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.
- 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.
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?