December 26, 2011

My Family Loved This – Personal Finance Software Program Critique

It is easy to use, and does things in an intuitive way, so you know what to do next. You don’t have to be a financial genius to use it. Then you just double click the file and it automatically imports into YNAB. If you use QFX (the preferred, newer format) then YNAB is able to determine those that have already been imported so you don’t get duplicates.

A budget to me used to mean spending several hours a week creating spreadsheets, trying to figure out my own math mistakes, and confusion with my wife not knowing how much we could spend. YNAB transformed my budget to something that I do 30 minutes a week, and I look forward to it. It will not baby sit your kids, but it will help you find some extra cash to pay the teenager down the street to baby sit for you. I have not found a better budgeting program out there; all of the creator’s “Rules” make sense and will work when applied in the real world.

If knowing that there are sometimes large expenses in this category, you had set 50 a month there for the last 10 months, you will already have 500 of that ready to go. You will spend $900 in that category to repair the problem. However, if you’re doing a head-to-head comparison to Mint, you’re going to find YNAB (slightly) clunkier to use. Instead of focusing on the very challenging and expensive syncing distraction (it’s a large distraction for most financial software), YNAB focuses on sound money principles. But really, who plans for a car breaking down? Who plans for family emergencies?

YNAB is budgeting software. Not projections of what your budget might be, but a real in the present budgeting software.

Prior to using YNAB, we had been sinking further and further into debt. We would pay some off and then have an ‘emergency’ or some ‘need’ arise that set us back further than what we had paid off. YNAB seemed to have the features I was looking for as well as consistently good reviews. So far have found the system easy to master and am looking forward easily tracking progress toward goals such as my travel, holiday, and loan repayment. There are so many issues with the logic built into that software. I like to call it functional BARELY! None of them were easy to use or gave me the information I was looking for in a budget program — which was budgeting my existing dollars with an eye to the following month. I even created my own excel spreadsheet for my budget that I used for almost a year. Money is difficult to track and with various avenues for it to come, go, or just sit, its simply going to a complicated piece of software that will get it right. Even with a fairly good handle on budgeting and my own finances, I still spent the better part of 7-8 hours the first day I got it installed figuring it out. Recently they held *free* online webinars to customers on how to use various features from simple concepts to advanced concepts. Now, who has ever seen that? Quicken is also a better product to show you where you could be in x amount of years. If, of course, you only spend what you think you will until then.

I was up and running within a few days of installing it. Free Landscaping Ideas.

Filed under Money by Zoey Roberts

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