YNAB questions

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I know YNAB has been discussed here before. I am hoping someone still uses it and can answer my questions!

Is the $60 fee a one time fee or is it a yearly fee?

Can I use YNAB even if we are not at the point of living off of last months money? It will be a while before we make it to that point but I have heard great reviews about YNAB so I am curious if it would still work for us.

How has YNAB changed your budgeting? Do you love the system?

[elletr13]

The $60 is a one time fee.

We do not live off last months income, but we still find it helpful.

It has helped us a lot because everything is manual. We were not the best at putting more than the bare minimum into savings. With ynab, as soon as I build the budget for that pay period, i set up the savings transfer.

[delawarejen]

I love YNAB - I've been using it for nearly 2 years now and I only wish I had tried it years earlier. I was using a spreadsheet before so I find it much more helpful. It's so easy to spend cash, debit, or use a credit card all in the same budget (I came to YNAB from cash envelopes, so spending something other than cash made my budget a mess).

You can get $6 off with a referral code. (Mine is ynab.refr.cc/5LHT58T if you needed one.) It goes on sale occasionally on Steam, and they usually put it on sale at the YNAB site over Black Friday. There's a 34 day free trial, but I loved it so much I bought it the 2nd day in

I do live on last month's income, but I wasn't when I started.

[ewall]

We have been using YNAB for 2.5 years and love it. We did not start with a buffer, but were very fortunate to build it up within a few months thanks to a bonus. We are still using version 3 because we don't want to pay for an upgrade So it's a one-time purchase unless you just have to have the latest and greatest features they may come out with in the future.

Ways it has helped us budget: actually budgeting and tracking spending. Seems so simple, but we never were successful until YNAB. I don't know, maybe living the YNAB concept was our motivation? We used it at first to tackle debt because we could plan ahead how much extra money would be put toward debt. Then we got into the habit of saving for a rainy day...setting aside savings each month for vacation, Christmas, car insurance, etc.

I will say that living off last month's income is awesome. It offers so much flexibility. Like when we have an unexpected expense (tax bill, home repair) we are able to easily make adjustments to make it fit in the budget without having to pull funds from elsewhere.

YNAB has also allowed us to successfully put all of our expenses on a cash back credit card. Before, I was always fearful of running up some huge bill so I used debit instead. Now I know it's budgeted for so it's no big deal.

Budgeting is pretty automatic at this point as our monthly expenses (fixed and variable) do not fluctuate much. YNAB helps us put the left over money to work in the best way possible.

Sorry, that was probably pretty long and rambling...

[EJSDJ]

i love YNAB! i've been using it for 5 years and i couldn't live without it! its made me LOVE budgeting and has taken all the stress of paying bills away!

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Thanks for all of the input. I will definitely try the free trial. We have been trying to get out of debt for years and just haven't been able to pull ahead.

We are in the process of opening a business so we will have extra income. I am hoping that will help us pay everything off and get ahead. I just hate to see it get absorbed into our budget and we don't get out of debt.

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