I've looked at YNAB before, I keep wanting to try a finance tracking tool - but I can't ever decide which one is worth my time. What's so good about YNAB? It seems to be marketed at a certain segment that I'm not in. At least, based on their homepage line:
> Stop living paycheck-to-paycheck,
get out of debt, and save more money.
As for 1Password, given your username I'm assuming you've tried Bitwarden? What is better about 1Password?
I actually hadn't heard about bitwarden (thanks) - I'll check that out.
I'm not in YNAB's target market either, but the value they provide is useful even if you're not struggling month to month with finances. You get really good control over your money and a much better understanding of how you're spending it and where.
Being really aware of that makes it easier to actually leverage it more because you know exactly what you can put where so you can be closer to zero in your checking account (push more towards investments, etc.).
It also makes it easier to change behavior and know exactly what knobs you can turn with your finances.
Only downside with it is that the auto-import sucks (I suspect because the bank APIs suck). I move all transactions through one credit card and I manually create transactions in YNAB when the card is charged. I use the Apple Card which has really good software so it's easy to notice transactions and make sure things line up.
My username is also from when I was 13 and really excited about linux :-), now mostly on macOS - I haven't really lived up to it.
I'll give the opposing opinion that YNAB's auto-import works well for me (I use it with a local credit union, 2 credit cards, and an online savings account). In fact, I used my own homebrew budgeting software for over a year before I found that YNAB exists and does everything I needed from my own software plus imports from banks automatically which was my biggest pain point with my own solution (it involved painful csv exports every month). I have been happy with YNAB for a year and a half at this point. Your luck may depend on which bank(s) you want it to work with. I believe their bank import api provider was recently acquired by Plaid so they are now using Plaid (as I understand it).
They are using Plaid, and yeah, it varies wildly by bank.
FWIW, I don't know that having a bank that doesn't play nice with Plaid is a deal-killer. There is a school of thought among many YNAB users that you should not use the auto-import, or even csv/ofx/whatever import, because manually entering transactions takes only a few minutes a day, and gives you much better awareness of your outflows. I can see some merit to that, insofar as tightly controlling your spending is kind of YNAB's whole thing.
Even with auto-import, you still have to "approve" each individual transaction that is imported, at which time you can assign it to a category (or approve the auto-suggested category). So that works for me in terms of being aware of spending on a regular basis. And if you manually enter some transactions as you spend, it automatically matches them up with your bank's version of those transactions as you import so you don't end up with duplicates. So it's okay to use it in a hybrid mode where you sometimes enter transactions manually and sometimes wait for them to show up automatically.
I don’t export - when a transaction is made I open the YNAB app and quickly add it.
I resisted doing this for a long time because I thought it would be awful, but it’s actually easier than dealing with import issues and reconciling later.
I've been using YNAB for about 6 months now. I was not living paycheck to paycheck when I started - but I have made significant improvements to my financial well being since I started using it.
Previously I had been using Mint to keep track of my spending, but I never felt in control, it was only useful as a reporting tool of what had already happened.
YNAB is all about giving every dollar a job and setting priorities for your life. It's the envelope system in digital form if you are familiar with that. With Mint and similar systems, I'd just be looking at my pile of cash in my account and thinking "yeah I can easily afford a new gaming PC!".
But I wouldn't be taking into account my 6 month auto insurance bill coming up in 2 months that would require a bunch of cash. YNAB let's me see that easily - it was painful in the beginning as I was "catching up" in all these categories, but now I feel so much more comfortable with my money and how it can be put to good use.
I used to use GnuCash, and recently started using YNAB.
In a nutshell, I would describe the difference as, "GnuCash (and Mint, Quicken, Moneydance, etc) are for monitoring your finances. YNAB is for controlling your spending."
The more mainstream personal finance apps have all sorts of tools for tracking investments and assets and all that good stuff, and a lot of rich reporting functionality. They also generally have some version of budgeting, typically with a fairly straightforward, traditional approach.
YNAB, by contrast, is really just about budgeting. I'd argue that it's not just an application, it's a whole budgeting method that happens to come bundled with an application to help you in implementing it. When you sign up to YNAB, what you're really doing is subscribing to (founder) Jesse Meacham's personal spin on Dave Ramsey's philosophy of money management. You might as well subscribe to his podcast while you're at it. In fact, I'd suggest listening to a few episodes of his podcast before even signing up for the free trial. If you don't like his way of thinking about money, you probably won't get a whole lot out of YNAB, either.
And YNAB really doesn't even try to be anything else. You can stick your 401(k) balance in there, but YNAB's own documentation encourages you not to bother. All you'll get out of it is that it will show up in one of the reports. It only has three reports, by the way, and they're all spartan and minimally customizable.
I've tried a ton of online apps before eventually writing my own. YNAB can be used to help track spending very well. The budgeting aspect is more to help with self control. For example.. Say you want to tighten down on things a bit, and you notice you spend $230/mo on going out to eat. You can set the budget to $200/mo which basically makes the number red instead of green if you go over.
I would place Lunch Money above YNAB right now. It tracks money in a bit intuitive way, and is easier to use in my opinion.
> Stop living paycheck-to-paycheck, get out of debt, and save more money.
As for 1Password, given your username I'm assuming you've tried Bitwarden? What is better about 1Password?