I’ve been doing my research and found some options like Banktivity, YNAB, Good Budget, and other popular choices but all of them are subscription based. Although I have no problem paying again a fee to upgrade to a newer version of an app.
I don’t need a direct connection with my bank to justify a subscription. In fact, I enjoy adding my expenses and incomes manually.
What do you use to budget? I’m thinking about just resorting to spreadsheets or hledger which someone suggested in the forum (although I’m not familiar with working with the terminal).
Do you need phone access? If not, Buckets might be worth a shot. I gave this a go and it’s as close to YNAB 4 (the version before it went subscription) and it works well.
The only reason I don’t use it anymore is because I’ve got YNAB 4 working on macOS Apple Silicon now, and have gone back to that - which I went to after YNAB upped the price of its subscription and that made to expensive for me (blame the falling £ against the $!)
If you want to keep it cheap, and type in anything by your own, I would also recommend to use a spreadsheet.
For this kind of usage, it shouldn’t really matter which App (Numbers, Excel, Obsidian, Devonthink?, or any other App providing Spreadsheets) you use for this.
The only think I would have a look on, would be the possibility to export the data via CSV.
I’ve never heard the use case of Devonthink (which I own and use) for budgeting, I’ll look further into that. What app has helped you to budget? or What software have you used for a longer period?
MoneyWell had an iOS / iPadOS app when it was first posted. The app was sold to someone who dropped that development and let the macOS app coast with only modest bug fix changes. The app was sold again to the current owners. From what I see, the UI remains unchanged from the time it was first offered (at least a decade ago if I am not mistaken).
All this is to say that your anxiety about non-native macOS code and your expectations for an iOS app may not be the best metrics to make a final decision.
At the time I was doing budgets more diligently, I did find MoneyWell more effective for me than YNAB. These were essentially the only two choices back then for the bucket approach to money management.
I downloaded the app for the trial period and I have to say I am enjoying setting everything up. Banktivity was a lot more complex for my needs, and gave up with it because of that. I think I will send a message to the developer of MoneyWell to see if the iOS is still around, although I don’t need it. I really prefer to get to home and do track everything with my laptop, it’s just like more intentionality.
I used Finances for a long time and was satisfied with it. The app was inspired by the double entry accounting software ledger-cli. But the developer has confirmed that it’s not going to be updated any more. So I switched to the open source plain text double entry accounting software beancount, which shares the same principles and origin. It takes a bit of time to learn but the documentation is thorough. It’s a modern Python implementation, which works quite well.
I use Moneydance mainly because of the ability to track my investments with auto download of stock/crypto prices along side my budgeting in one app. I tried so many times to get Banktivity working like this and never made it. It’s not really an envelope budgeting app though. I use its ‘foresight’ function to budget, it;s good because it allows me to forecast account balances based on future transactions & budget items.
For a free YNAB clone you can’t go wrong with Buckets or Aspire.
Does it support zero based budgeting? For the moment I’ll go with money well. I’m not a developer so my familiarity with command line tools is zero. I plan to learn how to use things like hledger or gnu cash while I do everything with moneywell.
That sounds great. Complex works for some people, specially if we love tinkering and playing with what we see. Others just want to spend little time and use an app.
Re: ledger-cli, there’s a project that is heavily inspired by and more actively maintained called hledger. The author has a comparison table and history here: hledger and Ledger - hledger
edit: of course, as soon as I post this, I noticed it’s been mentioned several times already lol
I have gone back to YNAB 4 - I was a long term user of it when it was around, and I had a license. I stopped using it about a year or two after they moved to the online version and I used that for about three years. It not being able to run on macOS partly drove me that way, and the iOS app beginning to fail (as my wife only uses iOS).
However, after continued price increases, I decided I’d had enough and ran YNAB 4 on a Windows machine, but I also managed to find out how to run on macOS again (basically it replaces the Adobe Air with the last 64 bit version - I found the script here) so I went back to it. There are days I miss the iOS app, but it’s not the end of the world.
I assume once Apple Silicon no longer has access to Rosetta 2, I’d be out of luck again and then I’d probably move to Buckets. One of the things that I miss is the ability to set goals for buckets/envelopes, and I’ve just double checked the Buckets website and that appears to now have that function, so tomorrow might be spent looking at moving over to it - though this may wait until April and the new UK tax year so I’ve a full years history in one software!
Note that I run YNAB alongside GNUCash - one is budgeting and the other tracks investments and is updated only weekly in terms of spending. Perhaps a bit of effort maintaining two systems, but I see GNUCash as a different tool, though it does have budgeting built in.