I currently using buxfer.com , my annual subscription is come up too. Looking for YNAB plus Sync Accounts experience from any Aussie users here
The amount of time I’ve spent over the last year trying YNAB replacements or mucking around with spreadsheets easily exceeded in worth the cost of the subscription.
I think I’ll just go back to YNAB for ease.
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Totally agree with that.
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This is the conclusion I reached as well, and begrudgingly resubbed recently. Shared family budgets included for no extra cost convinced me.
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Digging this up as Actual Budget has gone open source and no longer has a fee. You have to download it and run via Docker but once it’s running, it appears to work fine for me on my Synology. However, it’s relatively basic at the minute - similar to YNAB4.
Buckets is good - I like the Goals feature but it doesn’t have scheduled payments and it doesn’t appear to link transfers (so if you edit one, the other one wasn’t edited) so I think the time spent with it isn’t that great.
I’ve been using YNAB4 since the start of this thread when I let YNAB subscription lapse and I would say it worked OK for a period. However, I’ve not budgeted well for a month or two, in part not accessing the budget on a desktop and general life getting in the and I’ve had to play catch up.
Perhaps that £80 a year fee is worth it for being able to use a mobile app at the same time, as a quickly daily scan of the app would probably align everything and I’m not limited to having my laptop or desktop nearby.
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Funny that this should surface today. I’ve just received notification that my YNAB subscription renews this week. I haven’t looked at alternatives this year. YNAB has been too important to my family for years now. I couldn’t manage the family finances without it.
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I still do not get what YNAB (that costs more) can do more than Buxfer. To use YNAB for Australia, I also have to paid for local bank sync.
However, I am open to switching to YNAB if I can see value for (extra) money
I’d say that YNAB is intended to do LESS than many personal finance apps or systems. It’s part of the approach: you are buying into a specific framework that’s really intended to do a few things well: to break the pattern of living paycheck-paycheck by paying off debt and building up a buffer while planning your spending. It’s much less effective, in my experience, when you’ve reached some stability and want to solve a wider range of problems or answer a wider range of financial questions.
The app is only a small part of what you are buying with your subscription, and doesn’t make sense at all unless you fully commit to the system. It didn’t work miracles for me, but I was grateful that I used YNAB (before it went subscription and changed its philosophy) for a couple of years when the family was young and money tight. I left it (years ago) because I had to have far too many “work-arounds” to actually keep track of things and because I got fed up of being told I was a heretic every time I asked how to do something that demanded a little more flexibility or depth.
Like so much software, what ultimately works is not using any app, but how an app can become a useful part of a wider and deeper system to achieve your goals, and that’s always about personal choices, plans and reviews.
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This.
It is their system, and they have developed and changed it many times, and they will show you this in every way possible. If you ask questions that don’t fit their way of thinking, they’ll tell you that you’re doing it all wrong. Their attitude is one of the reasons I no longer use YNAB. For example, when I asked about having two different accounts, my personal account and a family account, I was immediately accused of hiding money from my wife and told that a sane person only has one account for the whole family. I reverted back to using YNAB 4 because Austrians, like Australians, don’t get automatic bank syncing.
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For me YNAB’s simplicity of focusing on one task, zero based or envelope budgeting remains its greatest strength.
My family doesn’t need investment planning as we have none. We don’t need retirement planning as we won’t be able to consider retirement due to our circumstances.
What we do need is rigid adherence to the zero based budget. YNAB remains the best for that for us.
I’ve used most other budget software out there but for at least 15 years I’ve run our family budget through YNAB.
As for bank syncing yes we don’t get that in Australia but I wouldn’t use it if it were to be made available. I like the accountability of entering each and every transaction. I’m in our budget multiple times a day, checking and rechecking category balances and fine tuning goals for each dollar.
Way way back in time I used MS Money with sync. It was great but it was an after the fact register of where the money had gone. We still need a plan for where the money will go, hence YNAB.
Zero based budgeting is a Marmite moment or a peanut butter moment. You either love zero based budgeting or you don’t.
As for one account or multiple. Various experts have had their say over the years.
