You may have been expecting another Mins Game post today, but I’m still working on that… So I’m going to start on another topic that I haven’t touched on in a while… my finances! I haven’t done a financial update post in a long, long time… (Last one was June 2018.) But don’t worry, I haven’t stopped budgeting or using my beloved YNAB (You Need A Budget)… So today I wanted to give you a small update on how all that is going…
Note: this post is not sponsored in any way, I just really love YNAB.
I don’t think it’ll come as a surprise to anyone who has been reading my blog for a few years that I love YNAB. It’s a budgeting application that really speaks to me. Originally, when I started using it, it was a software that you purchased (one time purchase), and it used your own drop box account to share the budget between different computers or mobile apps. In recent years, they have moved to a web based app with an annual subscription fee, but you were still able to continue to use your one time purchased software if you wanted. And so I did, because I hate being pushed in to annual subscription fees…
But… Last fall, I decided to finally check out the new app (I think I was actually forced to because a new operating system on our home computer was no longer compatible with the older version that I had been using). They offer a free trial (34 days – so you can go through a full month – and if you use my referral link to sign up we can both get a free month!), which I did before I committed. I exported my existing budget data, and transferred it all to the new app… I didn’t want to lose any of the historical information stored in the years of budgeting that I had done. I will admit that there were some hiccups in the transfer, and the first month in the new app I have purposely noted that it is the “transition” month because there were some messy things I had to do to get the numbers to line up. But… since that process was done, I really liked the new features, and also appreciated that the synchronizing between devices was seamless. It was “supposed” to be before, but there were always weird things that didn’t mesh well when inputting on the phone app, then looking at them on the computer program…
Anyway, fast forward to last month, and I’ve been using the new app for a while, things are going pretty good. I figured I knew what I was doing with the app. I was using it well. We have been through a few changes in our finances, had some large expenses and gained some new debt, had some variable income… We are coming out the other side now, and things are starting to settle out, and then… BAM! I found the YNAB youtube channel… And man, the game changers that I have learned in the last few weeks of watching their videos… It’s not that I was using the app incorrectly, it’s just that there was so much more that I could do. And so I wanted to quickly go over some of those things and how they are helping me get ahead with out finances.
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