Three months after receiving our undergraduate diplomas, we got married with not a care in the world. Except for that giant pile of student loan debt. And the impending cost of the master’s degree my husband had to take a week off from just so that we could go on our honeymoon. Did I mention this was the fall of 2008 (read: economic crash) and the only job I could find was a part-time teaching job that put us below the poverty line in one of the most expensive cities in the country?
Needless to say, we needed a budget and we needed it badly. My mom, who’d worked in a high-level corporate job for years, sat down with me and helped make us a self-calculating month-to-month Excel spreadsheet that would enable us to visualize where our money was going. This was really important since we were bringing in less than $2,000 a month, rents in Seattle were astronomical, and half my paycheck went to housing, leaving little wiggle room for the rest of the necessities (utilities, insurance, food, fuel, etc.). Throughout the month, we manually entered every single transaction. Miraculously, we never carried a credit card balance from month to month.
Fast forward a year and we both had full-time teaching jobs. We found an apartment closer to our respective jobs at the same cost as our first and we continued using our beloved spreadsheet. As DINKs (Dual Income No Kids), we knew this was our chance to pay down our college loans. I joked with my husband that, when I married him, I also married $50,000 in student loan debt. While he had worked hard throughout college to pay the majority of the high cost of the private university we attended, he did still carry $50,000 of loans when we got married. Add to that his recently completed master’s degree, and we were sitting at $70,000.
One of the best things we’ve ever done marriage-wise was to join a couples Bible study focused on marriage. Our first year, we read a book called Money and Marriage God’s Way. While not a groundbreaking book, it was very practical and though each couple was in a very different place financially, the book’s message called each of us on the carpet regarding our use of money. Together, the couples in our group researched different ways to keep track of spending. Mint (reviewed here by my friend Emily) and You Need A Budget (YNAB) were two that seemed intriguing, so we volunteered to try out YNAB since it seemed most similar to what we were currently doing. By that time, our Excel spreadsheet had seen better days, with glitches and calculation errors resulting fro being copied and pasted from year to year.
We’ve been using YNAB ever since.
5 things we love about YNAB
When we started using YNAB over 6 years ago, we were flirting with $70,000 of student loans; $50,000 initially and another $20,000 for a master’s degree. By tracking every single purchase — and having to manually input it — we had intimate knowledge of where our money was going. It took discipline but was well worth it for the ultimate result. In 3 years (by our fifth wedding anniversary), we were free of student loans (and believe me, we threw ourselves a party to celebrate!). We absolutely credit gaining freedom from student loans to having a handle on our money via YNAB. Some people use a cash envelope system (a la Dave Ramsey) for a similar reason, but we wanted to earn rewards from our two credit cards so we stuck with YNAB.
1. Categories
We settled on the following categories: Giving, Monthly Bills, Everyday Expenses, Periodic Payments, Savings Goals, and Debt. While there are subcategories in each of these, we like seeing how much goes to our monthly bills or our everyday expenses. Yes, it’s important to know how much we spent on groceries, but we also wanted to know, overall, how much our combined everyday expenses were to see if we could cut down anywhere so we could have more discretionary funding to use somewhere else within our budget.
2. Zeroing Out
Each month, we zero out our budget. The work of assigning money to categories occurs throughout the month, but reconciling what YNAB says with what our bank account(s) say is the key step to making our money work for us. When we head into another month, we either have a value in the “Overspent” category or we get to assign the leftover money to one of our subcategories for the following month. While we had money assigned to a “Student Loan” category, we could use unspent money to pay this down even faster. At a 6.8% interest rate, getting rid of it was crucial.
3. Periodic Payments
Periodic payments are a huge benefit of YNAB that allows us to make large semiannual or annual payments painlessly. Throughout the year, we put money aside for insurance payments, Christmas, and workout costs (we like to do half-marathons, triathlons, etc. and they’re expensive!). When our car insurance premium comes due, we’re not scrambling for cash; while it’s not partitioned off within our bank account, it has been within YNAB so we haven’t spent it. The same is true for Christmas: we don’t depend on last minute paychecks to cover presents, hospitality, or travel expenses to see family.
4. Month to Month Visualization
I love being able to see how we did last month, how we’re doing this month, and how what we’re doing now affects next month. YNAB’s default view is a 3-month picture and it allows you to make decisions based on things that might be coming up. Know that we’re traveling a lot next month? If we can spend less in “Eating Out” or “Household Goods” this month, we can allocate more to “Fuel” next month. Having a bigger perspective has helped me stay home with our two kids on just my husband’s public school teacher salary (this a great interactive graphic of teacher pay in Washington State).
YNAB also has a Reports function where you can make graphics of what your money is doing. We rarely use this because we’re numbers people but I can see how someone who is more visual would like this.
5. Mobile App
The Mobile App is an optional function that bridges the gap between YNAB4 (or YNAB Classic) users with users of the brand new YNAB (released in January 2016). One of the biggest cons of YNAB Classic – something we love, however – is the manual entering of purchases. But there’s an app for that! YNAB Mobile syncs with your desktop version via Dropbox, which allows you to enter purchases as you make them instead of having to tackle a mountain of receipts. I also love the mobile app because I can check how much money we have left in a certain category before making a purchase.
The New YNAB
No more manual entry…if you don’t want to.
This is really exciting stuff, y’all! They just released the new YNAB, which is a lot like Mint in terms of its connection with your credit cards, bank accounts, etc. We haven’t switched over yet because they are still working out the kinks of transferring everything (plus I just don’t have available mental bandwidth to learn a new system right now). I’m excited to switch over later this year, though!
