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YOU NEED A BUDGET REVIEW FREE
You can’t get away with using plastic like free money this way! If you’re a regular credit card user, you’ll appreciate the YNAB makes you pay off everything you charge to your credit card. YNAB also includes “Credit Card Payments” as a category, because it’s not really debt and it’s not really spending either. I’m still married to the Money After Graduation Budget, so I set it up my core 5 categories in YNAB: Housing, Transportation, Savings, Debt, and Life (which I further broke down into Food and Variable Expenses). You can create your own budget from scratch, or use YNAB’s “quick budget” feature which will use the most common budgeting categories most people have. Like I said, setting YNAB up properly is a serious time investment but it’s the only way to access the power of this tool to manage your money. Depending on how many bank accounts and credit cards you want to track, this can take anywhere from 1 to 3 hours. Once you sign up for YNAB, you can add accounts manually or you can elect to have the app scrape your bank accounts to pull transactions in automatically. Carve out a nice Sunday morning and brew a big cup of coffee and sit down to do your budget!īelow is a step by step guide to setting up YNAB: Import your bank data Getting started with YNAB is easy, but you should definitely allocate some time to get it set up the way you want to.
YOU NEED A BUDGET REVIEW HOW TO
But they are integral to the YNAB method and you’ll find yourself a fan once you put them to work! How to Use YNAB Using a budgeting app that has its own “Rules” that don’t even make that much sense at first glance can seem weird.
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Once your money sits for 30 days before you spend it, you’re a month ahead on all your expenses and can breathe easy knowing you have comfortable cashflow for upcoming expenses. Essentially what the app is trying to get you to do is get your money in your bank account and sit there. Aging your money is about breaking the paycheck-to-paycheck cycle. The only rule is you can’t spend more money than you have!Ĥ.
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If you go over in one spending category, you just move money from another to cover it. This is about keeping flexibility in your budgets. You usually forget about them until they happen. Things like your once-a-year property taxes or Amazon Prime fee fall into this category. True expenses are infrequent but expected expenses. Whether it’s paying bills or going towards retirement savings, no dollar is off duty!Ģ. Every dollar that comes into your bank account gets assigned to something. YNAB operates on four specific rules for your budget:ġ. While this is why You Need a Budget is such a great tool, it also makes for a steep learning curve compared to other apps out there. YNAB is more than just a budgeting app, it’s budgeting a method. But I promise you, if you stick with YNAB, you’ll love it. You might even get frustrated and tempted to switch to a simpler expense tracker. You should be aware that getting the hang of You Need a Budget will take some time and be a little uncomfortable. I’ve been using this app for more than 2 years now so I feel confident giving a solid YNAB Review.