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Comment by nilkn | Hacker News Reader

Based on my experience at least, YNAB (You Need A Budget -- http://www.youneedabudget.com/) is the best budgeting software out there. It's a lot more complex than this, and unlike something like Mint it does require you to manually enter transactions.

However, it is really the best interface I've found for setting a budget. Probably the best feature is that it can naturally incorporate overspending. If you set your grocery budget to $200 and you spend $250, YNAB isn't just like "yo, reduce your grocery spending." It remembers that you overspent by $50 and encourages you to incorporate that into next month's budget in a flexible way.

Unless you're a multimillionaire, you can probably benefit from using it. In fact, even if you are quite wealthy, plenty of celebrities have demonstrated repeatedly that it's still possible to go broke in just a few years.

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>'Based on my experience at least, YNAB (You Need A Budget -- http://www.youneedabudget.com/) is the best budgeting software out there. It's a lot more complex than this, and unlike something like Mint it does require you to manually enter transactions.'

I'm a big fan of YNAB.

Being fully automated would certainly be nice, but grabbing a set of CSVs from my bank once a month is a not a big deal and the software does a reasonable job of matching categories once it has some data.

>'Unless you're a multimillionaire, you can probably benefit from using it.'

I'd imagine so.

What I think makes YNAB really valuable is that is that it's loose enough so as not to become a mess if you aren't consistent and exacting about keeping it up to date.

You're going to get something out of it even if you don't bother to create a specific allowances. Simply going with suggested categories and generating a budget based on prior outflows will provide a useful perspective.

YNAB is amazing. Even when you don't actually need to budget it's incredibly useful to see spending habits, trends, etc.

I used Mint for a number of years, but the automated stuff was constantly wrong and the passive downloads broke all the time after Mint switched away Yodlee's data aggregation.

I adore YNAB. I started using it a couple of years ago when I had no savings and was living paycheck-to-paycheck but was making decent money. Now I have a cushy emergency fund, moving apartments was a breeze, and I'm saving up to buy some land. You do have to stick to their philosophy, but I've found it works really well for me.

My wife and I were discussing this a few weeks ago. If YNAB could automatically grab my bank transactions like Mint, I would be sold. I love their philosophy on budgeting.

The whole point of YNAB (Rule #1 of their program) is that you need to proactively allocate every dollar you have. Every dollar has a job, and then you need to manually enter when that dollar is doing its job so you feel when that money actually gets spent.

I tried for years to use Mint, but it's too passive. Too easy to ignore. With YNAB, every purchase goes in when we make the purchase, and I found it keeps us more honest about our budget estimates and also helps to curtail frivolous spending.

To each his own, of course.

To be most useful, YNAB should know my passive spending, and then harass me about all the dollars I am not reporting. Otherwise, I can just leak money and not talk about it.

I fully agree. It seems a little silly that if you have a busy period at work and forget to pay attention for a few weeks, that's just a black hole (short of going through credit card statements and trying to remember every cash purchase). This happens all the time with Mint, and I can just go back and categorize all the purchases that need doing so, with the only loss being that the cash purchases I forgot about show up as non-specific cash spending (through the initial ATM withdrawal).

Have you just tried it first? I'm not being hard, but I had the same feeling until we did it for the 34 day trial. Frankly, I now love the fact that it doesn't do anything automated in the background, now I actually have to consciously track my spend. Mint just became a passive record of spending. YNAB is active.

7 months into using it my partner & I find YNAB very overcomplicated. Being freelance I don't have a steady income, and I've never managed to make it handle that well. Because the income figure isn't correct it's hard to see what I'm actually spending (if I put my 'lump income' in a category and move money between categories to have 'income' each month, that mucks up the amounts).

I have yet to get it to balance any month too. Some categories (e.g. clothing) we work on an annual budget, so overspending in these categories rolls forward; that doesn't seem to work smoothly.

My partner can't get her head around it at all, which is a bit of a bummer.

What I'd like is a much simpler system based on the old T account (envelope accounts are similar) where each category functions as a virtual account, showing what was spent, inter-category transfers and overall status.

I haven't done full time freelance so feel free to shoot this idea down, but I'm always curious as to why freelancers don't just put their income in a separate, harder-to-access bank account and pay themselves a regular, weekly disbursement from that.

That's exactly what I do. Money from my book and consulting goes into a business account, owned by my single-member LLC. I make regular transfers from there to my personal account.

A piece of advice I had from a mentor 15+ years ago when I started my business was to pay yourself something regular. Even if it was a tiny amount like $200/wk, just do that rather than forever be pulling out irregular lump sums when you got paid for a job.

This is the first thing you should do. It also makes questions like "what was incoming and outgoing last month?" very easy. (download csv. done.)

I do put it in a separate bank account (a company account), but up to now I take drawings in chunks, maybe every 3 months. To make YNAB easier I am trying to take a chunk once a month, which feels very unusual.

There is also other random income that's not income. In the UK it's common for savings account interest to be paid back into the linked current account. For me that's not income to be spent each month, that's money to be re-invested.

None of this addresses ease of use though - or does no one else (or their partner) find YNAB confusing and difficult?

YNAB can handle irregular income easily, if you're using the YNAB method. Be sure to read https://www.youneedabudget.com/support/article/variable-inco...

It should be uncomplicated once you grok it. I signed up for their free course. It helped.

YNAB is dope and pretty cheap now with steam sales. Back in the bad old days it was like $60 but still super worth it(you'll save $60 in a couple days) and they seem like a pretty cool mostly remote etc dev shop.

It requires a win / mac machine? Why?

I thought no one did that anymore ?

You live in a bubble. Most apps I use at work are installed on the machine.

> for work

That's very clearly not what we're talking about here. I wouldn't be surprised if (for personal use, not work) the "bubble" is a more accurate descriptor for those who _do_ need desktop software. The only people I know who use anything on the desktop beyond their browser are software engineers, PC gamers, and people who use niche software, all with a quite-above-average level of computer-savviness.

>>The only people I know who use anything on the desktop beyond their browser are software engineers, PC gamers, and people who use niche software, all with a quite-above-average level of computer-savviness.

Walk through an office building, Work+Excel are still the software of the day in most businesses.

> Walk through an office building

Aaaand that makes it the third time that it's been clarified that this conversation is about personal usage, not office work. Jesus dude...

I'll take your downvote (on this and my earlier comment, in the ten minutes since I've posted this) and lack of a response as an admission of your error. It would be nice if you could express that in a less juvenile way though...

There was a third option until Adobe dropped support for AIR on Linux. YNAB has since been encouraging customers to use Wine.

http://www.youneedabudget.com/support/article/linux-installa...

I think the point being made is that these days this would normally be provided as a SAAS product, rather than as an actual install to your machine.

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