My wife and I have been using YNAB for almost four years, right after the most recent non-cloud version was released.
The biggest thing it has helped us with is accounting for regular but infrequent expenses, with respect to having reasonable expectations for the limits on our regular and frequent expenses.
Before, if we had a month where our bi-annual car insurance bill coincided with our quarterly pest control bill and a higher-than-normal utility bill (say a hotter or colder month than usual), then we would have a very thin month and need to really cut back on discretionary stuff.
Now, YNAB makes it super easy to set money aside each month for those infrequent expenses, such that there is always a just-the-right-size pot of money sitting there when the bill comes up. Now, for example, we never have to change our grocery buying routine in response to other expenses, as those other expenses are accounted for a piece at a time every month.
Even utilities, I average the last 12 months of utility bills, and set that amount aside every month. When we have a low bill, that pot grows, and when we have a high bill, that pot shrinks, but no other spending or saving is affected by those fluctuations. It's great.
I'm tempted to move to something like ledger/hledger or some other plain-text accounting tool when YNAB 4 goes out of support, but the thing I'm not sure how to implement in those systems is YNAB's categories, the "virtual envelopes". Does anyone have a better idea than this? https://gist.github.com/simonmichael/a1addcb652da4e78b183
The biggest thing it has helped us with is accounting for regular but infrequent expenses, with respect to having reasonable expectations for the limits on our regular and frequent expenses.
Before, if we had a month where our bi-annual car insurance bill coincided with our quarterly pest control bill and a higher-than-normal utility bill (say a hotter or colder month than usual), then we would have a very thin month and need to really cut back on discretionary stuff.
Now, YNAB makes it super easy to set money aside each month for those infrequent expenses, such that there is always a just-the-right-size pot of money sitting there when the bill comes up. Now, for example, we never have to change our grocery buying routine in response to other expenses, as those other expenses are accounted for a piece at a time every month.
Even utilities, I average the last 12 months of utility bills, and set that amount aside every month. When we have a low bill, that pot grows, and when we have a high bill, that pot shrinks, but no other spending or saving is affected by those fluctuations. It's great.
I'm tempted to move to something like ledger/hledger or some other plain-text accounting tool when YNAB 4 goes out of support, but the thing I'm not sure how to implement in those systems is YNAB's categories, the "virtual envelopes". Does anyone have a better idea than this? https://gist.github.com/simonmichael/a1addcb652da4e78b183