Comments on: YNAB – Operational Review

By: Scott

Scott — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 01:00:50 +0000

Thanks! I’ll do that.

By: Donna Jean

Donna Jean — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 00:12:47 +0000

Hi Scott,

I appreciate the interest in the modifications I made, but I wouldn’t be able to explain how I did it. It was a pretty complicated process, took a lot of trial and error, and I did have to mess with all the hidden layers of the program to get it to work.

But, I also did it with little understanding of the more advanced features of excel. It took a lot of tinkering, but that was enough to help me figure out what needed to change and make the changes.

I suggest save yourself a new copy and go to town making trying to make it work for you — oh, and un-hide everything including the very (vba) hidden worksheet.

By: Scott

Scott — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 14:36:04 +0000

Hi, Donna!

Can you let us know how you modified the excel worksheet to reflect over/under budgeting. I think that’s what I’m looking for but am afraid to modify the formulas for fear of breaking something. I did do something similar to you with the categories, but your way of grouping them with a vertical title is slightly neater than my solution! :)

By: Anthony St. Clair

Anthony St. Clair — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 03:48:16 +0000

Thanks for this and your previous post. I only recently found out about YNAB, and have been really interested. Our money situation is pretty good, but finding something that gives more a plan like this does sounds like exactly what we need.

By: Donna Jean

Donna Jean — Sun, 13 May 2007 00:36:19 +0000

Callie, I’ve read the options for the pro version and it did sound like it offered many things that I wanted. However, as far as I can tell, eliminated it’s most useful aspect: being in excel. I don’t want to move to a product that I can’t shape into exactly what I want.

Thanks for the feedback, I’m sure the pro version will meet the needs of many people.

By: Callie 302

Callie 302 — Sat, 12 May 2007 14:45:09 +0000

YOu may be interested to know that the pro version addressess ALL your concerns. I am using it with good success!

By: Jesse

Jesse — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 15:13:56 +0000

First off I want to say thanks to Donna Jean for offering such a thorough review of YNAB. Also, I was extremely delighted to see that you had altered it to use it how you wanted. That is just the type of thing I still love about having it on an Excel platform :)

Eva, one downside of having it in Excel is that trial versions aren’t really possible. However, if you want to try a trial version of YNAB Pro, I made it available just recently:

http://www.download.com/YNAB-Pro/3004-2057_4-10625881.html

Donna I thought you may be interested in the trial as well, at least just to test drive it a bit :)

To your modification, there are really two camps of people in regards to those budget numbers. One camp likes to keep their budget the intact so they can look back and have valuable iformation about what they they thought they would spend. The other camp (to which I belong more or less) sees budgeting as a way to direct your money to wherever it needs to go. It’s akin to an air traffic controller. You look to see where there may be problems and you change things around until everything will go smoothly again. This would necessitate that you remove suprluses from categories that no longer need them and move them to categories that are starving.

The first camp is more variance-focused, the second more balance-focused. Again, I can’t tell you how cool I think it is that you tweaked it to your liking!

By: Eva

Eva — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 21:19:25 +0000

I’ve been using PearBudget (http://www.pearbudget.com) for a while now, and I really like it. I wish YNAB had a demo version that I could try before buying it, to see how the two stack up.

By: Donna Jean

Donna Jean — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 18:49:49 +0000

mapgirl – they do offer a Pro version that doesn’t need excel (and it has all those neat charts and delux features). It looked like it had some nice updates that would be nice to have if I wanted to give up the excel format – instead I’ll just wait until I get around to adding them myself. :)

FT – yep, and like all stand alone software products, they don’t live up to my expectations. If I can’t dig into the way it works and tinker with it a bit, I don’t want to bother using it. There are so many other areas of my life that I already have to alter to suit the tools/utilities available (like online bill pay – argh) that I want my finance tool to do exactly what I want it to.

By: MillionDollarJourney.com

MillionDollarJourney.com — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 18:33:37 +0000

Have you girls tried MS Money? I find the program pretty good where you can edit all the categories to suit your lifestyle. It also has a neat future called a Cash Flow Forecast where it esimates your cash flow based on spending $x on x date or spending $x every x time period.