I am happy to report that it is doing this and more! I was really hoping that YNAB would solve our budgeting frustrations and allow us to pay the maximum possible on our student loan debt.
YNAB BUDGETING WHEN 4 PAYCHECKS OVER MONTHS HOW TO
I thought, “sure, for people who don’t know how to manage their money maybe, but it won’t really affect our budget like that.” I was wrong When I read the statistic on their website that says by following YNAB’s 4 Rules, on average you’ll have a $200 turnaround in one month, I was very skeptical. YNAB (pronounced “why-nab”) is more than just a budgeting tool, it’s a a philosophy and method for managing your money. I am frugal and on a tight budget since we have a serious debt payoff goal, so I did a lot of research before making the decision to buy it. I first heard about YNAB (You Need a Budget) randomly on twitter, then again in the foreword to an awesome tax book I was reading. We would take what looked like excess in our checking account and put it toward debt, but the next month we would have a credit card that required the bulk of a paycheck. This made knowing how much to pay toward our debt hard. I especially noticed the way credit cards complicate budgets when I started making monthly progress reports on our debt payoff (here’s one where I try to explain this frustrating phenomenon). This was driving me crazy! Since our bills came the month after the purchases, our monthly income and spending never matched up. Using credit cards with a traditional budget means you are actually spending next month’s income since bills lag a month behind. The problem was that it was hard to know how much we could pay on our debt.
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We always pay our credit card off each month, so getting into more debt isn’t an issue.
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We use credit cards for convenience, rewards, and protection. 4- We like using credit cards, but they were complicating our budget. That might be useful if it added some information, but there is no visual indication of whether you’re one dollar or a hundred dollars over. There is no consequence for going over, except that the entire bar for that category turns red. The budget bar graph gave us an idea of how much we had spent already in each category that month and how much more we had left to spend, but it did not offer much if we went over budget. 3- There is no good way to account for going over-budget. Since Mint doesn’t give us a good way to account for being over-budget in one category and under-budget in another category, it’s pretty hard to make sure each of your dollars have a place to go.
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We wanted to have all of our money going somewhere so that we could make sure we were paying the maximum on our debt. It is a record of the past, rather than a plan for the future like a budget should be.Ģ- Mint doesn’t work well for zero-based budgeting. The only time they come together is on the right side of the budget screen where Mint subtracts what you’ve earned so far with what you’ve spent so far. In Mint they are separate and distinct rather than integrated. Obviously income and spending are two vital parts of a budget. 1- Income and Spending in Mint aren’t connected. Mint is fine for seeing where your money went, but not a really good way of telling it where to go, which is what a budget should do. Here are a few of the specific problems we had with our Mint budget. While I like the convenience of having all of the info from various accounts all in one place, Mint isn’t really a budgeting tool. You can split transactions between multiple categories if you need to. In order for your budget to be useful, you must categorize each transaction.
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Sometimes Mint does a good job of guessing, but it often gets the category wrong. Each time you log in to Mint you’ll want to take a look at your transactions to check the categories Mint has assigned each transaction to. For each category, you set a spending amount. You can set a budget with Mint by clicking on the budget tab. Each time we log into Mint, Mint logs into all of our accounts to bring us the current balances and transactions. We have all of our financial accounts connected to Mint (checking accounts, savings accounts, retirement accounts, credit cards, student loans). Since 2007 we have used to track our spending and budget. I’m really excited to share with you how we have overcome some of the stumbling blocks of budgeting and why switching from Mint to YNAB has totally transformed our budgeting! Mint