Finding Savings Every Month

The Hains family hails from Belfast, Northern Ireland. Matt is a web designer and drum workshop facilitator. He and his wife are blessed with two wonderful children, a daughter (3) and a son (10 months). Prior to living in the UK, they lived in South Africa, where the cost of living was much lower. Managing their money then was “never a problem” but, of course, they didn’t have any kids at the time either! What follows is their account of how YNAB helped them break out of the overdraft cycle and clear the month with money left over.

How long have you been using YNAB?

“We have been using YNAB for about a year now.”

Describe your financial situation prior to YNAB.

Not having a love for managing money and being absolutely miserable at accounting classes in high school, I did not have a good understanding of how cash flow and budgeting worked. My dad tried to help by showing me how he worked his budget, but it was so complicated to me and all those numbers made me dizzy!

Trying to handle our finances was an incredible burden for me and often stressed me out to the point where I did not really take any interest in handling the finances for the family and often left my wife to handle that part of our life!

In South Africa where we used to live, managing our money was never a problem and we were never in debt. We didn’t budget and had no problems. Okay, we had no kids either! It all changed when we came to the UK. Suddenly we found that money became a very difficult thing to control and it began to control us.

We were left at the end of each month with no money would not have been able to pay the bills or buy food if we did not get our next salary. On occasions we would go into overdraft as a result of spending more than what we earned. I did not enjoy that at all. It placed a terrible strain on our relationship and our living here. I knew we needed to change the way we handled our money.”

Was there a point where you decided enough is enough?

It was just a gradual build-up of such frustration and stress that I realised I needed to do something!

Why did you decide to give YNAB a try?

After reading carefully through the principles of how the software was created and the “rules” of working with money that it addressed, I decided to get it since it made sense to me and the way I thought about money. Other applications expected you to think like them, where I found YNAB thinking like me!

Describe your financial situation now that you’re using YNAB.

As the months went on I became more and more positive. I was very happy and my wife was very happy too!

After 3 months of using YNAB, for the first time in years, we had a positive balance of £160 in our account at the end of the month. That had never happened to us before! We were amazed! A month or two later, that figure was £400 and then went up to £600*. We started to have money in our account sitting there simply because we had budgeted it properly. What a fantastic program!

Is there anything else you’d like to share?

At the moment, we are struggling financially due to various unforeseen expenses. But saying that, we still have never gone into overdraft since we started using YNAB. There has been money left over in our account every single month! We have been able to put money away, pay for things in cash, pay for things we otherwise would have used a credit card car for. Overall, the result is incredibly positive despite our current difficult financial situation. YNAB is making the current situation a lot easier to navigate as it helps up keep tabs on where all the money is going.

*Just to make sure we’re all clear here, £600 is the equivalent of $1,200 US dollars at the time of this writing.