![]() YNAB tends to work better than that because it’s a system. If you’re consistently overspending on food delivery, Mint will let you know, but it won’t help you come up with a plan to fix the shortfall in the future. At the end of the month, it tells you how you spent your money. Mint is backwards-looking (and so your budgeting must be reactive). You have to have the financial literacy to understand why budgeting is important, find a product that is easy enough for you to use, then form the habit to make it all stick.Ĭonsider one popular budgeting tool:, a free app powered by the publicly-traded behemoth Intuit) reported on their website that in 2016 they had 20 million users. And that’s because budgeting is about much more than what tool we use. According to a 2016 survey from the financial institution US Bancorp, only 41% of Americans maintain a budget. You probably need a budget.īut statistically, you probably don’t follow either plan. ![]() take 20% out of my paycheck and place it into my honeymoon fund). Financial Blogger Ramit Sethi recommends digitizing the envelope method by creating sub-savings accounts the envelopes become actual bank accounts and your money automatically moves between them based on predetermined formulas (i.e. There’s the Envelope Method, with which adherents physically allocate cash into separate envelopes representing categories such as groceries, eating out and gas any unused cash rolls to the next month, but if you run out, you’re SOL. While it’s not an accounting package per se, it certainly has value depending, of course, on whether you want to pay for the privilege of using it.There are many different budgeting methods, varying in complexity, that people can choose from based on their financial objectives and their overall level of financial literacy. In their 2005 book All Your Worth: The Ultimate Lifetime Money Plan, the mother-daughter team Elizabeth Warren (yes, that one) and Amelia Warren Tyagi popularized the 50/30/20 rule, which allocates these percentages of income to needs (50%), wants (30%), and savings (20%). We’re also pleased to see the ability for US, along with Canadian users to be able to import data from their banks. You Need a Budget’s creators seek to underline its high-grade encryption methods that protect your sensitive financial information once you’ve added it to their servers, as you would expect. Indeed, there are aspects of the app edition that make it rather more preferable to the desktop model. We are particularly smitten with the app version of the service, which gives you freedom of use no matter where you might be and emulates the desktop edition perfectly. Overall this is a solid cloud-based software solution that should help you get on top of your finances. You Need a Budget (opens in new tab) continues to improve with each successive release. ![]() All in all then we’d like to see this beefed up in future iterations. While email support is okay, it’s not quite the same, although another alternative is to consult the forums.Īgain though you're not always guaranteed the information you get is going to be 100% reliable. There is a step-by-step guide and FAQs, which should answer many of your queries, but it would always be a bonus to be able to contact a real person for those more unusual requests. ![]() There’s no phone support, which considering this is a paid-for service leaves You Need a Budget sorely lacking. This is even more of a point when you consider the ongoing subscription charge for using the service. The area of support has to currently be one of You Need a Budget’s weakest areas and could do with some improvement. The lack of real people support is something of a negative however (Image credit: You Need a Budget) Support
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