I use YNAB (you need a budget) it’s not free but it’s GREAT for setting savings goals, paying back debt, etc.
It’s also flexible if you need to break your budget for some reason. You can pull from another bucket easily (gas bill is high, pull from emergency savings or cut from gaming), or just overspend and it goes on a report to keep track and plan better.
The best part is peace of mind on big bills - when it comes time to pay taxes or pay for my 6mo car insurance I’ve already been saving 1/12 or 1/6 of that total every month leading up to it. I can put everything in auto pay and never have to worry about the money being there.
I tried it for some time but couldn’t get past the onerous need to reconcile and categorize every single transaction that it detects. It finally made me shut down my account because it caused me such great anxiety.
It auto categorizes now but it’s still a little tedious, sometime recently they added batch categorizing so I can grab all the restaurants and add that to my Eating Out category but it also forces me to look at my finances every couple days which is a good habit imo.
Man I used YNAB a ton as a freelancer starting out as a sort of bubblegum and paper clip solution for tracking my expenditures/purchases. It’s a surprisingly, flexible program and was definitely worth the money. Really glad I had it. Not saying that’s how people should use it, but the point is it’s just really good for tracking money in/money out.
Yeah I used be like wow I have $5000 time to buy some bullshit. But really $3-4000 of that is upcoming expenses so I really only have $1000 and I should use that to pay down a CC or student loans.
I use YNAB (you need a budget) it’s not free but it’s GREAT for setting savings goals, paying back debt, etc.
It’s also flexible if you need to break your budget for some reason. You can pull from another bucket easily (gas bill is high, pull from emergency savings or cut from gaming), or just overspend and it goes on a report to keep track and plan better.
The best part is peace of mind on big bills - when it comes time to pay taxes or pay for my 6mo car insurance I’ve already been saving 1/12 or 1/6 of that total every month leading up to it. I can put everything in auto pay and never have to worry about the money being there.
I tried it for some time but couldn’t get past the onerous need to reconcile and categorize every single transaction that it detects. It finally made me shut down my account because it caused me such great anxiety.
It auto categorizes now but it’s still a little tedious, sometime recently they added batch categorizing so I can grab all the restaurants and add that to my Eating Out category but it also forces me to look at my finances every couple days which is a good habit imo.
Man I used YNAB a ton as a freelancer starting out as a sort of bubblegum and paper clip solution for tracking my expenditures/purchases. It’s a surprisingly, flexible program and was definitely worth the money. Really glad I had it. Not saying that’s how people should use it, but the point is it’s just really good for tracking money in/money out.
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Yeah I used be like wow I have $5000 time to buy some bullshit. But really $3-4000 of that is upcoming expenses so I really only have $1000 and I should use that to pay down a CC or student loans.