The Weight of Money

Is YNAB – You Need A Budget the budgeting answer I’ve been looking for?

I’ve been looking for a new spreadsheet to manage my monthly spending. I’ve been at a loss for how to move from independent, single person budgeting, to family budgeting for three. This software looks like it might just work for me.

It’s Your Money provided a review of YNAB that sounds very favorable.

The benefits and things that draw me to this program: The recognition that balancing your checkbook is unecessary when working from a budget. I cannot balance a checkbook, I’ve tried so many times and always fail miserably. Since using my own budget sheets, viewable here, I’ve never needed to. I keep a buffer of several hundered dollars in my account and don’t let my expenses bypass my income.

I do like the logic of needing to have one month of income in the bank to begin with. The partner often looks at his account to see how much money he has, to me this should never be done. The money in my account has a purpose and I should never assume that what is there is available to spend. What my budget tells me is there is far more accurate. [However, one should frequently check their accounts to verify that there is no unauthorized use taking place.]

Also, the taking from the next month what you overspent this month also works for me. I do this now, or at least I did last year. It keeps the money in the account balanced properly.

I also like that there is a register entry for each dollar spent. Right now, I go through all of my charges, check them to the entries in my little green notebook (where I list amount, where, and category), and add things up to put in the proper budget line. It takes a lot of time and there is a high risk of error in adding up 15 dining expenditures.

The biggest draw back is that it looks like you need to re-enter your budgeted amounts each month… that would bother me because I plan ahead and the budgeted amounts should not be so variable. I’m sure copy and paste would work, but the authors do feel that entering the amounts each time is a good habit.

Finally, backups would be required. It panics me now knowing that everything I know about my finances is locked into an excel spreadsheet. If I were to lose it (and it’s backups) then I’d have no clue about the status of my accounts.

However, I think that I am going to give it a try. The partner is going to read over it at work today and give his opinion. Last night was the first time he didn’t allude to a budget being the end of the world — we’re making progress!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 19th, 2006 at 9:52 am and is filed under budget/goals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.