Corporate Shill (YNAB Edition)

06 Jan, 2023

On average, corporations disappoint me. Whether it's creating poor products, misleading their customers, mistreating their employees, exploiting their monopolies, or a plethora of other abuses, there is a lot for me to be unhappy about at most corporations.¹ But I do have a few companies/products² that I enjoy so much that I'm willing to be a complete corporate shill for them (at least for the length of a blog post). This post will discuss YNAB and I may cover other groups in future posts.

YNAB or You Need A Budget, is a budgeting app paired with a philosophy on how to budget. It provides articles and videos to teach its core budgeting tenets as well as showcase various financial circumstances and how to approach them. And then the app itself is built to work easily within this budgeting framework with connectivity to banks and credit cards to give a simple, central view of all your finances.

YNAB fundamentally changed how I view finances. I started using it a couple months into my first full-time job when I realized I needed some kind of budgeting plan to know how I was spending my money versus how I wanted to spend it. I'm almost 2 years in now and I believe it has saved me tens of thousands of dollars.

The core concept of YNAB³ is zero-dollar budgeting: assign all of your money to a purpose - whether savings for a vacation, approximate grocery bills or exact monthly subscriptions. Break down your financial spending into the categories you care about, and assign how much money you want to them. Then set goals for how much money you put into those categories over time, and new income can go toward meeting those goals.

This concept is simple but very powerful. When you spend more on a category than what you have, you have to make a conscious decision on where the extra money comes from (i.e. which other category is now getting shorted). It also helps to capture "unexpected expenses" (YNAB rule 2) such as car repairs or doctor visits. You fund these categories over time, so that when they do appear, you have already set money aside to handle them.

The app then lets you track this easily by connecting to sources and sinks of income and asking you to categorize incoming transactions.

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I am subscribed to the /r/YNAB and I see tons of testimonials of how much YNAB has helped people and I whole-heartily agree.

Now hear comes the real shill. I like YNAB so much and think it is so helpful for people that I'm willing to put money on it. YNAB has a fairly standard referral - if I refer you we both get a month free. Their pricing model is $14.99 a month or $99 a year (for an $80 savings). I will refer you and help you setup in that first month. And if you're interested in continuing, I'll pay for that first year for you. If it doesn't end up being your thing, no sweat. If you like it and are continuing, I'd like that $99 back to feed back into this program. (I do not have unlimited funds, so I'll cap this to the first 10 people). I won't post the referral link here, but contact me and I will provide it for you.