Manage your money wisely with YNAB app

LKY -

Any idea how much your spending is each month? Where did you spend the money on? On which category you spent the most in a year?

It is a good sign when you start questioning the above and you should read on for our advice on budgeting and expense tracking. You might argue that it is simple to do a simple math by subtracting the ending balance from the starting balance of bank statement for a figure on monthly spending. However, you have no clue what categories account most and more importantly, you have no control or intention whatsoever to control over your expenses.

When I was in my first job, I began spending more money than in student life. I started to lose track of my spending (spending became outrageous easily lol) and I need to regain control of it. To start with, I used simple excel spreadsheet to track each spending record but functions are way too limited with just expenses on each categories indicated. As time went on, I demand more complexity on my budgeting so I turned to a more developed tool to replace excel, and YNAB comes in handy.

Three reasons for using YNAB

  1. YNAB supports access from multiple devices - phone, Mac and PCs and it was not as (There were not much choices in 2010s). We input daily expenses with the mobile app on our phone and usually retrieve a monthly spending overview with desktop devices. YNAB just fits our habit and needs perfectly!
  2. YNAB introduces the concept of envelop - equivalent to categories - whereby you can assign the preferred budget to each envelop like "Restaurants", "Transport", "Utilities" in the start the month. As you record the expenses daily, YNAB automatically deducts the spending from the budget you set. In other words, you will know how much money left for spending. It offers a flexibility to transfer the remaining budget from one envelop to another overspent one.
  3. Last, YNAB provides API, so if you happen to know programming (and in this case I do :P), you can access the budget data programmatically. This further enriches what we can do with YNAB. One such example is we want to know how much money we could still spend per day in this month which needs some calculation with the data from API, we also sent this pieces of information to Slack (we will be sharing more on Slack in subsequent posts!) so we get a daily report notification.

I hope this gives you a brief background of YNAB and how it can incorporate your needs with its functions. YNAB created a community where you can explore more of its abilities and successful stories of paying off debts. They offer a free trial of 34 days too (By signing up with our referral link you will get a free month of YNAB when you subscribe it after the trial)! We really love YNAB and that we have subscribed to its services for 5 years and the good news is we have been saving 15% more than 5 years ago. We will dedicate our next few posts on solid tips and guidelines on usage ;)