Video Transcript
Hey Tammy here!
A question I’ll hear a lot is what budgeting app should I use? What is the best budgeting app?
If you want the quick and dirty answer, the budgeting app I recommend is You Need A Budget (YNAB). It’s the only budgeting app you need. It’s the best one out there. You can go sign up for it. There will be a link (because it’s what I use), and if you sign up you get a 30 day free trial and if you sign up using my link you can get an extra 30 days. So simple answer… You Need A Budget… sign up, you won’t regret it.
If you want to learn more about why then keep listening.
When you’re trying to figure out what budgeting app to use the first thing you should think about is “What do I want to use my budgeting app for? What is it supposed to do for me?” Hopefully the first thing you want your budgeting app to do for you is help you budget! So how do you budget? At the beginning of the month you sit down and you take your income and you deduct your expenses. You want to create what’s called a “zero-based budget”, meaning after you deduct your expenses you get to zero. If it’s negative you’ve overspent and you need to go back and adjust your expenses so that you get to zero. If you have a positive number at the end you’ve under spent, you don’t want that either! You want to take that money and allocate it somewhere; maybe it can go to savings, or debt repayment, or to a miscellaneous fund. That’s what you want your budget to do… you want your budgeting app to be one that allows you to do a zero-based budget. And there are actually only two budgeting apps that do that. I’ll get to that.
But before that, I’ll talk about all the ones that are called “budgeting apps” but actually are not budgeting apps. They are more what I would call “expense tracking apps”, they track your expenses and tell you where your money went, but they don’t actually help you decide where it’s going to go. They are not designed to guide you down this path to help you to a true zero-based budget.
Expense tracking apps that are called budgeting apps would include apps like Mint, PocketGuard, Goodbudget, and Personal Capital, are some of the more popular, common ones in this category. And I would not recommend these ones because they are actually expense tracking apps, not budgeting apps.
Now you might say “No, there’s a budget tab”, yes, somewhere in there if you dig around there will be someplace where you can enter a budget. But it’s somewhere kind of behind the scenes and it doesn’t hold you accountable the way that a true budgeting app will do. So that’s why I don’t recommend them.
So that leaves me with the only two apps that are actual budgeting apps, the zero-based budgeting apps. They are designed from the ground up to do that for you. And the two budgeting apps are You Need A Budget (YNAB), which is the one I recommend, and then a second one is “EveryDollar”, which is a budgeting app created by Dave Ramsey (if you’re familiar with him).
First I’ll talk about EveryDollar and why this is not the one I recommend. Because it is awesome, it does the zero-based budgeting and it does that very well. It even has a free version, which is awesome. But the problem with the free version is that you need to enter everything manually. You can’t hook it up to your bank and you cannot import your bank transactions. You have to enter everything manually. And some people actually prefer that, they like that feeling of being in touch and entering all their expenses, that helps them to keep better track. And if that’s you, then that’s great, you can sign-up for free EveryDollar. But I know for me… that’s work! If I had to enter all those transactions I would be a lot less likely to do it. I like for budgeting to be easy. Now EveryDollar does have an upgrade, for $129US per year, you can upgrade to their EveryDollar Plus, and that one offers importing and hooking up your bank… Except it doesn’t work for Canadian banks?!? So you could pay the money but you actually won’t get any benefit from it. That is why I do not recommend EveryDollar unless you absolutely love to enter your transactions manually.
Which leaves me with… You Need A Budget! And I’m not just recommending it because it’s the only one left! I truly believe it is the best because it does that zero-based budget, which you want it to do. And what’s nice is that it’s set up for a zero-based budget, that’s what you see, it helps you do it. And if you try to overspend there are red boxes that start coming up, telling you “warning, warning, you’ve over spent here”. So it really guides you.
Also the You Need A Budget website has a ton of resources. If there are any questions you can think of they’re going to have a resource. They have free courses you can take to help you with your budgeting. And if you budget this way it truly will change your finances. AND it lets you import or connect to your bank, which makes it easy, because I know for me, if it’s easy I’m more likely to do it. I like easy because then it will happen.
Now it’s not free. You can get a free month trial and if you use my link you will get an additional 30 days to try it. But the cost is $11.99US per month (as of June/July 2020), or you can pay for a full year which is $84US a year. They do offer a money back guarantee, so if you don’t like it you can get your money back.
So why would I recommend something you have to pay for when something like Mint is free (and I know lot’s of people love Mint)… well because it’s not going to do what you need it to do. And the small amount that you’re going to pay for YNAB, and for the benefit that you get from it, it really is a no-brainer. There’s a saying “Don’t step over dollars to pick up pennies”, and that’s what using something like Mint would be, just because you don’t want to pay $11.99 a month to get the paid app.
I recommend You Need A Budget because…
· It’s what I use
· It’s the only one you need
· It budgets the way you need it to
· It can import your banking transactions or it can hook up to your bank
· They have a ton of free resources
· A money back guarantee
· You get a one month free trial
· If you use my link you’ll get an extra month trial
That’s what I recommend. Go with it, sign up, and I think you’ll be glad you did!
If you have any problems or any questions please comment or feel free to get in touch with me.