There are numerous personal expenses software applications on the market, but most of them lack simplicity with too many features for the average user. Even free budget spreadsheets on the Internet seem to have this over designed quality. If you have to spend a lot of time in tracking a budget, chances are you won’t keep it up.
In doing some research on budgeting, I ran across this statement: live on the previous month’s income. The statement was associated with a product called YNAB (why nab), a personal expenses software application.
The idea is to slowly change your thinking about income. In general, most of us live paycheck to paycheck and income is allotted for immediate expenses, while credit cards make up for any lack. In YNAB, as income comes in you have a choice of using it in the current month or to be used the following month. You can also split the income – some to be used now and the rest, later. Interesting!
Little by little as you track expenses and save, you will be allocating most of your current month’s income to the following month. In other words, you are living on last month’s income with additional money in the bank at all times. This change will take time of course depending on your situation and how much debt you have.
In addition, you’ll have enough to cover those occasional expenses such as annual insurance premiums or auto registrations because they will be planned for in advance. This is extremely important to retain financial integrity and not incur more debt.
The name YNAB stands for You Need a Budget and that pretty much says it all. It is simple personal expenses software that only takes minutes a day to maintain once the initial setup is done. Because of the forward thinking nature of the application, there will be less worry about making ends meet. This is especially advantageous if you are following a debt elimination plan.
YNAB has full support for the user in the form of online classes, forums and plenty of reading material to help you in making that switch in thinking from money panic to money secure. The first step is to download the software for a free 7-day trial to check it out.
The one downside to the software is the lack of a debt snowball tracker for those on a debt elimination plan. You can certainly track your debts with YNAB, but it would be nice to have the long term snowball calculator. Perhaps it will be included in a future release.
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