YNAB vs Mint: Why YNAB Is The Better Budget App. Budgeting is one of the first things people learn to do when they start growing up. That is, if they want to stay at the top of their growing list of accounts and still save money over time.
Raed :Â Best Alternative to YNAB and Mint – A Review
Most people think budgeting should be easy. You take your income, deduct your expenses, and whatever you have left you can spend however you want, right?
It’s actually not that simple. To get things done right, you should use a budget app. The two most popular budget apps are You Need a Budget (YNAB) and Mint. This article will compare YNAB and Mint so you can decide which budget app is best for you.
Why do I need to apply a budget?
A budget too simple is a budget for people who never want to move forward. They will not be prepared for emergencies, they will not have a pension, and they will definitely not remember those bills that come unexpectedly.
The most important thing to keep in mind, whether you’re using YNAB or Mint, is that neither of them is going to create a budget for you. To get started, you always have to do something in advance.
To start off: mint
Mint is really trying to automate the budget creation process. This is accomplished by providing him with all the login details for all your accounts.
When you sign up for the first time, Mint will guide you through a wizard where you will add all your login details. If you are already done with the wizard and want to add additional accounts, simply select Add Accounts from the menu.
Once you’ve added all the accounts, you need to give Mint 24 hours or so to collect all of your account data and try to fit everything into some budget.
After everything is configured, the next time you enter your personal account, you will see all your accounts on one page.
This includes:
- Checking current and savings account balances.
- Credit card balances
- Loan balances.
- Investments and Real Estate Ownership
- A list of your upcoming invoices and their dates.
- Various charts detailing your expenses.
The entire “budget†approach of the Mint is historical data analysis. It helps you analyze your spending structure in order to adjust future spending in order to cut costs that you are spending too much on.
Mint knows all the “goals” of your spending based on the budget you create. In the next section, you will learn more about how “budgeting†looks like in YNAB and Mint.
Get started: YNAB
Getting started at YNAB is completely different. This is mainly because YNAB’s entire philosophy is upside down from what you usually think of when you think about budgeting.
YNAB doesn’t care how much you make or spend every month. He only cares about how you plan to spend the money you actually have. For this reason, you only need to provide information about your bank accounts
YNAB will connect to these accounts and collect all balances.
When you first get started with YNAB, it will provide you with a default budget that matches most of the regular household budget items.
You can add new items by selecting the small + icon to the right of the section and adding a new “category” for each budget line.
At this stage, you don’t actually need to plan anything, you just need to try to make sure that everything that you are ever going to spend money on is included in the list.
After you’ve added something, it’s time to distribute all the available money in your bank accounts across the various items in your “budget.” In the next section, we’ll compare how YNAB and Mint do it.
Making a Budget: Peppermint
When it comes to budget, Mint is a bit old school. This is because it uses a standardized approach to assigning a “goal” to each account. This means that you give him a monthly limit that you want to hold.
To start creating a budget in Mint, choose Budgets from the menu
Then click the “Create Budget” button.
You select each category (budget item) in turn, assign the frequency of this account and the maximum amount that you want to spend (or should spend) on this account.
You will need to do this for each individual budget line for which you have an account, you want to save or invest.
This is really no different from the standard budget you can create in Excel. The only difference is that Mint enters your actual spending data over time and then compares your actual spending to your target budget spending.
You will notice that the end result for Mint is this:
- 1 -You will know when your overall spending gets out of hand by the end of the month.
- 2 -You will see which budget lines you overspend each month.
- 3 -The Mint tends to generate guilt as budget overruns are often inevitable.
- 4 -Resolving Contingencies Spending in Mint is complex and adds to your financial planning.
- 5 -Invoice notification emails from Mint can be annoying if you don’t disable them.
- 6- Overall, the budgeting interface and process is complex and time consuming.
Making a Budget: YNAB
Budgeting at YNAB will make your head spin at first. This is especially true if you’ve always used the old approach to monthly budgeting.
If you are going to “assign” a monthly amount to each budget line at the beginning of the month, you will have to re-learn everything you’ve ever thought about budgeting.
YNAB’s approach is that you only plan your spending as far in the future as possible with the cash you currently have. More funds are added to “Include in the Budget†every time you receive a salary or any positive cash flow into your bank account.
You will need to go down the list of budget items and assign the portion of these funds to be included in the budget for each budget item to be disbursed soon.
As you progress down the list, you will need to make sure that you only allocate funds for the things that are due early.
Once your “To Budget†amount has been depleted, everything is ready until the next time you receive your salary.
The other side of budgeting is defining the categories that your recent spending falls under. You will need to do this almost every time you log into YNAB, selecting each bank account and specifying which category each item belongs to.
Over time, when you assign your expenses, you will see that they are deducted from the amount included in your budget.
This is where YNAB gets very interesting. If you spend too much in a category, you will see it in red. In fact, you will need to cover this overspending, either by assigning more money to it to be included in the budget (if you still have it), or by reallocating funds from other budget categories.
You will notice that the end result of YNAB is:
- It forces you to control spending in your categories (for example, dining out) so that you do not have to “steal” money from other categories that are important to you (for example, savings on a car).
- The distribution of funds by budget category gives the impression that you are actually spending that money, which makes you more realistic about your spending.
- YNAB helps you save in different areas of your budget and makes you proud when you actually achieve it.
- Not importing due dates for invoices forces you to keep track of due dates in another system so that you allocate funds to the most important accounts first.
- The psychology behind YNAB budgeting forces you to accumulate funds in your bank accounts naturally.
YNAB Vs Mint: a general comparison
So when comparing YNAB and Mint, which one wins? In this case, there is actually a clear winner.
Mint is built on the old-fashioned concept of making a monthly budget, setting goals, and then pushing yourself into submission with guilt when you fail every month.
Mint has the advantage that it integrates with every bank account and company you have accounts with, but there is a huge security risk with this integration. If someone ever hacks into the Mint servers, all of your financial accounts will be vulnerable.
YNAB, on the other hand, takes a very innovative approach. It literally forces you to plan all the funds coming in at the time they are received. If you want to save money, you need to make sure that money has been assigned to all bills due before your next paycheck before saving money.
The advantage of this is that you no longer look at your bank account to decide if you can afford something. You are looking at your budget. If you haven’t allocated money for a new sofa, you will have to spend money on something else that may be just as important to you.
This is the secret of why YNAB works so well and why it is clearly superior to Mint, no doubt.
YNAB vs Mint: Why YNAB Is The Better Budget App
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