YNAB and Mint ?s

*pixie*

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Jan 13, 2008
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I'm trying to understand YNAB and Mint. I would like to set up our finances on some sort of spreadsheet, mostly because I would like to see exactly how we are spending our money. I feel like we don't have as much money left over at the end of the month as we should, and I have a feeling that little purchases through the month and adding up to a bigger chunk of change than we realize.

From what I understand, both of these programs are linked to your bank accounts? Not sure how I feel about that. I wonder if what I'm looking for is more of just a general accounting program that would categorize our spending. I don't think I necessarily need help with a budget, or software telling me what I can and cannot spend. More just help "seeing" where I'm spending.

Any suggestions?
 
I can't speak to Mint, but I use Ynab. It is great if all you want to do is track your money and see where it goes but it does so much more if you want to get into the seminars. You just set up categories for your expenses and put the amount you want to budget for each. You do not have to link it to your bank account for it to work. I started it with the same idea as I did not know where my money goes. Now I know and I am working on making cuts in areas that I feel I am spending too much!

HTH
 
I haven't tried YNAB, but I LOVE Mint. I can track everything and set budgets, its awesome.
 
Mint didn't work well for us, but we LOVE YNAB, even though we've only been using it a few weeks.

It does not link to your bank account, which is good and bad. The downside is that you have to manually enter your transactions, which can actually be a good thing!

You set it up by showing how much money you have in your bank account right now. You only budget money that you currently have. You can set up as many categories as you like, but the goal is to assign every single dollar a job. In some ways it's odd, in that you may not have enough money to allocate for every monthly expense, which feels just wrong. But, it is forcing you to decide how to spend the money you currently have, not the money you think you will have. Then, with the mobile app, you enter each transaction as you make it. All you need to enter is the dollar amount, and select the category it goes into. The mobile app doesn't tell you how much the budget is for the month on the main screen, just what you are allowed to spend at this point in time and still stay within your budget. For example, pulling up my app tells me that I have $50 left to spend on gas until my next pay day, and $40.56 to spend in fun money. This kind of running count down really helps DH and I curb our spending. You are allowed to go over budget, it just shows as a red balance because you spent more than you planned to for that category. It's also very easy to adjust the budget to move budgeted funds from one category to another.

Periodically, you reconcile the budget to you bank account to post the transactions that have cleared and make sure your balances tie together.

I would say that the main difference is this: Mint shows you where your money went, and YNAB shows you where it's going. So it really depends on how you want to view your money. If you want a look back as to how you spent your money in the last year, etc., Mint works great! But, it does link to your bank account. What I disliked about it was that it put things into categories for you. Like splitting fast food from dining out, which just made it more of a pain for me.

Both are great programs, but YNAB works better for us.We are halfway through our first month using it and we have already added more to savings and paid down more debt than we ever have in a month.
 

Thanks for the explanations, both programs make more sense now. I'm leaning towards YNAB, mostly because you don't have to link your bank accounts. I think I will give the free download a try.
 
I love Mint. Been using it for 2-3 years now. I like that it is linked to my accounts, all in one place, so I don't have to login to multiple apps or websites to see everyting (I still can and do, but do not have to if I am out on the run). The budgets still show how much you have left to spend each month, so it does not just "show what has been spent" without showing "where its going". It does both.

It does not tell you how to spend your money. You decide. You can edit whatever you want. I edit budgets all the time. It does not tell you what you can or cannot spend. It is just a website/app/program. Only you can decide that. What it does is compile all of your inofmation in one easy location, help you track it, and make better decisions.

I did the spreadsheet thing for years. Mint is much more powerful and convenient. I can pull up my Mint app while out on the go and know how much I have left in my gas budget before filling up on the way home, etc.

And its free. No way I'd go back to having to enter everything manually.
 
We go old school. We use Excel, there's a separate tab for each month, and tabs for YTD and Aggregated (full year).

We put in our income for the month, including any payments for dependent care, etc. and have categories for all of our expenses broken out. We've been doing this now for 16 years, and have gotten pretty accurate on the budgeting amounts. Then we track actuals against the budget to see where the money is going.

When the end of the year comes around, we create the budget for the next year.

One thing to note, if you aren't living paycheck to paycheck, and there are a lot of people who do where this wouldn't work, is that we budget based on a yearly return, so there may be months where a vacation occurs that we have more expenses that we do income, we don't have budget categories for "save up for", we just put the total amount in the month that it occurs, so if we're buying airfare for a trip 3 months out, we'll put the airfare budget 3 months earlier than the expenses for the trip.

We don't worry about allocating every single dollar in the budget, and leftover income on our actuals is already in the bank, so it doesn't need to be allocated to savings, it's going to sit there until we need it for an expense, or have enough to pull to an investment account.
 
I've used MS Money for years and years. I really liked the end of year reports for taxes. But it's not supported anymore by MS and won't be compatible with newer versions of Windows (I have Vista). Anything that works like Money out there?
 
I downloaded the trial version of YNAB. Hated it. Just was not what I was looking for. Signed up for Mint.com and have spent the morning adding my accounts and setting it up. LOVE IT!! This is exactly what I was looking for.

It's been very interesting. Since it combines all of our checking, business, savings, and retirement accounts, it really gives a great overview of our finances.

So far, the only thing I don't like, is we have a HELOC loan on our rental property and it shows up as credit card debt on Mint. Really wish I could designate it as a "loan". Not a big deal though.

So glad I tried it!
 
Mint is free, which means you aren't the customer. Someone else is. I'm very wary of knowing that Mint makes their living selling my information to other people.
 
Mint is free, which means you aren't the customer. Someone else is. I'm very wary of knowing that Mint makes their living selling my information to other people.

Yes, that is why I have stayed with Money for so long. It's on my computer, not on the internet.
 
I've used MS Money for years and years. I really liked the end of year reports for taxes. But it's not supported anymore by MS and won't be compatible with newer versions of Windows (I have Vista). Anything that works like Money out there?

I too have used MS Money for years and have always been very happy with it. MS offers what they call Money Plus Sunset to replace certain expired versions of Money. If you Google Money Plus Sunset you can find the article on the MS site that explains what it is and how to download it. It doesn't provide online services but I didn't really use that feature. I'm currently running Windows 7 and have no problems running Money Sunset on my computer.

I also use Mint on my iPhone and found it very helpful to an overview of all my accounts.
 




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