YOU NEED A BUDGET (at least I do)

Since dealing with finances has been a big concern with the prayer requests, I thought I’d share about the budgeting program that we have been using since November. It’s called You Need A Budget. I highly recommend it, however, the first thing I am going to say is what’s wrong with it.

The main thing that could be improved about the program is that it should be able to automatically connect to your bank(s) and download your transactions like Money or other financial apps do. If you buy the Pro version, it can import Microsoft Money downloads, but you have to go to your banks’ webpage(s) and download them from there. If you are unable to download your most recent transactions (if you can only download last month’s statement), then that really does you no good…you’ll have to put them into YNAB manually. I get around this by using YNAB in combination with Money, using my own system that I won’t elaborate on here. The reason I’m telling you this first is because if you are unwilling or unable to spend the time doing this, then you obviously won’t actually use the program.

Now, what’s great about it. First, you input how much income you have for the month, which you then distribute into different categories, so far pretty normal. The thing is, if you overspend on any category, it automatically deducts that from your total you will start with for the next month. This is a feature that I have not seen on any other budgeting software, and it makes so much sense, because that money is coming out of somewhere! I could never figure out how it was useful for a budgeting program to tell you “You’re over budget on groceries!!!” but then never make you account for it anywhere. I think how this used to manifest itself with us was on the credit card. We use our credit card to pay for most things (because we get points). While we have always paid off the ending balance on our statement, we would drift from only spending money that we already had in our bank account to getting the money to pay off the bill just before it was due (meaning that we were really one month behind). YNAB has kept that from happening.

The second fabulous feature is that when you don’t spend all of the money in a specific category, it carries over in that category to the next month. This makes saving money for specific expenses that only come up every few months or once a year (or at unknown intervals, like car repair) easy.

Now, it’s important to note…well, I’ll just say what my personal experience was. I was a little bit more stressed out about money for the first couple of months. This was because I was going way over budget. When we started in November, for example, we both went to the dentist. Did we actually have money to go to the dentist? No. It therefore got taken out of our starting point for December, which is always a great month for keeping finances under control anyway. So, my point is, you’ll probably be overspending your budget and putting less money into certain categories than you know you’re going to spend for a little bit, but it’ll turn around.

Last thing, whether it is the male or female who is in charge of bills and whatnot in your home, it is fairly easy to pull your spouse aside as you’re assigning money to categories and let them see exactly where your money is going. This can be helpful. There are also great categories to start with (you can add or delete categories at will) such as “Fun Money (His)” and “Fun Money (Hers)”. So you can allocate a certain amount there every month and if your spouse has a certain proclivity towards…buying video games, that’s fine, as long as there’s enough money in that category for them to do so. (It’s also great for things like going out for coffee or buying art supplies). It’s also easy to skip forward a couple of months and create a theoretical budget if you’re thinking about having a major change in your financial picture and want to see how that would work out (say you were thinking about…buying a new house?).

All in all, it’s a program worth looking into. So, go check it out. I don’t remember how long you can try it out before you would need to buy the license key, but it’s probably 30 days. Here’s a link to download it if you’re interested www.youneedabudget.com/ynabpro-dl.php