No Credit Needed reader, James, uses the You Need A Budget budgeting system to manage his household finances. He recently sent me an awesome email and I’m happy to share it with you:
I don’t believe that I have ever taken the opportunity to thank you for mentioning YNAB on your blog. For it was here at No Credit Needed that I first heard of YNAB. At that time my wife was pregnant with our first child and we were trying to decide if she was going to return to work or become a stay at home Mom.
To make a VERY long story short, YNAB afforded us the opportunity to not only allow her to stay at home with our child full time, but also allowed us to become completely debt free and financially worry free. So while the folks at YNAB deserve tons of credit, it is really you who deserves the most. I can’t thank you enough.
Isn’t that awesome? I’m super-proud of and for James and his wife, and happy to see that You Need A Budget is working for them. My wife and I have been using YNAB to manage our finances for several years. YNAB just announced version 3.0 and its pretty awesome.
James, thanks for letting me share your email – and congratulations on the new baby! New babies rock!
You Need A Budget is my budgeting tool of choice. I’ve been a YNAB affiliate for several years and I really dig their product.
I agree wholeheartedly! I’ve used YNAB for two years and it has allowed us –
1. For my wife to work part-time and spend more times with our children.
2. Not scramble for Christmas expenses (we are big spenders on this oliday) as we have in the past.
3. Aid in planning for non-regular expenses such as twice yearly insurance, annual work expenses, etc.
4. Streamline keeping track of expenses.
5. Reduced our spending on areas we wish and allow us to increase in areas we’ve wanted to but previously had never been able.
I’ve not used the new program (yet- it’s downloaded) but from what I’ve read there are some great reporting improvements and more flexibility.
Can you tell I love it?
I’m another ynab fan. I’ve been using it for a year and it really does help to give me an accurate picture of my finances.
Love YNAB! It is the best budget software, period!
Being a Quicken and then MS Money user for many, many, many years, it was a little weird using YNAB at first. Actually, it was very weird. It is like night and day compared to those two. I suggest people view the YNAB video tutorials. I found them really helpful in getting my puny mind around the YNAB rules. And I am currently using YNAB 3 on my mac, which makes it even sweeter! Try it. It will show you how to live on last month’s income (This is my favorite YNAB rule).
Interestingly enough, I started using YNAB about a month ago also from your site! I love it so far and I hope that it becomes as useful to me as it did for this person.
I’ve tried a lot of the options out there but now I’m a huge YNAB fan. And the new YNAB release is even better!