Monday, January 16, 2012

A Lot Better Than Anticipated - Finance Business Software Review

By Alexander Wright


The philosophy of assigning each dollar a job, and working up to living off of last month's income, has changed how I see my financial life. Well worth the purchase price. If you do think you'd like to use a budget, there is no better place to start than YNAB. I had always considered a budget before, but didn't like the idea of being forced to only spend a certain amount on food, or not be able to go out to eat if I wanted to. I am also doing Dave Ramsey's Financial Peace University program and just this month have become debt-free except for the house. Last month on the DR forums I read about YNAB and how many DR followers use it.

All of my accounts get automatically downloaded to Quicken, a feature not available in YNAB. All in all, I just found that YNAB requires way too much manual entry. We are doing Dave Ramsey's method and using cash envelopes but we needed a really effective budgeting software tool and this is it. YNAB, where have you been all my life"

Yes, the tutorials are great, but they're really time-consuming. However, I spent the time, took the tutorials, and set up my finances in YNAB. I now know where every penny goes and feel totally in control of choosing what to spend my money on. The money to buy this software is an investment to a peaceful financial future. If you are moving from Quicken/Money, you'll have a sense of missing "bells & whistles" but mostly those really are features that YNAB isn't trying to duplicate. The software seems very robust so far, I've seen no bugs at all, no crashes on my Win7 machine. I simply set up more "fields" to track the money in that fashion instead of by "payee". If you are new to budgeting or a veteran looking for something to make your life easier, this software is fantastic.

Rumored future features include account designation abilities, so that you can not only budget appropriately, but then check the amount of $ you have in each of your accounts, as well as many, many more. Also, the author of YNAB has designed a 10-day budget boot-camp, to help you see the importance of the monthly budget, free via email.

Anyone considering this software needs to understand the fundamental difference, which YNAB is not the same as those programs. It has one single goal, and that is to help people live with a budget. I know, because I used to think that way. Knowing what your day to day expenses are is not the same as actively planning for your future and having control over your money.

I've been using it for a couple of months now and everything seems to be going smoothly. I really like having the transaction tracking and budget tracking in the same software instead of managing it in 2 different places. I've been a long-time Quicken user, and have experimented with other options. This is the first program I've tried that actually is geared around sticking to a budget.

Quite frankly their budget set-up interface left a lot to be desired, only allowing you to create a general monthly budget. With YNAB, I was up and running within a few minutes, and after playing with all the features to see what it could do, I was fully loaded with a budget and bank transactions within twenty minutes.




About the Author:



No comments:

Post a Comment