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Comment by bvanslyke | Hacker News Reader

"Where did my money go" budgeting has never worked for me. I've been way more successful with planning ahead every $ of income as I get it and then manually tracking expenses. Budgeting had to become an actual activity for me, and not just something done automatically by a webapp. I'm a huge shill for YNAB[0]. The software is really nice but basically it's a glorified (paid) spreadsheet. My fiance and I agree that the methodology it forces you to use, though, has easily saved us thousands so far.

[0]http://youneedabudget.com - they recently upgraded to a subscription based web app but I'm still using the classic version that's a one time purchase: http://classic.youneedabudget.com

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What's worked best for me is putting all of my income into one account and then just giving myself a fairly low monthly 'allowance' into my personal checking account (at a different bank), from which I spend out of (including rent, student loans, etc.). It took a few iterations to get the monthly value correct so I wasn't running much of a deficit or a surplus.

But now it's good and I don't sweat the small stuff, and I can skip eating out in order to buy a new bike part or whatever. I do look quarterly-ish and see what I am actually spending on.

I do something similar, albeit a bit leakier. I have all my money coming in to one nexus account, and then I have weekly/biweekly/monthly outflows of everything (bills, stock investments, transfers to 3x different banks, mortgage). I keep that account with a bunch of buffer, but ignore all my other accounts. Each month I keep that main account 'floating' is another month where all those other accounts are growing. If I ever dip too low, I can supplement with one of my other accounts.

It's not a great solution, but it's the one that I've stuck with best.

> It's not a great solution, but it's the one that I've stuck with best.

Far and away the most important part of any such strategy...

I couldn't agree more - I tried mint for a while and I basically did nothing with it besides checking my transactions.

YNAB completely changed how I view my money. Now when I go to buy something, I don't just go spend. I see how much I have in that category, and if it's not enough, I either move money to it from another category, or not buy it.

It's been very helpful for me in my goal of saving more than 50% of my take home pay.

Shame it has gone subscription only :( I hate ongoing charges for that sort of thing.

Yea I've been on the fence about trying that out, especially since it's missing some key features (reporting, the calculator). At least YNAB4 is supported til the end of 2016, gives them time to get the new one fixed up.

This is my plan as well. I'll continue to use classic thru it's end-of-life support cycle and then revisit nYNAB and see if they've managed to at least hit feature parity.

YNAB Classic would not be that hard to replicate as a foss project. After the recent switch I am very tempted to do this.

Wow, this news was crushing. I was on the fence about getting ynab for a couple of months now and I was going to get it sometime this week. Coincidentally the trial of ynab made me detest subscription models more than I already did and then they became a subscription model! This is really saddening.. Are there any good replacements that you are aware of (since I do know that ynab is essentially a glorified spreadsheet, but I do like their methodology).

What I hate more is the thought of having my financial data stored in some shady, cobbled together, cloud service, hosted somewhere on Amazon AWS.

I predict, that it is only a question of time until they will encounter some disastrous data leak.

Begin a YNAB user for more than a year now, I am really angry at them for this move. So I'll guess I have to move on to something else after the support for the YNAB4 apps will be shut down.

I completely agree. We've got support until December so I'm considering replicating as much of YNAB 4's methodology and functions as possible in either Excel or Google Sheets when I have free time.

I'm a big fan of YNAB as well (classic, web just isn't there yet and normally I'm the first to jump on the web bandwagon). I'm still just getting started with it but it's an awesome tool!

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