One of the often overlooked values of budgeting is the Power found in planned purchasing. There are a few different ways you can look at this Power, and a myth I would like to debunk.
Planned purchasing will help you:

make smarter buying decisions
avoid impulse spending
be rid of guilt when spending

Make smarter buying decisions
What my [...]

A few customers have mentioned it would be nice to have some type of marker on the Budget sheet that shows which category you’re dealing with when you’re budgeting. I thought this was a nice idea for an optional add-in. Here’s a little shot of what it will look like once installed:

With YNAB [...]

Just in time for the New Year switch I hope, I’ve added some nice functionality to YNAB that will have you budgeting just a bit quicker:

You can now use drop-down menus to select the category for the Outflow, instead of having to switch back to your Budget sheet to remember exactly how you spelled “Miscellaneous [...]

This is part III of a four-part series on budgeting. So far, we talked about freeing up cash flow by budgeting. Once you’ve budgeted and have that free cash flow…flowing…you’ll have a few options with what you can do with it:

Give it.
Have fun with it.
Invest it.

Today we’ll talk about option #2 (perhaps your [...]

In Part I of this series on Budgeting, I talked about finding cash flow. I mentioned that Dave Ramsey says there are three things you can do with money: give it, invest it, and have fun with it.
Today I wanted to talk about giving it – which should always come before the other two [...]

I’ve decided I’m going to focus on the various advantages of budgeting. Yes – I call it budgeting. Yes – it involves writing down what you spend. Yes – it means you can’t spend willy nilly without reaping the consequences (well, you’ll reap the consequences whether you budget or not). Yes [...]

I posted just a little while ago about how ING had raised their rates .1%. Well this time they’ve gone a bit further. You’ll now be getting 3.75% on your money that sits there. It might be a nice place to stash a large portion of your emergency fund.
On a related note, [...]

Sure Christmas is coming up in 22 days, and we’re probably all a bit focused on everything that has to do with Christmas. But, you do realize, that just seven days after Christmas you’ll have 2006 staring you (blankly?) in the face.
What will you do with it?
I love to exercise. I don’t love [...]

This has been live on the site for about a week and I totally forgot to mention it here. Thanks to a tax class I’m about to finish (tomorrow morning I’ll be trying to figure out how to do a corporation’s income tax provision for their financial statements…), I was able to glean quite [...]