This is so important. Until I read this I didn’t understand why people loved YNAB. For me, buckets of money for specific purposes is not how I think of finaces at all. Needs change and things are far more fluid than a strict envelope system can handle. Then again, we have zero debts, no car or house payments, no loans, use credit cards almost exclusively and pay them off in full every month. We’re at the age that the RMD is in effect for most of our investment accounts.
We use Banktivity to track expenses for 3 businesses and our personal accounts but NOT any investment accounts. The ongoing inability to properly handle multiple complex investment accounts and direct download of transactions was insurrmountable. However, for providing the year end expenses by buusiness that our accountant needs it’s fine.
For investment data we have 2 brokers. One of them has an app that can aggregate all the investment accounts even those from the other institution so for overall data on net worth and investment details I use that.
Interesting thread. I’ve been with YNAB so long now, since YNAB 3 launched, it would take something exceptional to make me move. I haven’t found anything yet which fits the way I budget for my family better than YNAB.
I was similar, since it was YNAB 4 then nYNAB to its current iteration. I found I was doing more basic cost tracking and reactive “roll with the punches” week after week that I never actually used it to step back and look at family finances and forecasting as well as not being discreet enough to drill into patterns at particular places etc. It was very good at making sure I was staying in some guide posts though which had become less critical as those changes became habits.
I don’t recommend changing if you see it meeting your needs, there’s a mindset in YNAB that isn’t as natural elsewhere and those guide posts aren’t as obvious. If you’re not having issues with long term planning or needing having to track any investments (super / property etc.) then I wouldn’t stress.
The thing I saw with YNAB and loved it so long was that it does the basics the best, no one does basic envelope tracking better than them, but it doesn’t do more at all; if that makes sense.
I have been trying to figure out a solution to move away from YNAB too. I like it, a lot. Envelope budgeting makes sense to me. But sometimes I feel like I hit edges of the software and it doesn’t do a good job with net worth tracking, or giving me a holistic picture of my income. Plus, it’s a $100/year subscription. I tried Actual Budget before they went self-hosted only, and I do actually really like Buckets (I’m keeping an eye on it for when the mobile version is ready for daily driving).
I’ve been attempting to hack together my own solution using some plaintext command line tools (the rabbit hole of r/plaintextaccounting was a wild ride) and I feel like I’ve made some decent headway. Not enough to replace YNAB yet, but I’m learning. The nice thing is the tool I’ve chosen (hledger) is very flexible and I can basically do anything I want with it. The downside is that it is very flexible and thus does not have good gutter-guards if you want to do envelope-style budgeting. I wrote a blog post about it that sort of explains how I hacked it into an envelope budget, but it is definitely not for the faint of heart.
I’m enjoying reading others’ responses. It does seem like there’s nothing quite like YNAB for those who are really married to that method, but I will probably always be looking.
Banktivity user here. It has some minor things that are incredibly frustrating (download from Vanguard still doesn’t work and recurring dividend payments never memorize the category) but not enough to switch. I recently looked around at a few other apps and tried a DIY solution for a month or so in parallel but it was too cumbersome. I couldn’t find anything else as robust and detailed as Banktivity.
(Full disclosure I am a CPA and get pretty nerdy with my finances.)
Big thanks to @Helios for his long detailed post of Banktivity. It convinced me to give Banktivity another run.I tried it for a while a few years ago but couldn’t make it stick. Been a YNAB user for a years and I’ve run into issues lately with budgeting and I’ve never enjoyed their reports. I’m almost 10 days in on Banktivity and enjoying it so far. Now to convince my wife to use it over YNAB!
I’m a week in with Banktivity now, and I am pretty sure I am staying with it and will drop nYNAB and Moneydance.
It took a LOT of attempts to get the budget and envelopes set up, but once I did, it’s been great. I’m not sure if I’m benefiting from recent changes in version 9, but I really like the budget screen. It’s easy to see my scheduled transactions, budget amounts and what I have in each envelope. Moving money to ‘roll with the punches’ is simple, and diving into an individual budget/envelope line item is great as it brings up a report for that item that shows both the upcoming scheduled transactions for that envelope and all the movements in and out of the envelope.
Reports are very good. I like that I can create variants of reports based on existing reports. For example, it’s made it quick and easy to go back and generate capital gains reports by year. As a UK user, I had to learn how to get it to give me a UK-applicable report. I needed to go back and change ‘Lot Selection’ from ‘FIFO’ to ‘Average’ for all historic taxable sales in my investment accounts, so it used more UK applicable rules.
I like to forecast based on budgets & upcoming transactions, and there is a forecast report, but out of the box, it won’t take budgets without scheduled transactions into account (e.g. Groceries, eating out, fun money etc…) To get this to work, I set up placeholder budget amounts for these costs as scheduled transactions for the last day of the month. I can skip them at the end of the month, but having them allows me to get an idea of forecasting months from now.
It’s not all been great, though - two issues persist. Firstly support is tough to get hold of. I’m still awaiting a response to a ‘ticket’ I raised a week ago.
Secondly - Investments. The module works well for me, I can see my portfolio, and it’s easy to look at stats such as rate of return etc… The problem is the slow/inconsistent / just plain broken updates of Crypto and Stock/fund prices. I can live with it as I am a passive ‘buy & hold’ type investor, but this might be a deal breaker for me if I was more active.
I’m thinking of starting up using some sort of finance software again. 10+ years ago, I used iBank. A couple of years ago, I set up MoneyWiz but it constantly would not connect to my investments and became too frustrating to use. After doing some digging on the web and now reading this (including @Helios fantastic write up), I think I may give Banktivity a try again. Can’t hurt with the 30 day trial.
I have been using it for about 5 years and it’s pretty solid. Vanguard has some issues at times, but not a deal breaker. For the most part it connects, updates, and works well. LMK if you have any questions, happy to help.
I can’t remember when i started using Banktivity … certainly before they took on the current name. Many years.
It has stood the test of time for me. yes, there are sometimes wriggles with connecting to bank accounts, but for that they are beholden to the third party interfaces, e.g Saltedge, Yodlee, the banks and institutions, and who knows who else. The good news is their support is top notch and persistent.
