As I was working up the courage to start a blog discussing personal finance, I realized that as I look back over my life that it’s something that I’ve always been interested in.
I grew up watching my grandfather constantly watching his stocks on tv. Before the internet was really doing its thing, he’d have CNBC on for hours with the stock ticker rolling. He’d have his notebook ready to write down the most recent price as he watched his stock pass.
When I was growing up, something that we enjoyed doing was driving around and looking at nice neighborhoods and nice houses. As we drove through the neighborhoods, the comment that was always made was, “man, what do these people do for a living!?”
But as we would look I always told myself that I wanted to be able to buy a nice house someday.
I’ve always been fascinated by how money works, how people get it, and how to put myself at the biggest advantage for my income level to keep it.
The year Katie and I got married, it turned into an obsession.
We had just gotten married in June and graduated with masters degrees in May. We were both going to be public school band directors in Texas and we were entering the workforce at a time where there were serious budget shortfalls in education. Most school districts were on a hiring freeze. We applied and interviewed, waited and wondered.
Finally, at the very end of July, Katie landed a gig in the Houston area. We were so excited. We were going to get to move to an area that we were really excited about and Katie had an awesome new job.
The problem was, it was quickly becoming apparent that it wasn’t going to happen for me.
As that became apparent, I became obsessed with looking at how we were going to make it work with our finances.
Even though I’ve always loved learning about finances, that’s where my love for the subject really took off.
I’ve read a whole lot on the subject, I’ve done a ton of experimenting, and tried many different solutions to budgets.
The best tool I’ve found for budgeting is call You Need A Budget(or YNAB for short).
Now I’ll leave the debate over what’s best to someone else. I’ve tried a lot of different solutions and this is the absolute best budget tool. I’m sure that I’ll still be tempted to experiment with new things when I discover them, but I doubt I’ll switch.
And really…it doesn’t matter what you use.
My dream with this blog is to take a subject I’m super obsessed with, and to really help people who either aren’t as obsessed or just aren’t as far along as me on their journey to figuring out their finances.
Things that I’ve come to value in my ynab budget:
- It’s a zero based budget-Meaning that you assign a job to every single dollar. There is no ambiguity over what every single dollar you have is supposed to go toward.
- Flexibility month to month-This is a big problem I’ve seen with budgets in the past. You need a unique budget for each and every single month. Budget programs that have you create this perfect budget that is supposed to be a fit for every month are not based on reality and won’t set you up for success.
- The amount you have budgeted in each category is what matters, not how much you have in your checking account.
- It also acts as a checkbook ledger.
In college, I used the budget tool in the online portal with my wells Fargo account. I’m not sure if it’s any better now, but it really wasn’t practical then.
In our first year of marriage, my wife and I used Mint, which is a very popular tool. However, I’m just really not a fan. Last I checked, the things that bothered me about it are still there, so I really don’t think it’s the best way to budget.
It doesn’t allow you to create a unique budget month to month, which kind of pigeonholes you into this concept that we should have a perfect template for our budget that works for each month of our lives.
The other issue is splitting transactions. If I go to target, I could be spending money from 4 different categories when I pay. I may be buying diapers(which is a unique category for us), clothing for kids, a book for myself, a new shirt for Katie, and toothbrushes. These items all come from unique categories for us and there really wasn’t a way to split that in Mint.
Then, we I read the Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsey, we gave the cash envelopes a shot.
Look, I know it’s 2019, but I really thought paying with cash was a good learning experience for us. There are a lot of studies out there that prove that when you pay with a card, you spend more. I totally believe it.
When we paid with cash, I felt like I was paying way more attention to how much I was paying. When I paid with card, I sometimes had no idea how much I was spending. When you pay with cash, you actually have to get the envelope out, count out the money, did the coins out if you have exact change.
So I totally believe those studies that say that you spend more when you pay with card, debit and credit. That’s why we have to be super on purpose with our money. It slips out of our fingers so incredible easy.
After we did cash for a while, I discovered the land of budgeting spreadsheets. Now, we did not have a super complicated spreadsheet. I would say it was a big deal compared to what most people do with their finances, but there’s some real budget nerds out there that do amazing things with their spreadsheets. The problem is, it took too much work for too few features.
Around the second year that we were married, I saw an facebook ad for YNAB. If you ever wonder if those facebook ads actually work, they definitely do. I had never heard of YNAB and I definitely didn’t have any friends doing it.
I checked it out and I was super intrigued by this program. This was 2013, and at the time, it was a program that you downloaded to your computer.
YNAB is a little different. As budget programs do, it does pretty much anything you would possibly need from your budget. But there is definitely a learning curve. I did the free trial for a month, but I just didn’t feel like I could justify the price-tag. I think at the time it was $65.
I spent another year struggling along with my budget spreadsheet. They worked pretty well, but they just took so much stinkin work to keep updated. Finally, the next summer in 2014, I realized that YNAB had everything that I was looking for, and would do a better job of it than I could do with my spreadsheets.
Now, I feel like I am a complete YNAB nerd. I will go check something out when I hear about it-I spent some time with Dave Ramsey’s Every Dollar app to see what I thought, but there is nothing out there that I’ve found that competes with YNAB.
That being said, I think at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what you use. If you are totally convinced that another budget tool works the best, that’s totally ok.
Here’s what you need to do starting today. If you don’t have a budget tool that you use, I want you to go sign up for the free trial of YNAB. If the reason you’re reading this is because you’re trying to find information on the internet on how to clean up your finances, you need to start today, right now.
You can learn as you go, you don’t need to have all of the information right now, just the next step you need to take. That next step is to start with the budget. You don’t have to have all of the perfect categories and the perfect percentages to assign to each one. Just take a guess, and start.
If this is your first time to start a budget, if you’ve been thinking about finally getting your act together and getting yourself on a budget, that’s awesome! I want to hear about hit. Send me an email and let me know that you’re starting.
For my people that already have a tool for budgeting, what do you use? What’s the feature of the budgeting tool that you feel like you can’t live without.
Like I said before, I feel super nerdy about this stuff and I can’t wait to hear what you’ve got to say.
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