A Penny Saved

Budgeting is one of the main pillars of personal finance.  Without a solid personal budget and a means to stick to it, your chancees of improving your financial health are pretty poor. 

Enter YNAB.  What in the world is YNAB?  You Need A Budget, of course.  There are two different flavors of YNAB budget software - YNAB and YNAB Pro.  With the vanilla YNAB you get a fancy set of Excel spreadsheets.  They are very user friendly, but do require some very basic Excel familiarity.  If Excel isn’t your thing, consider YNAB Pro, which is a standalone Windows application.  You also get some extra features such as unlimited categories, reporting, and the ability to import transactions from your bank.

YNAB Pro Interface

Though YNAB Pro runs $39 as opposed to $19 for the basic version, I recommend it fully.  It simply feels more full-fledged and polished -which it is.  The budget and expense screens are very simple to use and input your numbers.  The reports are exceptional, and can show you just about everything you can imagine.  If you don’t quite follow how you spend your money, YNAB Pro can be a livesaver.

Bonus Time

If you order YNAB Pro direction from this site, you even get a couple bonuses.  They include the YNAB Debt Snowball, Retirement planner, Mortgage Analyzer, and more.  In other words, they really round out the package.

For $39 bucks you really can’t go wrong.  You get a full-fledge budgeting package complete with excellent add-ins.  If you really use the software and pay attention, it will pay for itself time and time again.

Note:  Just wanted to mention.  I’m not selling YNAB or YNAB Pro - you’ll notice that there are no affiliate links in this article.  I simply think it’s a very good product, and something that my readers should look in to.