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Comment by awicz | Hacker News Reader

I switched to https://ynab.com a while back. It's not exactly the same concept as what Mint was intended to be, but I couldn't be happier with the move.

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I have been using YNAB for over 2 years since my 50 year old mother somehow found out about it. It is a different way to think about budgeting and the tool only excels if you work within the "YNAB principles". I would recommend reading the companion book You Need a Budget before starting with the app. It was important for me to digest and understand the philosophy before I started using the tool. Otherwise I believe I would have been turned off by the rigidity.

I seem to respond well to defined, rigid systems. I handle all my task management via the systems outlined in Getting Things Done. I'd be curious what other books are out there for handling aspects of life with a systemic, opinionated approach (professional life, social life, dating, etc.)?

I tried really hard to like ynab, but I just couldn't get the hang of it. I think the hangup is that I'm not really looking for a budgeting tool, I just want to categorize and see where my money is going - less so planning. Its easy to do that with Mint as budgeting in Mint feels more like an addon then a core concept.

I don't really use YNAB to strictly budget either, but more for tracking as well. Essentially, I budget the fixed categories (mortgage, property taxes, insurance, etc.), move some fixed amount to a savings category, and then leave the rest as "To Be Budgeted".

Then, as the month goes on and some of the categories that didn't have a fixed budget are "over budget", I just move the required money to the individual category to zero it out. Anything that caries over to the next month goes to the savings category.

Founder of Lunch Money (https://lunchmoney.app) here– I encourage you to check us out! I'd like to think we're a more non-opinionated and simple alternative to YNAB.

I'll just throw in an extra 1up here. I am a very happy customer of Lunch Money. It's the only app I have ever stuck with for any amount of time.

It is still early days for the product, bur it is rapidly improving and the creator is very good and communicate. The couple of times I have requested support (mostly for feature suggestions), she has gotten back to me very quickly.

Out of all the services listed here, yours looks the best. I’ll try it out once I start my new gig in a month.

I couldn't handle the forced system in ynab - it's clunky and I want a budget program not a whole new budget system. To me less useful than an excel budget because it tries to force you to do things it's way.

I'd rather use Excel than be forced to use their stupid system.

You might like Tiller Money. It's basically the bank integration that Mint and YNAB have, but instead of being forced to use their interface it backs out the data into an Excel/Google spreadsheet that you can build your own system on top of. (It costs money, but after what happened to Mint I consider "sustainable business model that doesn't involve selling your data" a feature for this sort of service.)

Only allowing logins via google is highly disappointing, and makes tiller unusable for me.

The last thing I want to associate with my google account is my financial data.

While I can understand not wanting to create a Google account (even just to use as a login), my understanding is that if you use Tiller via Excel, Google will not have access to any of your financial data.

Check out Tiller; I tried both it and ynab, and went with ynab because I'm the opposite of you, at least in this regard :)

Why is it a new budget system? You just categorize the money you have right now, there you go, that’s your budget.

If you're using it for budget management, YNAB is much, much better than Mint.

I've been using it for about two months now, and while it takes a little getting used to, it is so much more powerful for actually getting a handle on your finances. Highly recommend.

I finally feel like I have a solid handle on my budget, Mint never gave that to me.

I really like ynab, but they stopped importing my discover card months ago and they have basically declared that there is nothing they can do since their partner can't do anything about it. There is a contingent of their users who claim that it's better that way, but if I'm manually adding transactions and categorizing everything my self, then why not use an excel sheet instead of paying 90 dollars a year.

I'm on month two of ynab, and I'm a total convert. It's been extremely valuable to me so far. We'll see if I can stick with it.

Been using YNAB for over 5 years now, since back when it was a pay-once desktop application. Can't live without it at this point.

The best part for me is how it handles where money you earn goes, it always goes to next month, not the current month (granted, after I graduated college it took me a bit to actually get back into this because of living with effectively 0 income for 4 years), so you know that you're already budgeted for the month when you get into it. That feeling is super comforting for me.

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