You Need A Budget.

Okay, well maybe you don’t but most people benefit from having one. The difference between tracking your expenses and deliberately planning what your money needs to do for you.

There’s a thing called the envelope system, or zero-based budgeting, which basically means helps you assign the moneybags you have now, to the expenses you know you’ll have. “What does this money need to do until I get paid again?” It’s a whole thing, and it works really well.

I don’t know how to link to communities but search for /c/ynab (or if you like, also /r/ynab over on that other site).

https://www.budgetwithbuckets.com

Ledger or GnuCash. I like Ledger and plain text accounting in general because plain text files work well with version control tools such as Git.

Ever since YNABs price hike I wanted to have an alternative, but all were not really up there yet. For a few weeks, I am using ActualBudget which has been open-sourced by the developer and is actively maintained, including the „recently“ introduced support for goals :)

Edit fixed url

Nothing beats a good old spreadsheet.

I was on a spreadsheet for years and recently started selfhosting Actual and importing transactions automatically through email alerts.

A spreadsheet, it compares against monthly trends, and splits the transactions by type. It also tracks shares, and debts.

plus I “compete” with 2 mates to see who spends the least month on month. They are super tight though, so it’s hard for me. I did win June though, first win since March 2022

Controversial take - no budget. Split income into 3 or more buckets - savings, critical bills (rent, utilities, debt, etc), and discretionary. I manage as separate accounts.

Spend discretionary freely and enjoy the peace or mind that your financial future is secured by the first 2 buckets. If you run low, rice and beans til next paycheck.

No need to track coffee expenditures, you’ll realize during rice and beans week that you can make it at home.

Your mileage may vary.

I use a google spreadsheet (to have it synced across devices) for manual transactions with physical money. zthat, and the digital transactions from my banks I aggregate in GnuCash about every quarter or so.

My wife and I use Goodbudget with a single login. It’s pretty quick to add purchases as they are made and easy to look through the history and see trends.

Used to use gnucash on Linux desktop for a goooood long while. I wanted nicer reports so I shopped around with homebank (one developer so slow development but very nice project!) and tried money dance (didn’t like it, though I tried really hard). Eventually tried my own spreadsheets and apsire budget but finally settled on YNAB because I need a hands-off approach as I’m so busy.

I reconcile accounts every few days and auto-sync my banks with plaid (YMMV on how much you’re into that) and it works for me. I’m happy paying the subscription but if it ever goes to US$150/yr I’m probably going to quit it.

I’ve been a long time You Need A Budget user. It’s really put me on the proper budgeting and goal building path.

However I need to likely make some changes in budgeting process to account for, now that I split expense more often with a partner. We’ve been using Splitwise to track split everyday expenses like groceries. If anyone has recommendations here with YNAB and Splitwise, I’d like to hear them. Right now my reporting in YMAB is all messed up considering the splits we do. When I do get reimbursed by my partner, it’s easier to pull from a single category as opposed to splitting that transaction out from what was recorded in Splitwise.

The recent AMEX issues with their import partners (MX and Plaid) are annoying, but I did manual entry back on V4 so nothing I’m not used to. But still considering there’s a yearly fee with new YNAB and it doesn’t import my main spending card is annoying.

I use Tiller, which is a paid service that dumps your transactions into an Excel spreadsheet or Google Sheets. I like being able to have full control, without needing to copy everything into the spreadsheet.

Money Manager Ex. It saves the file as a SQLite database, which makes it easy to parse. I have a couple python scripts that extract the numbers, and generate a JSON file with numbers, png graphs using matplotlib, and I have another module that takes the generated graphs, numbers, and a latex template, and generate a nice PDF.

For instance, when the script finds a brokerage account, it separates out deposits / withdrawals from actual P/L to calculate true time weighted returns.

Budget-wise, I look at it on a yearly basis. This is important because some significant expenses have an annual frequency (practice insurance, housing insurance, etc), or bi-annual frequency (car insurance…) And some expenses are discrete frequencies throughout the year (vacation, etc…)

It requires more discipline than on a monthly basis, but the reasoning behind it is if we spend more than we earn on a given month, it is not necessarily bad, because it might just be the month we went on vacation, or the month we had our yearly insurance premium. The important goal is to spend less than we earn on average . So over the long run wealth accumulates naturally. Short term deviations are not important as long as our long term lifestyle is aligned with our income.

Sticking with budgeting is really my downfall - I’ve jumped around so many approaches but really struggle with maintaining the habit. Currently I use a self hosted version of actual, which I do like!