However I got married and merged finances, so I needed something a bit more user friendly to give my wife access to our budget. YNAB is well it's slow and dogmatic. I don't mind dogmatic but the way it rolls months annoys me. Couple that with a clunky slow interface and I'm done with YNAB.
What do you use to for your personal budget?
It's a simple yet powerful budgeting tool. YNAB always look overcomplicated and unfriendly to me
I created a form with name (text), amount (number) and category (dropdown), then opened it in my iPhone's browser and added it to my homescreen. Whenever I make a purchase, I tap the icon and up pops a blank form. Takes me no more than 10 seconds to fill out.
You can link the form responses to a spreadsheet, and from there I can categorize and aggregate with this raw data any way I want. Next step is to create some graphs on the spreadsheet and add that view to my homescreen, so I can see how much budget is remaining in a month.
I've grown tired of budgeting tools that try to link your credit cards, etc--authentication maintenance is never the smoothest, and things are more detailed than I need them to be. Best thing about this method is that I have the raw data to work on, and I can adjust my data visuals easily as my needs change (it might also be cool to one day do large aggregates over, say, 10 years of personal spending)
Before that, I was using SQLite with a shell script for a while to keep track of my expenses, code here [2].
A few years ago we had some major life changes. At that point I set up more accounts. My wife is on all accounts, but she has a PRIMARY spending account, which although I am on the account I never use. We put money into it regularly. Since she does most of the shopping that is where she spends from. I have a separate account for the mortgage. Another account for charge cards, cash and utilities.
By physically separating the money I have not had a late mortgage payment. My wife has freedom to spend without guilt. And we are finally saving money.
Your mileage might be different.
It's a very straightforward application for logging, categorizing your transactions. The UI is clean and simple, the features like Budgets/Plans/Scheduled Transactions are great, the visualization features are meh, but I don't use them that much. Another great thing is how easy it is to reach out to the developer. I've personally asked for a feature through Twitter and had that patched in within a week.
Do you want want to track daily expenses ? only big expenses ? check balances across multiple accounts ?
Personally I get along fine with a spreadsheet and a wife who is into finance professionally.
I have set everything up so I can just copy and paste my banks export straight into a sheet, pivot tables on the next sheet.
In the other I plot graph of the data in the first page, In particular graphs covering each month, each year and last 5 years.
Never needed anything else
I did use buckets when trying to budget. It's the same as ynab but not online
Neobudget for shared stuff