YNAB 5

[elaine amj]

I have been very pleased with YNAB 4. That said, as time goes on, I get more tempted to switch to newYNAB. We wouldn't use the auto sync from our bank accounts (DH is paranoid) so I will still manually download stuff - but I would LOVE to be able to access my budget from any computer. DS has taken over my laptop (where I have YNAB!) these days so I tend to keep putting off playing with the budget. Still a little reluctant because I still haven't changed my mental thought processes for spending though. YNAB is great at giving me a hard limit on how much I can spend. But we are in the fortunate position of having a large buffer fund (did I mention DH is conservative and paranoid?) so even when I've hit the limit, I know there is more money, so I continue spending. I do feel guilty that I'm using YNAB more for money tracking than money budgeting.

I'm trying to reduce our expenses and real budgeting may be the only way to do this. I'm rather horrified at how much we are currently spending. On the good side, we are still sending a significant chunk over to savings every month.

 

[IndyPirate]

It takes time to get used to doing a budget and more accurately predicting future expenses. We've been doing YNAB consistently for the last two years (had done previously but stopped for about a year), and only in the last 10 months or so have we gotten more or less comfortable with our predictions and are starting to have a little built up in the different categories. Two years ago, we weren't embracing our true expenses. We would often try to spend less on household/grocery and restaurant expenses, but we would end up blowing it more times than not (sometimes by a lot!). Eventually we accepted that we spend more than we want and started budgeting more for it and were able to keep better to those budgets. Now about a year later, we're actively trying to cut the same category but with a bit of a different mindset. We managed to cut $250 for April, hoping to do $350 for May and keep that up. It would be really nice to have that much more for other categories.