt is typically the best bang for your buck you can get.
Yup. That's the main plan. I've snowballed away my small dollar amount debt, so rolling down the high values is the next goal. The bank card was originally supposed to be used to transfer credit card debt to so I could pay it off at a lower APR, but again car emergencies killed that.
long answer: it helps you discipline yourself to save for future surprises and not spend money you need later just because it's in your account right now. If you're good at doing that already, mint is probably fine for you. If you need something to help regiment your plan and guarantee you don't derail yourself because you forgot about the e.g. quarterly larger insurance payment or something like that, or you didn't put some bills in your car emergency fund every month, so now you're boned, YNAB is awesome.
If you are already good at budgeting in the short and the longterm such that you have pools of funds set aside to cover bills and surprises, Y Don't NAB. If you aren't good, YNAB.
That said: If you weren't sticking with the unpaid version, the paid version isn't going to magically help you manage your money more. It will only add some feature to make using the unpaid version easier.
This.
The most important thing stressed to me during my financial counsel training was to ensure the person has the tools to achieve their goals. After that no one can make it happen but the person.
If the new one version is what works for you and saves you more than you spend on it then awesome. I’d say it’d be worthwhile to give it a try so long as you can cancel at any time.
However, should it result in the same situation a few months down the road then you might want to consider how to better prepare and/or accommodate those situations.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6876819/how-do-you-add-ui-inside-cells-in-a-google-spreadsheet-using-app-script
It's a lot of setup, sure, but it's powerful.
I'm also glad no one's being judgmental.
If you liked how YNAB4 worked, but your main issue was keeping on top of entering things in, the online YNAB (New YNAB, or "nYNAB") might very well be worth it to you. It's very well targetted for the things you listed in your post. Instead of "woo extra income, hobby and eating out time!" you'll be giving that money jobs for emergency car maintenance and your various goals, and you'll realize you don't actually have all the discretionary extra money you thought you did.
Don't forget there's a 34 day free trial for nYNAB, so there's no reason not to at least give it a try to see if you like it. The way it handles credit cards can throw some people off, so don't hesitate to ask for help if you find that part confusing.
Even if you don't need to manually balance (which you'll still have some manual work anyway since the categorisation is never perfect), I'm not sure that will solve the demotivation factor.
Luckily you said you're getting a boost to income so that always makes staying on budget easier. Otherwise I'd recommend looking at your budgeting practices so surprise expenses or unwise splurging doesn't throw everything out of whack.
For instance, my own budget has several different sinks for stuff like that. I have a monthly bucket for "Stuff I Don't Need", a long term savings bucket named "Highly Unexpected", as well as some other long term buckets I can borrow against if I need to ("car replacement" and "moving costs" for me since I don't plan on doing either soon).
The other thing I do is my standard monthly bucket allocations are a couple hundred short of my income for the month. When I'm balancing at the end of the month I can then apply the extra to a bucket that went over, or if I stayed on budget I can put it into one of my savings buckets (usually "vacation"!).
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
How do you feel about Mint? It's pretty good for budgeting and does a lot of what YNAB does. Though it's targeted advertisement so you might not like that as much.
E: I missed the bottom part of your first post.. hmm
I've "used" mint for years - which is to say, i hooked it up to my banks and kind of forgot about it. Even before I got YNAB 4, I wasn't a fan of how it was more a finance tracker than a budgeting tool. As I said, I'm debating closing out my account.
Yeah well I don't have something like this but I probably should. Hoo boy do I get it.
I'm no financial wizard, but when it comes to eating out too much and over spending on hobbies, I suggest looking into your banks automatic transfers. I started aggressively putting money into my savings account and automated it. I check my debit account out of habit because I used to be flat broke and buying french fries might put me in the red. Keeping my account main account at an acceptable number, but not so high that it feels like I have "extra" does all the work for me when I need to say no to buying random crap.
To be honest my finances straitened up as soon as I became a independent contractor and had to pay my own taxes, so the constant monitoring came out of necessity, and Quickbooks. I'm guessing with a normal paycheck and w-2, Quickbooks would be way overkill, but I think it makes a case for buying the software that you think will help. Getting an email about my Quarterly taxes is the boost I need to sit down and do a bunch of manual assessment of my spending.
I actually found it helpful to go a step further and keep my savings in a different bank account with a different bank. That way dipping in to them requires very specific action and a 24 hour turnaround on the transfer (I hear transfers may take longer in the US than they do here so may not be as viable option).
When you get a pay rise is an excellent time to start a practice like this. Whether it's shunting money to savings or paying off debt, setup an automatic transfer now to shunt 1/2 of your pay rise off to this purpose now. You're not used to having this money, so you won't miss it. Getting half of it will still feel like a boost to your budget.
It sounds counter intuative, but if you don't already have an emergency fund I'd suggest using some of the pay rise money to save one rather than purely paying down debts. In an ideal world, and from a pure numbers point of view it's better to pay down the debt and rely on borrowing for emergencies. But in practice having an emergency fund means you're less likely to feel knocked back when something unexpected comes up like the car repairs. It also allows you to draw much harder lines around what you will take on debt for.