My wife and I combined our two accounts into a joint account when we married and we would never do it any other way. One account with YNAB is easy to manage. Multiple accounts too can be readily managed.
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Couldn’t agree more. YNAB is best for simple families who are more paycheck to paycheck (hopefully a bit above thanks to YNAB) and making sure you’ve planned for everything. The rigid system is built for that.
Marmite? I’m sure you meant Vegemite.
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I’d argue very strongly that you need BOTH. Envelopes make sure you’ll have money to pay your expected and some unexpected expenses, but you can’t make real change in your pattern of income and spending unless you understand what it is, and why and you can’t even decide what to put in each envelope unless you know what you have had to spend before.
I’ve been using https://debitandcredit.app for years and really like it. I’ve got a very customized, probably narrow, use case for it too though, so it might fit your bill, might not.
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You get both with YNAB which allows you to make better choices as to what your real category balances should be.
Huh… Buxfer looks awesome!
just wondering how much time you have to spend on this. I tends to use credit card payment for everything possible and as little cash transactions as possible. Hence my credit cards transactions can be up to a few hundred items a month, ranged from buying coffee to home appliances.
For me at least, I would not be able to check this manually for every single transaction
I use Buxfer mainly to track my spending vs budgeted and my net worth trends. To this end, it is doing fine
I’m a YNAB guy and I mostly manually enter - 10-15 mins a day to budget, probably.
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Looking at Buxfer, it doesn’t have a good implementation of the envelope budgeting system, which is the aim of YNAB. It appears that I have to select how much I intend to spend for the month rather than budgeting what money I currently have available, which is the crucial difference between budgeting and envelope budgeting systems. It looks similar to Moneywiz interns of its tracking, which I’ve used in the past and most other budgeting apps, even GNUCash which I use for the tracking the whole lot. GNUCash doesn’t get every transaction added - just transfers between accounts and spending as a single consolidated payment but allows for the larger picture. Just admit I had a quick play and probably not long enough to get into the weeds, but a high level look seemed to suggest it wouldn’t work for me.
I also don’t agree with the comments it’s just for people living pay cheque to pay cheque. I wouldn’t consider myself in that category but it allows us to better prioritise where we want to spend our money and deal with expenses as and when they come in. All the other budgeting apps seem to struggle with moving money from one envelope to another. I’m not pay cheque to cheque but I’m certainly not in the case that I can just drop money on anything I want at any time - at least with out some knock on effects or delays to larger saving goals.
It’s a different way of thinking and it clicked with me. It sounds like it’s not your mindset, but that’s fine - life’s boring if we were all the same (and we couldn’t then discuss different software choices 
)
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Envelope budgeting is simply one method of selecting “how much I intend to spend for the month”, one in which you chose ONLY to budget money you have already received. If your big risk is spending money you don’t really have, it’s a wise choice, but it can restrict your flexibility (so you don’t use the money you do have as well as you could) if you are financially stable and sensible (e.g. YNAB’s “buffer” - keeping money to pay a bill that will not be due until after your next pay check, so you don’t actually need to keep it)
Almost all personal finance apps allow you to set a target spend against a category for a period and track it. They vary in how they help you to set those targets. Strict envelope budgeting apps will only allow you to allocate income already received. That’s the essential difference. In my experience there’s ALWAYS a way to move money from one budget to another and many apps allow straightforward “budget transfers”. Lots of apps are very much better than YNAB (IMHO) at helping you set and save for long term goals.
For example, you can do envelope budgeting in an app like Moneywiz and the approach would work in a lot of personal finance apps. They explain how here: https://help.wiz.money/en/articles/4838574-setup-envelope-budgeting-system
People should use an app that works for them, and if that’s YNAB, that’s fine by me, but I think a lot of that app’s dominance in a part of its market (and the prices it can command as a result) are due to successfully creating and marketing the idea that it is the only thing that can work for people, and that’s obviously never been true. it’s really rather strange how defensive its users are of YNAB, especially on its forums. As I said, asking a question about better ways to do things was more likely to bring condemnation from YNAB users than genuine help.
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