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You need a budget reviews1/6/2024 ![]() Looking at the age of our money and living this month on the money we earned last month or even earlier evens things out a bit. ![]() Ideally, our rental income is steady and predictable, but anyone who’s ever been a landlord knows that’s not quite always the case. I was a real estate agent for a few years, he gets some per diem when he travels for work. ![]() Sometimes he or I have unpredictable income here or there. Freelancers, independent contractors, salespeople.Ĭhris’ paycheck is very predictable and that’s what we live off of. ![]() I think this approach would be especially helpful for people whose income isn’t completely predictable. You’ve broken the cycle and are not living paycheck to paycheck.Įven if you’re already not living paycheck to paycheck and you just know how much you bring in each month and spend less than that, it’s a good habit to get into when you’re looking at your overall budget. You also only budget the money you have right now, not what you anticipate getting this month. The point is that you’re paying this month’s bills with last month’s income, instead of this month’s. YNAB highlights “the age of money”, which I’ve never heard it called before. Personal Capital is our net worth tracker of choice. We don’t use YNAB as our overall net worth tracker, and therefore don’t have our investment accounts connected to YNAB. YNAB allows you to set a monthly funding goal (think retirement contributions), a target balance goal (think emergency fund, large purchase), or a target balance goal by date (vacation or Christmas gifts anyone?). Set savings goals for categories to help you keep your eye on the prize and watch your progress (and do a happy dance when you get there, of course). The only ones you have to enter manually to ensure they’re accounted for are things you bought with cash. You can manually add transactions into your budget, and if you purchased something with a credit card, YNAB will automatically link the transaction with the one you manually entered when it posts to your credit card. A lovely surprise.Ĭonnect your accounts to YNAB to ensure you have an accurate picture of your finances all the time. Even so, what’s available goes farther than I would have expected. Since you’re paying for the software, I’d expect good back end support, help topic articles, and the like. The really good news: there’s extensive help articles and videos, as well as workshops and customer service options to help you climb that learning curve in a hurry. There is a bit of a learning curve (just a bit) with YNAB, but the way its set up makes a lot of sense. See my once you get the hang of it… comment above and rest easy knowing “once you get the hang of it” will only be a few minutes. The guide will familiarize you with the buttonology and methodology quickly, saving you a bunch of trial and error time trying to figure it out. It really will only take you a few minutes, and, as a good quick start guide should, it takes all the guesswork out of getting started. And we do mean quick-you’ll be budgeting in minutes!” I highly recommend you read through the quick start guide. It says, “To succeed with YNAB, you just need to read our Quick Start Guide. This may seem obvious, but after you sign up for your account (and free trial), you’ll get a welcome email. There are no limits on how many free months you can earn. Plus, they have a referral program: if you refer a friend who signs up for the subscription (after their full 34-day free trial…which you also get to enjoy), they get a free month and you get a free month. We decided it’s very worth the $6.99/mo price tag. Since we’ve been using the free version of EveryDollar, once our free trial ended with YNAB we started paying for something we weren’t paying for before. We like it so much we switched to YNAB for good. Good news: it doesn’t take very long to get the hang of, so no worries there. I started the YNAB free trial (34 days) for the purposes of this article. Maybe you’ll realize there’s an even better option out there for your life!īoth YNAB and EveryDollar take the zero-sum budgeting approach, which is why I chose to compare these two together. Maybe you’ll discover you’ve already found the perfect one for you. If you’ve been budgeting with an app, website, or Excel spreadsheet for a while, read on. If you know you need a budget but aren’t sure where to start, look no further. There are plenty more, but we’ll start with these two for now. Today I’m going to take a closer look at two popular budgeting apps, You Need A Budget (YNAB), and EveryDollar.
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