YNAB is excellent - its design forces people to budget properly.

It also lets you track all expenses and let’s you keep lifestyle inflation in check.

I’ve found it well worth it (and I’m pretty responsible financially).

Mint on the other hand is totally useless.

> Mint on the other hand is totally useless.

That's hyperbole. Having a bird's eye view of every single account, transaction, investments, net worth, etc. is "totally useless"? No.

I use Mint and it works quite well for keeping an eye on your financial life at a glance. I don't need some micro-managey software like YNAB (that I'd have to pay for monthly!) to continually increase my wealth and keep debt in check - here's my tricks:

* Pay off credit card in full every month (I have one card that I use for gas, etc.)

* Invest 20% into company-matched 401k, my Roth, etc. primarily focused on S&P 500 Index Funds

* Save roughly $275/check into a liquid savings account.

* I have no car payment (paid of my 2010 Subaru that I got for $9k).

* Everything on autopay.

* Don't buy stupid nonsense.

It's worked well thus far. There's no real "need" to budget - KISS principle wins the day again.

> That's hyperbole. Having a bird's eye view of every single account, transaction, investments, net worth, etc. is "totally useless"? No.

If you can get it to actually connect to things (I have 2FA on most accounts, and since Mint scrapes the sites and stores passwords in plaintext, it doesn't know how to handle this) and tag everything properly (MCC's vary pretty widely). I think that the promise of Mint is great, but in reality it falls apart as soon as you have more than a few accounts, or start using anything that wasn't originally built in (e.g. 2FA).

That all said, I follow the same general principles: autopay everything in full, invest money first, live within my means (with certain exceptions that are the "budget").

I just don't understand giving your banking credentials to a third party. Will your bank even cover fraudulent withdraws if you give your login info to Mint?

This is the main reason I stopped using it. The benefit was too low compared to the risk. Once I started using 2FA and realized how it worked I noped right out of there...

My Sparkasse app (Germany) lets me add other bank accounts and the credentials are stored only in the app. I think there's an EU directive forcing banks to have an open API, which makes it work. Much better than screenscraping.

Is there any such trend in the US?

Giving someone read-only access makes more sense. Even better is like what you mention, a program you run, but open source.

I shared your hesitation as well, but I don't think Mint is storing your bank password in cleartext anymore at least for Chase. I just signed up for Mint the other day and did not see anything like this for any of my accounts. For Chase, they specifically use Oauth to grant read access to the account.

For me, my checking account is the only banking account I really care about. So much so that I don't use my debit card for purchases and only use it for ATM. I really don't care if my credit card gets stolen since that's their problem and not money out of my pocket.

> Mint scrapes the sites and stores passwords in plaintext

Incorrect:

> How secure is my login information I store in Mint?

> Your login user name and passwords are stored securely in a separate database using multi-layered hardware and software encryption. We only store the information needed to save you the trouble of updating, syncing or uploading financial information manually.

Ref: https://mint.intuit.com/how-mint-works/security

In other words, Mint doesn’t store your passwords in plain text, it stores them reversibly encrypted. That is indeed better, because if someone hacks Mint’s database they might not be able to read your passwords. However, it has the same problem as plaintext passwords that if someone at Mint is untrustworthy, they can decrypt your password and pretend to be you. That system makes it inconvenient for you to protect your accounts (you would have to memorize new passwords for all of them) and difficult to apply for restitution later (because it looks like you were the one who logged in).

> "Don't buy stupid nonsense."

That bit is doing a lot of work. Seeing 'bird's eye view' is useless because it has no real effect on behavior after the fact, the feedback loop is too long and disconnected. Also - Mint's software is itself bad and intermixed with the ads it's just hard to figure out what's going on.

How much do you spend on food? How much on groceries? A gift you forgot to plan?

YNAB let's you get a real intuitive understanding for all of this, you know explicitly where every dollar is going and you do it in real time per transaction.

It gives you a lot of power.

Do you need it? No. You've got the basics down with 401k max, monthly savings, Roth IRA, etc. That's awesome.

Could you benefit from it? Almost certainly yes. I'd bet if you used it seriously (even just the 30 day trial) you could trivially double the amount you're saving per month in liquid savings.

One reason I like it a lot is the exactness of it gives me complete confidence I could control my burn rate to any number necessary, good for FI.

It's marketed to people who need help getting out of debt, but it's also good for people with high savings rates and high income. It frees you to allocate large amounts of money to index funds, or stock market bets without worrying about how much you need in your account for auto-pay expenses.

Its yearly subscription cost is effectively negative.

This is completely your opinion and not necessarily true for any person who reads your comments. I used YNAB for 120 days when it had longer trials. It didn’t do enough for me. It was more annoying for me than any potential savings.

Bird’s eye view has been much more helpful as a middle ground. Not Mint and technically i can budget, but I’m not too interested in that.

Do you have a family, or at least entagled budgeting with a significant other? Either one of those makes this workflow almost impossible.

>Invest 20% into

Seems rather difficult with family.

