Is it worth the cost? In my opinion, yes. YNAB: $11.99/month or $84/year – Is YNAB worth the cost?
YNAB 4 VS NEW YNAB FREE
With a free service, you aren’t likely to get much customer service, and Mint does have ways of monetizing your use of the platform (such as ads). Mint does handily beat YNAB in one key area: it is free. YNAB vs Mint Price Comparison Mint Pricing: FREE That said, it is easy to go a little too hands-off and not use it to track your spending regularly. It doesn’t require you to do much, as it will track your spending on its own. Mint is a much more passive budgeting approach. YNAB, on the other hand, drives you to make proactive spending decisions by seeing how much money you have in each of your budgeting categories before making purchasing decisions. Mint merely documents spending and then tallies up each spending category. The most significant difference between these two budgeting services (ignoring the other tools offered by Mint, such as bill alerts, credit scores, etc.) is that Mint is reactive while YNAB is proactive. When you spend money that you received more than 30 days ago, you have broken the paycheck to paycheck cycle. Aging your money means that you stop the paycheck to paycheck cycle by spending less than you earn. Age Your Moneyįinally, YNAB pushes you to age your money. Just move $100 from your travel category to your restaurant category to cover your overspending.Īgain, it’s about budgeting your priorities but proactively managing where each dollar is going. Maybe you have a category for travel, but you aren’t planning to travel for a while. Let’s say, for example, you go $100 over your allotted restaurant budget in a given month. When it does, you can move money from different categories to cover this overspending. Making spending decisions taking into account current and future needs is a massive piece of the secret sauce when it comes to budgeting. And you don’t have any guilt about your spending because you planned for it. So when the holidays do roll around, and you spend $600, it’s no big deal. Instead of panicking when the bills hit after the holidays, you set aside $50 every single month to cover holiday gifts. Let’s assume you spend $600 on holiday gifts each year.
YNAB 4 VS NEW YNAB HOW TO
And I did too before I learned how to embrace my true expenses. How many of you get your credit card bill after the holidays and find yourself stressed out? I am guessing most of you. Second, YNAB forces you to think about all your long-term expenses. As YNAB puts it, instead of stressing over every spending decision (or having guilt because of your spending), you spend knowing it was part of the plan. Prioritizing your spending gives you more control over how your money works for you. This zero-based budgeting approach allows you to prioritize where your money goes. You have now given every one of your one thousand dollars a job. Zero-based budgeting.Īs an example, if you have $1,000 in your checking account, you may allocate $300 to groceries, $600 to rent, and $100 to insurance. And when I say every dollar, I mean every dollar.
The first rule of YNAB is to allocate a job to every dollar in your name. YNAB has defined four fundamental principles which are the driving force behind its budgeting approach: 1. YNAB, on the other hand, is not a full-featured set of financial tools. Think of it as more of a spending tracker. In a nutshell, it is documenting spending that has already happened. The budgeting tool automatically tracks spending from each of your accounts and then assigns a budget category to each expenditure. Mint will automatically sync all of your financial data so that you can stay up to date as it happens. It does all of these things in a straightforward tool. Mint is a long-standing personal finance tool with a whole host of tools designed to give you an overview of your financial situation.
Why Am I Choosing YNAB as the Best Budgeting App? Mint Overview