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Tuesday 3 January 2012

Not Good Enough - Top Personal Finance Software Critique

By Isaac Perez


But, this product seems like an early release. Even for budgeting, I find it incomplete.

I actually know how much interest I make a month. It simplifies your finances while giving you more information.

You do this through simply through setting up your budget based on categories and then allocating all inflows/outflows into these categories. Even if you are not a financial Whiz-Kid, this is pretty painless to do in YNAB.

I can easily import transactions from my bank and categorize them to come out of the correct budget accounts. Oh, I'm also a fan of Dave Ramsey and am working on my debt snowball (almost done, too!) and the zero-based budgeting and "rainy day" savings philosophies of this software support the Dave plan.

The software does have learning curve to it, but I think that if you invest the time it takes to get up to speed on it, and to improve your financial self-control, you will be glad you did. If you are after financial freedom (and not by winning the lottery!) then this program is highly recommended.

We recently had our laptop break down and didn't replace it for two months, during which time we went without YNAB. It was insane to see how much we needed the program! Quicken and Mint are maybe even better at showing you what you had already spent. But that is the key- what you have already done. You won't be disappointed with this God-sent utility. I have been using YNAB for a little over a year now. It's eye-opening, to say the least. It will change the way you think about your money, or in my case, it made me *start* thinking about my money. With most software programs the software is just given to you for you to figure out how to use it. But YNAB provides a system to teach you how to manage your money guided by your budget.

I still use Quicken, and some day, I may give it up! But, I won't part with my YNAB Pro software. In looking for a good budgeting system, I have tried Quicken, and MS Monkey, and both of them are completely overwhelming. I have no idea how to use them, and do not have the time to learn them. It has an automatic 'scheduler' function that will automatically show the inflows and outflows of my family $, as many things such as paychecks, rent, utilities, and even tithing occur on a scheduled basis. It quickly shows how much total $ we have available in our 'budget'.

Within the budget section, you can get to some level of detail, but just in a small pop-up window. If you want to look at all your entertainment expenses to try to analyze what you might cut down on, there's no good way to examine those details, or to look for categorized transactions if you have a large volume of data.




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