The YNAB team has this to say about the new version and the pushback that not inputting every purchase would remove the intimacy with each transaction:
Yes. We’ve long since held that direct import would kill awareness and so we’d never do it. But we realized we were wrong, wrong, wrong. The way we’ve built the new YNAB you can have transactions imported directly from your bank (so fast! so easy!), but you still have to assign them to the appropriate category. Way less tedium, without losing awareness. Also, you can still use our mobile apps on the go, and manual entry if you choose. Or a combination of it all. Win-win all around.
I have a feeling that once we switch, we’ll still utilize manual entry but I am willing to try a new way as well.
What things don’t I love about YNAB?
Honestly, I couldn’t think of a single thing. Seriously. YNAB works for us. Even the cost doesn’t bother us. If you sign up before January 31, you’ll lock in a 10% discount off the yearly $50 charge. $45 a year to have a hold on your money? Tech support if you ever need it? Yes, please. (As current YNAB4 users, we get the discount as well even though we’ll be waiting until after the promotional period to switch over.)
How could YNAB help you with your financial goals this month? This year?
I’d love to hear about your budgeting successes (and failures!) in the comments.
Rachel Zupke
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I think one of my favorite parts is with categories and goals as well, especially if you’re working the debt snowball. I have initiated a “debt snowflake” category into mine, where I can budget some extra to go toward my debt payments as well. They seem to continue to be making tweaks to the new YNAB site keeping things fresh and up to date.
I’ve been a Dave Ramsey fan for many years which has been very beneficial. The one thing I could never quite understand since I work as a personal trainer and my income fluctuates from month to month was how to budget when you are not sure of your income. What YNAB does is you budget for February the money you earn in January and on and on. That made so much sense and that’s what’ve I’ve been doing for a couple years now. I’m using the original or classic YNAB and I have no trouble manually imported my expenditures. I look forward to budgeting each month as I watch my money age. Budgeting with YNAB has helped get me through a divorce and cancer surgery. I’ve always been fascinated with personal finance and how people handle their money. I’ve never tried Ramsey’s “Everydollar” budgeting software so can’t really comment on it’s effectiveness. I’m a YNABer for sure.
Cheers,
Chris
We started using YNAB three months ago, and we love it too. So much more visibility of where our money is going. And the mobile app is great–makes entering expenses and checking how much money you’ve got budgeted for different things easy.
FYI: I’ve synced up with a couple of our bank accounts, and that’s working well.
Another great thing about YNAB, that I can’t rave about enough, is the tutorials (written and video). Fantastic. So clear and helpful.
Thank you for sharing this! My husband and I have a goal to pay off my car in the next year, and we’ve been back to budgeting again but not quite doing things the way we know they need to be done. This will help!
We were using YNAB4 for about 9 months and since have switched to the new YNAB. The learning curve isn’t bad! I only miss the reports because I am a big picture person. I also haven’t uploaded our old data yet. But for staying on track with the budget day to day, it still works great! I love the goal setting feature; it’s so rewarding to change those yellow numbers to green. We are looking to pay off some serious debt this year, and I know that YNAB is the tool that will help us achieve our goals.
Anyway tl;dr – jump in; the water is nice!
Awesome to hear! And great job paying down debt…it’s soooo nice to have that freedom. I’m guessing we’ll switch over in the next few months.
I wish you’d explain more about how you paid off 70,000 in three years using YNAB. I have a $52,000 loan I’d like to pay off within a few years. I’m using WYNAB 4. You can email me if you’d like.
By carefully tracking every transaction, we were able to have a tighter hold on our money and spend frivolously. That way, we could put every available penny toward our student loans and we paid them off much more quickly than if we spent money without knowing where it was going.
I did Dave Ramsey’s FPU and then chose YNAB as my budgeting tool. The two combined have CHANGED MY LIFE. I now budget this months salary for next month. It took me about 6 months to get there but that’s ALL. I would have never imagined how much CONTROL can give you FREEDOM!
Amen! Such a great combo.
I stopped using cash when I had teenagers! LOL (you’ll get this when you have some) Anyway, use Mint. Have it set up to yell at me when I overspend a category. Only heard about YNAB today. Is it any different?
Yes, Mint is different. It automatically assigns things to categories whereas YNAB has you do it with every transaction. It gives you more awareness with each transaction. With the new auto-import, they are more similar but YNAB still forces you to understand your finances at a more intimate level.
This was such a delight to read, Rachel! It’s so encouraging to hear how quickly you were able to pay off your debt using these methods.
I’m truly fascinated by everything I read about YNAB. Their concept of “aging money” is really unique, too. Sometimes it makes me wish I didn’t need such a complex accounting system, but could use more of this approach.
Thank you so much for sharing your success–and your love for YNAB!
Sure thing! I’m always happy to share…especially if it can help someone else!
I’d be interested to try the new YNAB. I gave it a shot before but went back to Mint because I couldn’t live without automatic imports. That said, I use Mint very much in the same way it sounds like the new YNAB works. I always have to go assign categories because Mint gets half of them wrong, and we’re always living off last month’s income, so it’s not hard to use Mint like it sounds that YNAB works.
I remember being really frustrated by the automatic category assignments when I tried Mint. Nothing was ever accurate!
I think that YNAB’s choice to add automatic import but keep the manual category assignment is a great solution–not to mention, I realized, a lot like QuickBooks Online, which is what I use.
Now I just need to find the time and motivation to set it up…
Definitely a struggle…that’s how I feel right now about switching over to the new YNAB. I feel like I need an entire day and someone bringing me meals (and chai!) so I can focus and knock it out. 🙂
If they were smart, YNAB would have some kind of service to port over all your content from the old version to the new version.
They have a beta version right now and they’re working on it over the next few months. I’ll definitely wait for them to work out the kinks before switching!