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I messed up my first post somehow... which probably means everything I say now should be taken with a grain of salt..lol .. anyway maybe I should try to start again...
I realized this morning that I have been using YNAB for more than a decade . My first budget was on the fancy excel spreadsheet that Jessie first developed so many years ago. Since then I have used every version of YNAB that has come out and even tried a few others, but I have always come back to YNAB. It is simply the best budgeting program and methodology that I have ever used.
My husband and I had never discussed budgeting until he got deployed to Iraq I was suddenly in charge of our finances. Thank God I found YNAB. For the first time in our marriage we had a plan and a method to follow. When my husband returned home15 months later and saw how healthy our bank account was, he declared I should continue handling our finances and so the years went by and here we are.
Our children are all grown up and we are enjoying the grandchildren now. This past year has been super stressful in so many ways, however, we have had financial peace and that has been amazing. We are about to enter a new chapter in our lives, my husbands retirement, and thanks to YNAB, I know we will adjust and roll with the punches! We are two full months ahead in out budget, we have fully funded emergency and rainy day funds, and all of our bills are on auto pilot.
I thought it was about time for me to thank Jessie and the whole YNAB team for this great tool and to offer a few words of advice to anyone new to the program:
Make your financial health a priority now so that you can have financial freedom and peace for the years to come. It doesn’t matter what your level of income is. YNAB can help you achieve your goals.
Take the time to really learn to use the program and its methodology. Use all of the classes and information YNAB provides.
The magic is in the buffer, or as it is now called, age of money. Being able to budget a full month of expenses ahead is the secret sauce. I would go as far to say it is the most important ingredient to success except maybe for the emergency fund.
If you fall off the budgeting wagon, just dust yourself off and begin again. Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither will you become a budgeting expert without some bumps in the road. Just keep at it and one day it will just click and become a habit.
Thank you YNAB for being the tool that helped get my families finances in shape and kept them there over the years. This is a screen shot of my age of money today.
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What a wonderful post, and one that parallels my own journey. I started in the Fall of 2009 when I was expecting my 3rd child. I was worried we didn't have the finances to "afford" a 3rd, but I said if the only thing holding us back is money, then we're going to get our money in order because we only have now.
I started with YNAB Pro, I think right after Jesse retired the spreadsheet. YNAB broke was not the word, when I realized we truly only had $50 a month to eat out, but man did I make that $50 last! So many ups and downs I should have my own journal, and for so many years we really just treaded water until finally, he's getting paid what he's worth!
I always regarded our win as "Well, the lights are on and we're not in debt, so something must be right." It took a really long time to build that solid buffer while expenses just kept going up no matter how hard I worked to keep them down, but we're finally there . I can't even imagine what trouble we would have gotten into going the way we were going.
So here's to stay-at-home moms who handle the money in the decade of YNAB club! 🥂🥂🥂
Congrats on your grandchildren and your husband's retirement. Thank you both for his service!!
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Well done! I am also a longstanding Ynab user ( since August 2014) but still have Ynab4 at the moment. I was involved in all the discussions of the nYNAB on the old forum and then did join this community forum but haven't been reading it for quite a while. I am now considering a switch again and would like to know whether other longstanding members would now recommend it. My old laptop is dying so I need to replace it. It seems a good time to give the nYnab another chance.
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Vibrant Yes that is exactly how it worked on Ynab4 but one of the Ynab team told me that it wasn't a option on nYnab. However the same person also told me that transactions transferred from Ynab4 wouldn't repeat unless I changed the setting but they do. Yesterday my first scheduled transaction for 2021 happened and I can now see that it is scheduled for February in grey. 🙂
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Superbone Actually here is a question for anyone previously on Ynab4. Did you often delete older data from Dropbox? Did it affect Ynab4 on the desktop? I am trying to clear space on Dropbox to view some photos sent to me by family but it is telling me that I still don't have enough free storage on Dropbox. Although I have moved to nynab, I am not quite ready to stop Ynab4 working. I have deleted some old Ynab files from 2014-2016 on Dropbox but it doesn't make any difference. I haven't completely deleted them so can still restore them.
Thanks