A little late here - but I adore YNAB. I’ll talk about it all day but at it’s base it functions off of a digitized envelope system rather than trying to match projected inputs to projected outputs every month.
YNAB has the automatic uploads of transactions (and does try to guess a category for you but you do have to review and approve).
It is fairly expensive. Although the family plan works if you have anyone you’re open about finances with (or simply trust the family “owner” not to peek - like my younger sister decided to trust me not to look.)
Premium: We allow members to choose your own price for Premium. You can choose on a sliding scale between $3-$12/month. The $3 - $5 options are billed annually.
For me, the killer feature of Mint is that it connected to my accounts and aggregated all my transactions automatically. I cannot and will not input transaction data manually, so things like YNAB are absolutely useless to me.
I’ve never heard of any other app, free or paid, that can do what Mint can do.
It looks like ynab does do this now. I remember when it was just software on your computer, but it’s a full cloud app now (complete with $15/month price tag).
I’m on the hunt for a new solution, too. I may try it.
YNAB pulls in most transactions programmatically if you connect accounts. Some accounts don’t sync (eg Apple) and other accounts will only do an initial sync (most 401ks and loan accounts). I think the sync restrictions are a factor of the accounts themselves and not YNAB; I’d love to know if I’m wrong there.
YNAB does not categorize things for you. It’s a different approach where you define money buckets, assign funds to the buckets, and categorize transactions into those buckets. I moved over when Mint got acquired because fuck Intuit and I haven’t really put a ton of time into trying to understand the different paradigm, so I’m not sure I’m explaining it properly. I didn’t use YNAB before because the paradigm isn’t how I’m used to thinking about my spend.
Don’t start the trial unless you’ve got time to think about setting up your buckets and spending targets. Or, if you just want to test the import because you’ll make time later to set it up, it’s probably worth the trial. There is a “family” plan that allows an account owner to share things; I think that’s worth it if you’ve got some people you share financial info with who also budget and you want to keep costs down.
Doesn’t matter. They have a massive lobbying arm that keeps the US government from making taxes automatic. Unless that lobbying goes away (or politicians start caring about constituents which is much less likely), Intuit will continue making money hand-over-fist from tax software that it can use to fund other dumb shit like acquiring then closing Mint.
The easy to deploy with pikapods seems tempting and really cheap. I may try it
I moved to doing it on my own on Google Sheets (with the envelope system and all) because as convenient as Actual Budget was at the time* I found it lacking in graphs and reports, which I find more important. My Google Sheet, though has more upkeep, I can query and make almost any kind of report or graph I need.
What’s the reporting/graphs like now?
*I even paid for a few months to trial it and I think the mobile app as well… I think. I remember entering something on my phone with Actual Budget
They’ve simplified the use of it in a way. Effectively just a website but reactive so access on a phone is simplified.
On the graphs and reports. There’s been a lot of work in the last two months, there was a limiting factor in the original choice in graphing library, but I’ve seen a Sankey graph, which seemed interesting. But more importantly there is a “custom reporting” which will probably not be as flexible as hand rolling your own Google sheet, but does give you a lot of control.
oooh okay. That is much better than before from what I’ve tried. And a bunch more graphs. I made it crash though by selecting it. And I do miss the interface and just the ease of things. Thanks gonna try it out when I can.
It really does. I’ve been migrating away from cloud services this past year, wasn’t planning on losing Mint but there’s no time like the present, I suppose.
Mint was useful to me for a while until it started forcibly recategorizing stuff with no way to fix it. Tech support was aggressively worthless to the point that I fully shut down every Intuit account I had (they have their tentacles in some surprising businesses). Fuck Intuit and their data hoarding and their anti-taxpayer lobbying and their cold-blooded murder of what was once the only half-decent money tracking app.
This is a good example of what was once a really good company that made really good products but was ruined by the business bros. Everything they touch turns into garbage.
I use YNAB (you need a budget) it’s not free but it’s GREAT for setting savings goals, paying back debt, etc.
It’s also flexible if you need to break your budget for some reason. You can pull from another bucket easily (gas bill is high, pull from emergency savings or cut from gaming), or just overspend and it goes on a report to keep track and plan better.
The best part is peace of mind on big bills - when it comes time to pay taxes or pay for my 6mo car insurance I’ve already been saving 1/12 or 1/6 of that total every month leading up to it. I can put everything in auto pay and never have to worry about the money being there.
Man I used YNAB a ton as a freelancer starting out as a sort of bubblegum and paper clip solution for tracking my expenditures/purchases. It’s a surprisingly, flexible program and was definitely worth the money. Really glad I had it. Not saying that’s how people should use it, but the point is it’s just really good for tracking money in/money out.
I’ll third YNAB. I’ve been using it for years. Being able to see how the money in your checking account already has a purpose and isn’t sitting there waiting to be spent on some bullshit is huge. My SO and I argue about stuff, but our financial stress, a huge problem in many relationships, is nonexistent.
Yeah I used be like wow I have $5000 time to buy some bullshit. But really $3-4000 of that is upcoming expenses so I really only have $1000 and I should use that to pay down a CC or student loans.
I tried it for some time but couldn’t get past the onerous need to reconcile and categorize every single transaction that it detects. It finally made me shut down my account because it caused me such great anxiety.
It auto categorizes now but it’s still a little tedious, sometime recently they added batch categorizing so I can grab all the restaurants and add that to my Eating Out category but it also forces me to look at my finances every couple days which is a good habit imo.
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