I could see someone wanting to pay for a year or two until they've established the habit of disciplined saving. But to perpetually pay a service to present a (useful) facade over your money doesn't seem right if it's not also instilling habits in you that don't depend on software.
It also lets you track all expenses and let’s you keep lifestyle inflation in check.
I’ve found it well worth it (and I’m pretty responsible financially).
Mint on the other hand is totally useless.
That's hyperbole. Having a bird's eye view of every single account, transaction, investments, net worth, etc. is "totally useless"? No.
I use Mint and it works quite well for keeping an eye on your financial life at a glance. I don't need some micro-managey software like YNAB (that I'd have to pay for monthly!) to continually increase my wealth and keep debt in check - here's my tricks:
* Pay off credit card in full every month (I have one card that I use for gas, etc.)
* Invest 20% into company-matched 401k, my Roth, etc. primarily focused on S&P 500 Index Funds
* Save roughly $275/check into a liquid savings account.
* I have no car payment (paid of my 2010 Subaru that I got for $9k).
* Everything on autopay.
* Don't buy stupid nonsense.
It's worked well thus far. There's no real "need" to budget - KISS principle wins the day again.
If you can get it to actually connect to things (I have 2FA on most accounts, and since Mint scrapes the sites and stores passwords in plaintext, it doesn't know how to handle this) and tag everything properly (MCC's vary pretty widely). I think that the promise of Mint is great, but in reality it falls apart as soon as you have more than a few accounts, or start using anything that wasn't originally built in (e.g. 2FA).
That all said, I follow the same general principles: autopay everything in full, invest money first, live within my means (with certain exceptions that are the "budget").
Is there any such trend in the US?
For me, my checking account is the only banking account I really care about. So much so that I don't use my debit card for purchases and only use it for ATM. I really don't care if my credit card gets stolen since that's their problem and not money out of my pocket.
Incorrect:
> How secure is my login information I store in Mint?
> Your login user name and passwords are stored securely in a separate database using multi-layered hardware and software encryption. We only store the information needed to save you the trouble of updating, syncing or uploading financial information manually.
Seems rather difficult with family.
You just described your ... budget.
That bit is doing a lot of work. Seeing 'bird's eye view' is useless because it has no real effect on behavior after the fact, the feedback loop is too long and disconnected. Also - Mint's software is itself bad and intermixed with the ads it's just hard to figure out what's going on.
How much do you spend on food? How much on groceries? A gift you forgot to plan?
YNAB let's you get a real intuitive understanding for all of this, you know explicitly where every dollar is going and you do it in real time per transaction.
It gives you a lot of power.
Do you need it? No. You've got the basics down with 401k max, monthly savings, Roth IRA, etc. That's awesome.
Could you benefit from it? Almost certainly yes. I'd bet if you used it seriously (even just the 30 day trial) you could trivially double the amount you're saving per month in liquid savings.
One reason I like it a lot is the exactness of it gives me complete confidence I could control my burn rate to any number necessary, good for FI.
It's marketed to people who need help getting out of debt, but it's also good for people with high savings rates and high income. It frees you to allocate large amounts of money to index funds, or stock market bets without worrying about how much you need in your account for auto-pay expenses.
Its yearly subscription cost is effectively negative.
Bird’s eye view has been much more helpful as a middle ground. Not Mint and technically i can budget, but I’m not too interested in that.
If you used Simple pretty much exclusively you wouldn't have to manually enter any transactions, although you might occasionally have to categorize things.
The obvious exception would be cash transactions, which I don't believe Simple ever tracked in any detail.
EDIT: and I think it migrated to OAuth anyways so no more tokens
They seemed like a close alternative, but if I'm doing all this work manually, I might as well use a spread sheet for free.
Unfortunately, I doubt YNAB can just ask people to move banks. Honestly, that, a web interface, and how speedy ACH payments are processed are kind of my highest priorities and would switch banks just for that. But those are all hard to impossible to assess without opening an account. I had a credit union get very confused when I asked if they had a demo of their web UI before I opened an account. I imagine I was the first to ask.