YNAB - Pros and Cons From a Former Mint User скачать в хорошем качестве

YNAB - Pros and Cons From a Former Mint User

In this video, I'll tell you about the budgeting app YNAB -- what I like about it and what I'm not so crazy about. Please subscribe and leave comments below! *** A full transcript can be found at www.marblejar.net. *** Hi, everyone. This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll tell you about the budgeting app YNAB -- what I like about it and what I'm not so crazy about. I did an overview/tutorial video on YNAB, which is a popular budgeting app. I've just switched over to YNAB from Mint and in this video I'll discuss the Pros and Cons of YNAB from the perspective of a long-time Mint user.If you've seen my YNAB tutorial, you have an idea of how YNAB's approach to budgeting differs from traditional budgeting. I would say YNAB is a combination of zero-based budgeting, which was popularized by Dave Ramsey and involves budgeting every dollar and paycheck budgeting, which is a method of mapping out expenses based on each paycheck. All that to say, coming from a Mint user, this took a little getting used to. With Mint, you spend some time setting up your budget with amounts for each category. These amounts remain the same for each month. Then you track your actual purchases against your budgets by grouping your actual spending into budget categories. You get an idea of where things are going, but the slate wipes clean every month, so if you were a little over on a couple of things, no big deal.With YNAB, you don't forecast your income. You can only budget money that you actually have in your account. There is much less forecasting and much more reality-based planning. In addition, YNAB forces you to be more actively engaged with your budgeting with notifications, alerts, and actionable budget views and colors. Plus, YNAB helps you to accumulate money in your budget categories for future purchases whether they are quarterly insurance payments, saving for a new car, or saving for your kids' college.PROSOkay -- first let's go through the Pros for YNAB. I've been very impressed with the app, so this list is much longer than the Cons. Getting Started - YNAB allows for imports, so you can import in transactions from another budgeting software or spreadsheet. For a budget nerd like me, this is nice since I wanted to import transactions all the way back from the start of the year. In addition, if you link your bank accounts, the bank balances reflected in the app should mirror your actual accounts to within a day or so. There are also ways to reconcile your account if you can't figure out why the amounts are wrong. Mint is missing a reconciliation feature. Budget Categories - Setting up your budget is a complete dream compared to Mint. You have complete control over adding, deleting, and editing categories. In addition, you can make new budget groups to put the categories in. YNAB has it's own groups by default, but you can add or delete whatever groups you want and make them contain whatever budget categories you want. Mint will let you make new budget categories, but you have to do it within their weird category group and it will not let you delete the default categories, so you are left with a TON of unwanted stuff to weed through every time you want to tag a transaction. Plus, YNAB allows you to manually sort your categories to however you want to see them, whereas Mint only sorts based on its weird category groups making it hard to know where things are. YNAB also has the ability to choose budget accounts as favorites which automatically show up at the top of the list -- for areas where you may be particularly interested in limiting spending for the month. I also love the fact that each group has totals for budgeted, activity, and available. Approving new transactions - once you link your bank and credit cards to your YNAB account, it will start to bring in transactions once they have cleared. This is another fantastic thing if you have been a Mint user. Mint does this, but it intermingles new transactions in with the old, so you have to pick through old transactions to try to find new one that have been imported. It's annoying. Not only does YNAB alert you when there are new transactions, it houses them in a separate spot and waits for you to approve them before putting them in with everything else. It's great. Also, categorizing transactions is super easy. First of all, you only have your own budget categories to pick from, unlike Mint where you have to scroll through all of their bizarro categories with complicated nested subcategories. But perhaps the best thing is that YNAB remembers the last category that you used with a vendor and puts that in as the default. So, for every transaction from a vendor that you've previously used, you usually just have to approve it, rather than choose a category. It's a huge timesaver for the activity that you do the most with budgeting apps . . .