One trick I found really helped me curb thoughtless spending in the past was calculating the cost of purchases based not on the sticker price, but on the sticker price + whatever the compounded interest would be for the same amount of money on my mortgage. (At the time our interest rate was 5% with about 27.5 years left on our mortgage, so it effectively doubled the price of everything.) The thought was that if we sp…
Thinking about interest and growth does help put prices in perspective. Using mortgage interest rates doesn't work as well these days, since they've fallen so much, but you can use the standard market growth rates instead: either 7% or 4% depending on whether you take inflation into account.
FYI, it looks like the mobile site has some issues in IE on Windows Phone. The white text is a bit hard to read with the background image [1], and refreshing the page results in this [2]. Looking forward to trying it out though! [1]: http://imgur.com/vtp2PnZ [2]: http://imgur.com/3iEI4kw
I also had the problem that when I selected an input box, the keyboard would open and the app would think that I had flipped the phone. It then showed me the black screen prompting me to flip it back which caused the browser to lose focus of the now nonexistant input box causing the keyboard to collapse again.
Thanks for the feedback, we'll push some fixes for the orientation bug tonight
7 months into using it my partner & I find YNAB very overcomplicated. Being freelance I don't have a steady income, and I've never managed to make it handle that well. Because the income figure isn't correct it's hard to see what I'm actually spending (if I put my 'lump income' in a category and move money between categories to have 'income' each month, that mucks up the amounts). I have yet to get it to balance any…
I haven't done full time freelance so feel free to shoot this idea down, but I'm always curious as to why freelancers don't just put their income in a separate, harder-to-access bank account and pay themselves a regular, weekly disbursement from that.
A piece of advice I had from a mentor 15+ years ago when I started my business was to pay yourself something regular. Even if it was a tiny amount like $200/wk, just do that rather than forever be pulling out irregular lump sums when you got paid for a job.
nexus 4: goal amount: this will cost
put cursor in field
keyboard opens
window registers as landscape due to width/height problem
keyboard closes
repeat.
I would do that the other way around. If you wanna spend something you gotta hold your finger down and thus punish your behavior. For me it seems that the app punishes you with waiting time when you wanna save money.
Based on my experience at least, YNAB (You Need A Budget -- http://www.youneedabudget.com/ ) is the best budgeting software out there. It's a lot more complex than this, and unlike something like Mint it does require you to manually enter transactions. However, it is really the best interface I've found for setting a budget. Probably the best feature is that it can naturally incorporate overspending. If you set your…
My wife and I were discussing this a few weeks ago. If YNAB could automatically grab my bank transactions like Mint, I would be sold. I love their philosophy on budgeting.
Have you just tried it first? I'm not being hard, but I had the same feeling until we did it for the 34 day trial. Frankly, I now love the fact that it doesn't do anything automated in the background, now I actually have to consciously track my spend. Mint just became a passive record of spending. YNAB is active.
You live in a bubble. Most apps I use at work are installed on the machine.
> for work That's very clearly not what we're talking about here. I wouldn't be surprised if (for personal use, not work) the "bubble" is a more accurate descriptor for those who _do_ need desktop software. The only people I know who use anything on the desktop beyond their browser are software engineers, PC gamers, and people who use niche software, all with a quite-above-average level of computer-savviness.
>>The only people I know who use anything on the desktop beyond their browser are software engineers, PC gamers, and people who use niche software, all with a quite-above-average level of computer-savviness.
Walk through an office building, Work+Excel are still the software of the day in most businesses.
It requires a win / mac machine? Why? I thought no one did that anymore ?
There was a third option until Adobe dropped support for AIR on Linux. YNAB has since been encouraging customers to use Wine. http://www.youneedabudget.com/support/article/linux-installa...
I think the point being made is that these days this would normally be provided as a SAAS product, rather than as an actual install to your machine.
I'm finding the terminology a little strange for this one.. "Helps you love how you spend every dollar"? While I get the gist of what you're saying, it makes my head hurt a little bit. Am on Android (Moto G) and every time I tapped the goal amount text box, it requested me to "Rotate device to portrait" despite my portrait lock being turned on, so was unable to add a goal amount. I like the idea of this app but not q…
I liked the terminology. Don't know which one of us is more representative of the target demographic, though. It's not (necessarily) just marketing fluff. A lot of people view budgeting as "here's what I can't spend money on". It can be easier to stick to a plan when viewed through the lens of getting the maximal enjoyment for the money. There's a lot of people out there who "don't know where it's all going"; the ide…
Thanks for the feedback. The perspective you articulate is exactly what we're trying to do with money management. A lot of people feel pretty bummed when they think about managing their money, and consequently avoid thinking about it and realizing that they could derive more short and long term satisfaction with the ways they spend their money. We think that a positive, visceral experience can help people reframe their relationship with their money and ultimately derive more satisfaction--aka, "love"--the way they are spending their money.