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Comment by remir | Hacker News Reader

A couple of days ago, I opened a YNAB account to test it out and had the same reasoning: why can't my bank do all of that envelope budgeting stuff?

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there's no money for them in doing that, they want you to borrow money (via credit card or other) and pay them back hopefully with interest that's how they make money

The money in it is that it makes you more likely to deposit with that bank which gives them the reserves to legally lend out money, like in credit cards, which is how they make money.

A consumer bank is dependent on its deposit base.

Lazy people prefer having one bank for everything. Savings, mortgage, credit card, investments. The way you get all that business is by having better pricing and/or a more polished app than the competition. If people want envelope budgeting (and I don't claim to know whether that's the case) then you should probably implement it.

I always thought the money was in the float for them. The more money they convince you not to spend and just hold onto in your account, the more float they have to make money off.

Just as a heads up, you can email support after your free trial and ask for an extension. They'll pretty much always give it to you. If you're a student, you can send in your student ID and get a year free. YNAB changed my life.

would love if you shared how it changed your life, I'm always skeptical about these types of things that I end up abandoning after a short time. thanks!

Not parent, but my wife and I have been using YNAB for over 5 years, even before they moved to a web app. It’s changed our lives:

- We never fight about money because we have already planned for the next month together.

- We each get equal amount of no questions asked personal money that the other person cannot criticize how it’s spent.

- When we first started using YNAB we realized we were living off credit card float, and spending money we didn’t have until we got the months paycheck. We thought we were doing great just because we would pay our credit card off each month. But we were actually 100% relying on our future paychecks to survive.

- My wife lost her job 2 years ago and was out of work for a month due to COVID. The budget gave us an objective view rather than an emotional one. In both cases, we didn’t need to even rely on our emergency fund because of flexible budgeting.

- We are able to maximize credit card rewards without being concerned with spending too much.

- We are able to easily track our cash equivalent net worth.

Most of these things are not YNAB specific, but the software makes things so much easier.

Do you each have a YNAB account, or share one?

We share one account and one budget.

Thank you I will have try this out and go in with a positive mindset that it's a structured and objective system and I can't honestly say where my money is going today which is causing me to spend money frivolously on things I don't really need.

Honestly I might just make an Excel spreadsheet and track monthly credit card billing statements and total income/month and net profit after debits (bills, living expenses, etc.)

Think this would work like YNAB to a degree until I'm fully invested in budgeting?

I have tried a few of these budgeting applications. Unless you have a large amount of bank accounts in different banks, investments with asset managers etc, it is just as easy to process it in Excel. I just download my monthly bank transactions and import them into an Excel flat file. Each item I tag against an expense hierarchy. Then I run a simple pivot table to compare spend over time. It’s not as fast, but it’s free, very flexible and I’m not bound by predetermined rules.

It's hard for them to do it and that is one of the reasons BBVA bought simple. Did it work? No, now they sell it.

Banks are too busy updating their legacy systems to process their batches. They are barely catching up with mobile applications and to show transactions in real time there so they do not have resources to implement this type of things.

Of course it is a matter of priority buy that is how it works now and traditional banks still have the power to drive the industry.

Some banks do (monzo and revolut)

I miss monzo so much :(

I moved out of the UK and sadly never found a real alternative.

I had a simple workflow that made me happy:

I had two budgets, one for fixed spenses such as rent and phone, another for everything else (food, taxi, entertainment, whatever). I'd divide my "everything else" budget by 30 and tell monzo to move everyday that amount into the credit card account.

So basically... A daily budget. It was something like 20-30 pounds per day. I wanted something more expensive than usual? I'd "save" for a few days.

It's not the most efficient budgeting, but it was so much fun.

I think Monzo is making moves to expand into the US. There's a waitlist (you might be bumped up if you were a UK customer?). I got one but didn't end up using it very often.

They were, but then they hit funding issues in spring 2020 and appear to be scaling back their US expansion.

https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/09/monzo-to-shutter-las-vegas...

I'm in Singapore, probably faster to wait for an asian neo-bank to appear than for Monzo to get here

The other way around. They deny you if you're a UK customer.

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