> There's no real "need" to budget

You just described your ... budget.

I'd refer to it as more of a "set-it-and-forget-it automated financial framework". I'm not, for example, pondering how much I'm spending on groceries, frantically updating YNAB with those transactions. Everything's sorted and just keeps working for me.

I tried YNAB, but didn't fall in love with it. I currently use Mint, which I'm familiar with and have used for years, but I don't like Intuit. I now pay for Lunch Money and am gradually using it more and more. I'd like to switch over properly at some point to a service that isn't using my data for ads.

I agree, Mint is a joke compared to YNAB. It didn't even come close to addressing my budgeting needs or giving me an insight into my finances.

That and the ads really add insult to injury.

Yes, I pay for YNAB and have for years, because otherwise I would have to rebuild it in Excel and my version would be terrible. It's well-designed, it's fun to use, it makes me less anxious about the state of my finances and it helps me to spend and save more responsibly.

I'm in the same boat. In a world before I found Simple, a spreadsheet with all of my monthly expenses and totals for each account transfer I needed to do was good enough. I can't get myself to see the additional value of mvelopes.com. Simple, however, was a game changer for me. Sad.

What’s the main difference between Simple and YNAB? I’m a YNAB user but have never used Simple. You say that you can’t see the extra value of mvelopes (and I assume YNAB) but if you don’t have Simple then why is YNAB not good enough?

I have both, and since adopting YNAB, my Simple budgets have been redundant and abandoned. Simple offered nothing that YNAB doesn;t, other than direct actions on your account (transfers, etc). That was far outweighed by YNAB's ability to manage multiple accounts, in particular their credit card balance & payment management.

I'm not familiar with how YNAB ingests transaction data, but I seem to remember when I looked at it last that at least some transactions have to be logged manually.

If you used Simple pretty much exclusively you wouldn't have to manually enter any transactions, although you might occasionally have to categorize things.

The obvious exception would be cash transactions, which I don't believe Simple ever tracked in any detail.

It’s all automatic. You do have to approve and categorize transactions though. But the import is automatic if you’re using a major bank.

not for all major banks, mine (usaa) forces 2fa which broke ynab and made it useable because i don't want to do data entry for every transaction.

USAA works fine for me. It just asks you to enter the token during login.

EDIT: and I think it migrated to OAuth anyways so no more tokens

I ran into this for alliant. Reach out to YNAB support, they adjust your account supposedly to not use Plaid for instances like MFA being enabled. It wasn't clear if its an all or nothing deal though for all your accounts to use Plaid or not.

It's been said elsewhere but just in case, they recently started using different import provider(s) and many accounts that were broken before now work great, including MFA ones.

They might have fixed this. They switched to using plaid for external accounts this year, and I was able to add several banks which had 2FA earlier today.

I pay for YNAB. For me it's worth it for their auto-import to take a quick look at my spending across accounts at various institutions and to look at larger trends over time. A lot of folks were annoyed when they went to a subscription model, but I think the visibility they provide really does pay for itself.

I tried it. Auto-import never worked reliably. I asked their customer support for help, and they said I should just do it manually.

They seemed like a close alternative, but if I'm doing all this work manually, I might as well use a spread sheet for free.

They've done a bunch of updates to the importing in the last year so it might work better with your institution now. They support Oauth for the bank creds too for those that support it, which is great.

It's still not great. You have to reauth accounts all the time, and I'm constantly getting the little wrench icon telling me they can't pull transactions right now. I've not found a single alternative that will give me a solid overview of all my various accounts as an api that I can build my OWN dashboard off of, otherwise I'd use that. YNAB still gets my money, but reluctantly until then.

How secure is linking your bank account with YNAB?

They use Plaid [0] under the hood. As long as you trust it, it's safe.

[0] https://plaid.com/

so a bit more secure than mint then?

Plaid doesn’t seem very secure reading this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25753935

Importing greatly depends how well your bank/credit card plays ball. Most banks don't have any incentive to participate and newer security features like 2fa have made it harder/impossible. I do have one bank that grants application tokens for read-only access. The setup UX wasn't awesome, but I wish that was standard.

Unfortunately, I doubt YNAB can just ask people to move banks. Honestly, that, a web interface, and how speedy ACH payments are processed are kind of my highest priorities and would switch banks just for that. But those are all hard to impossible to assess without opening an account. I had a credit union get very confused when I asked if they had a demo of their web UI before I opened an account. I imagine I was the first to ask.

They can't ask people to move banks, but TBH I stopped using my credit cards from a certain provider because YNAB wouldn't sync (which drove me to look into other cards and ultimately get a better one that, by chance, would sync).

I've tried YNAB multiple times but would inevitably miss entering a transaction and then it would be a pain reconciling my bank accounts with YNAB. Without tracking the transactions I couldn't accurately use YNAB to determine how much was left in the budget. Having an envelope like system built into a bank would be extremely useful.

I'm pretty certain I've saved more than $86 in my first year of using YNAB for what it's worth. Ymmv of course.