You Need A Budget – YNAB First Impressions

I follow r/personalfinance here and there and a budgeting software that often gets praise is YNAB. I personally have been using Mint to budget ever since the first year of university, but now that I have a proper income from my full time job, I thought I could use leveling up my personal finance systems.

YNAB has quite a learning curve. The problem with this learning curve is that it’s hard to understand the appeal of YNAB until you get passed it. The intro tutorial often recommended on the subreddit are this guy’s YNAB tutorials: https://youtu.be/exS0gU-Ie8E. Now, his latest 2022 version of the tutorial is an hour long! I almost closed my computer at the sight of that! But, as I started watching, I got invested, pun intended. YNAB is a system that often requires people to have a mindset shift to wrap their head around; especially those who live paycheck to paycheck.

In my opinion, once that shift happens, YNAB is not that much more complex than something like Mint. Like Mint, you can assign budgets to certain categories of spending. Like Mint, you can see whether your automatically tracked transactions (often from debit/credit card purchases), go over or under that budget you have set. YNAB takes this a step further.

First of all, YNAB has you thinking of all your bank accounts as a pile of money all stacked up on a table. It is your job to apply stickers to certain parts of this cash to expenses that will inevitably arise as you live your life. YNAB has a ledger system that allows you to proverbially move money to over spent categories or move money from under spent categories. This is the true beauty of this system as it allows you to be more flexible with your spending and budgeting. If you do this right, you can allocate all the money you have on the table for multiple months of pre-planned spending. This helps break the paycheck to paycheck mindset for one. Two, it helps you guide your spending decisions as you can see if every expense has been allocated for or not. It’s super hard to explain as I’ve only seen one video, but I will try YNAB for two months in parallel with using Mint. Until then will I give my final verdict.

Overall, I’m super excited to start using this system, but I know there will be a lot more maintenance work than I’m used to with Mint. See ya in two months.