Hacker News Reader

Comment by MonkoftheFunk | Hacker News Reader

I think this would be good for planning your savings for future (forecasting), YNAB is about current and past budgeting (though there are ways around it (http://www.youneedabudget.com/support/article/forecast-in-yn...).

View on HN

That isn't my impression of YNAB. I only tried it out briefly about a year ago, but what I understand is that you plan you future savings by adding it to your budget today. If I wanted to save $80,000 for a down payment on a condo over four years, I would budget $1667 monthly for it in YNAB, and then allocate incoming money to it each month. That isn't a workaround, that is simply how the system is supposed to work.

When you think about planning for the future, I don't think a mobile app is really a good way to go about it. When I was setting up YNAB, I used the desktop app. It took me a while to enter all my budget information and set it up the way I liked it. This wasn't because of YNAB's UI, which is pretty good, but because monthly finances can be complicated. I couldn't imagine doing all of this on a mobile device. It would be incredibly frustrating.

YNAB has mobile and desktop applications. This is nice. You use the desktop application for setting things up and the mobile application for recording purchases (and checking your budget status when considering a purchase) while you are out.

All that said, I was never hooked. The system forces you to think about and record every purchase you make. This is probably great for people living paycheck to paycheck trying to get ahead, or people unable to meet their savings goal. If this isn't you, then you'll probably just find the system to be an unnecessary annoyance.

In that sense, yes, YNAB can be used for future planning of expenses. But I think the thing they were referring to is that YNAB is not really meant for 'forecasting' your money. Though you could do it, they discourage it and it's meant to be about allocating only the money you have now. In other words, you don't budget something until you actually have the money for it.

So the difference is with YNAB you would indeed budget $1667 when you get your paycheck, but you wouldn't carry that out 12 months in the future and plan your income/expenses to determine how much money you'll have at that point.

I've thought about this a lot. What I really don't want to do is invest time in dealing with the data I don't care about. Because of the nature of spending, it tends to be pretty noisy data. When my budget isn't tight, I really don't care to track and think about every transaction. I'm just not interested in a detailed accounting of my coffee habit if at a high level my finances are on the right track.

I've taken an approach of manual entry for a few "important" categories of discretionary spending. It's been good to leave everything else for the less frequent review of my bank statements.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com