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Comment by rocketpastsix | Hacker News Reader

YNAB generally gets mentioned as one of the de factor budgeting options. I used it a lot a few years ago and it works. Their system is a little wonky if you aren't used to the envelope method but they have great docs, a great little podcast and a healthy community.

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Ditto on YNAB! I started using YNAB a couple years ago now and it has fundamentally changed my perspective and relationship with money. The 4 rules of YNAB [1] really helped me conceptualize how to best take advantage of it.

[1] https://www.ynab.com/blog/ynab-four-rules-less-stress

Love YNAB, been using it since 2011 and never switched to their subscription cloud service. YNAB Classic still works, though I don’t think you can legally acquire it anymore.

Look into Actual Budget, it’s a free self-hostable clone of YNAB. Or could be thought of as an independent implementation of the same budgeting methodology - but it felt close enough in UI and concepts that I feel comfortable calling it a clone.

I manually enter every expense (as categories are not by store, so automation can’t work), and YNAB makes this more convenient with a lot of tiny things (though on testing, the biggest parts are probably remembering the last category for a payee, and better flowing "enter"-key behavior when entering multiple transactions).

That said, it also has a bunch of things that I’m missing in YNAB, so I should probably just set up an instance and go a week with trying it, so thanks for the nudge :)

What do you do on mobile? Very much like being able to enter things in on my phone.

Of course I can keep receipts and do it later but just wanted to know how others handle it.

Actual budget works fine on mobile. I added it as a Home Screen app on my iPhone.

Or -

https://www.budgetwithbuckets.com/

For a client application

You can import too

Importing YNAB4 into Actual worked, this errored without much information what went wrong.

I wasn't a fan. tried it for a couple of months and I kept felt like it didn't have features I was looking for. Currently using Monarch which is pretty good, not perfect. I wish I could have done my own thing with plaid but sadly I couldn't get a dev or small business account.

Ditto. I can’t imagine living without it.

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