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Friday, January 20, 2012

Fantastic Overall, Wonderful Item - Best Personal Finance Software Review

By Carter Baker


It comes with free upgrades and amazing customer support. Be sure and read the setup guide and visit the support forums at youneedabudget.com I can't believe what this has done for my finances and peace of mind. With YNAB Pro I can import any file type possible - OFX, QFX, QIF, CSV, whatever. Quicken limits me to just one file type which some local banks I've used may or may not support.

Because of YNAB, I absolutely know that there's always money enough for anything that's going to come along. YNAB has helped me exercise some discipline and do so without significant data entry or long, tortured sessions at the computer. Others have described the concept of the product, so I won't do that. I will just describe what I find lacking.

It was easy to bring that in to $200 a month, which gives me an extra $300 to save or spend on my debt. You can't really budget a month in advance for a car wreck you don't know you're going to have. It is not for mortgage or investments or other kinds of financial things. If you bought it to do these things then you bought the wrong product. No yearly upgrade fees and YNAB never becomes an obsolete software as so many do. It is a one-time purchase that will last you the rest of your life.

Who plans for the rainy days that are sure to come and mess up whatever budget you have set up" YNAB is a program for proactive budgeting.

Again, the software doesn't enforce this rule, but it does make it possible in ways that other software just doesn't facilitate, and it makes it easy to plan ahead. Rule Four is that if you overspend in a category, rather than carry a negative balance on that category into the next month, it zeroes out the category at the beginning of the next month by stealing money from the available balance for that next month. The help offered online, in tutorials and in the forums, is important for those of us budget-challenged. I had used Quicken in the past; it didn't help me decide what to do with my income; YNAB makes it clear to see where the money is going and perhaps even to improve how much of it I can hang on to. You can add, delete, and rename categories and sub categories as you wish. You do not have to wade through a bunch of pre-determined expense categories to get to the ones that matter to you. Before buying YNAB, you must understand what it is and, perhaps more importantly, what it is not. YNAB is not an accounting system, it's a *household* budgeting system. After 4 or 5 months most user will have set YNAB aside or use it in a much reduced role as I do. The reason for this is: I've used Quicken for a few years, but I've always been frustrated with the annual/biannual upgrade costs and the lack of a real budgeting function. Then, in December 2007, my wife lost her job, I was in a panic; now what would we do" How would we get by"




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