You Need a Budget

When we first started budgeting I used the program from Dave Ramsey. It was an okay program and I used that for the first year or so. The problem with that particular one was that I couldn't fund my vertical envelopes to accumulate since we budget for things year round. It also didn't allow you to put in a transaction and split between categories.

One day I read a blog post where someone was introduced to You Need A Budget. I figured it wouldn't hurt to take a look and use their free month trial. It was so worth my time as a love this site. It is so user friendly and has the features I was missing with other programs I had tried in the past.

So here are my 5 favorite things about YNAB:

1. I can fund my categories in advanced. I know how much we will spend per year on a certain thing, like insurance, and split that into monthly payments. When the bill is due I have the amount already set aside. This also works well with our seasonal employment. I can fund our winter account during the summer. The program tracks all of this for you, other programs I used and checked out, didn't. I had to keep track of things myself.
   
2. I can split a transaction between categories. I really love this. How many times do you buy toilet paper, clothes, and groceries. I have a better idea of what I'm spending my money on when I can split categories.
3. There's an app for it! Who doesn't like being able to quickly enter in a transaction as your waiting for the kids to buckle. This makes bill time go much faster. You can also check to see where you are, especially if you are a family who lives pay check to pay check. A quick check will tell you, yes you can buy that item or no you have to wait. Plus you AND your spouse will have access to your budget.
   
4. You can set up recurring payments. There are several bills that come out of our account automatically and are the same amount every month. You can set that transaction to repeat monthly or weekly. Again it makes bill time easier as I don't need to enter in all the information. I can just check that yes it went through.
5. I have access to a summary of what was budgeted last month, what was spent last month, average budgeted, and average spent. This makes it easy to adjust our budget if we have been spending too much the past few months or too little.

If you want to try out You Need A Budget click on the link here and we both get a month FREE!