Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Listen to the Episode Below (00:53:00)
YNAB vs EveryDollar Budget Comparison
Dave Ramsey announced his new budgeting software – EveryDollar. It is awesome – and have many similar features to YNAB (You Need A Budget). Which premium budgeting software is best for you? Let’s compare the different features and methods to identify the right one for you.
Links mentioned in this segment:
- YNAB: Save 10% on YNAB http://moneyplansos.com/YNAB
- Get 2gb FREE in-the-cloud storage to sync YNAB with all your devices (among other things you can use DropBox for)
- EveryDollar: Sign up for a Plus account ($99 a year after 15-day free trial) or the free account
Holla from the…Honda?
I lucked out with a TREMENDOUS deal on a Honda Civic. The catch? I live in St. Louis and the car was listed in Dallas.
So many things can go wrong when buying a car long-distance. You must rely on the assistance of others or you’ll find yourself in a mess.
Teach Children To Save Day
April is Financial Literacy month and Friday April 14, 2015 is Teach Children To Save Day.
Upcoming conferences:
- National Coaches Conference in Des Moines June 9-12 (closed group)
- Podcast Movement July 31-Aug 2 in Ft. Worth, TX: PodcastMovement.com
- I’m speaking at FinCon15 Sept 17-20 in Charlotte, NC: Tickets: stevestewart.me/fincon
Steve, Love the episode but really “holla from the Honda”. What’s the matter don’t they sell used Impalas? I am so conditioned that whenever I hear Holla, I think Impala. You simply must come up with a better name for the segment. I will try to help you and hopefully your fans will chip in so we come up with something better than “holla from the Honda”. Here are my early suggestions: “shouts form the Civic”, “rantings from the antique”, “clamors from the cash car”, “last thoughts from the little ol’ lady car”, “Honda Highpoints”, “It’s got four wheels and no payment book so shut up.” Good luck with that.
I vote for the “shut up” one! Hahaha. Great stuff Second Timothy
Steve, good comparison with YNAB, but I use DR’s Gazelle Budget online at MyTMM. Can you compare everydollar to gazeele budget? The interface seems similar. Will Ramsey continue to support the Gazelle Budget?
Gosh, I don’t have access to MyTMMO Gazelle Budget and have no idea if it will go away.
I heard back from the people at EveryDollar. They are saying the old Gazelle budget is staying but are looking to create a new, fun budgeting experience for subscribers.
Thanks for the shout out! I was glad to have you on my show.
Wish I knew you were going to Dallas! I live in OKC, so might have been able to meet in person! Maybe next time! (or at PM15 if I get to go)
Thanks Joshua. I didn’t have much time to hang out in DFW. I picked up the car, visited my mother-in-law in Plano (fed me and gave me a place to sleep), then drove home for 10 hours the next day.
The next time I buy a used car in Dallas while living in St. Louis (hahaha, yeah – right) I’ll check with Gary Leland and arrange to be there during a Podcast Dallas or a FinCon Local MeetUp
Wait. You said OKC. Yeah, that’s a bit of a detour from DFW-STL, although we could meet in Tulsa (only a 90 minute drive for you and on my route back to STL).
Yeah, I guess it would be shorter going straight through Tulsa instead of OKC.
Steve,
Thanks for the comparison. You mentioned that YNAB forces you to wait. I have found that if I enter all transactions AND do a download of accounts every few days then I never have to reconcile. YNAB imports account transactions with just a couple clicks and is super fast. So I’m always up to date and never need to import. With Every Dollar people will be tempted to never enter transactions since they come automatically.
I don’t remember what I meant if I said YNAB forces me to wait. I do remember mentioning EveryDollar making me wait to categorize the transaction because it won’t show up in the program until the transaction is fully processed by the bank (pre-authorizations don’t show up and it can take up to 3 days for a debit card transaction to be finalized).
I completely agree with your last sentence too – but I know myself too well. If I started using the paid version of EveryDollar then I wouldn’t enter transactions any more – which means I wouldn’t be paying attention to my budget often enough.
Steve,
You might be interested in the review of Everydollar that I posted on reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/31pioi/my_everydollar_review/
Michael Finney (the lead for Everydollar) responded to my review, and I wrote a response to him – I make additional points there.
One of the issues you missed is that Everydollar doesn’t match transactions. So when you manually enter a check as you write it (and I really can’t imagine doing a budget any other way) then you need to delete that transaction when it downloads from the bank. Otherwise you’ll double book the transaction.
You noted the kludge that Everydollar has with end of month category balances. But it’s worse than it appears – if you don’t label the category a Fund, then when the month ends, the money just disappears – it doesn’t roll over into the balance OR as available to budget.
And Everydollar doesn’t do reconciliation. If your budget is off because you entered a transaction manually, and then categorized it when the bank downloaded it causing it to double post, good luck finding it. You can’t tell which transactions are bank transactions and which are manual once you’ve categorized them – so there’s no “cleared” flag.
Finally manual entry in YNAB is a lot easier – you don’t realize what a time saver auto complete for Payees and Categories is until you don’t have it.
Steve – another point I noticed during your podcast. You mentioned manually clearing transactions with YNAB – I don’t do that. I download transactions from my bank and import it into YNAB. I’ve set QFX files to automatically open, and associated to YNAB so that when I click on the download link on the bank website, YNAB opens the import dialog on that file automatically.
I do this so that YNAB clears the transactions for me automatically. And I can see and deal with transactions that show up from the bank that I didn’t enter manually.
Finally, one of the other issues with Everydollar is that transfers aren’t handled. If I transfer money from checking to savings I need to delete those transactions when they show up because they aren’t categorized.
Thanks for all the info. I had only used EveryDollar for a few days when I recorded that episode. You’ve definitely done your homework.
I’ve never considered using budgeting software, but anything from Dave Ramsey warrants attention. Thanks for the info. I have to brush up on this and see if it fits my needs or not.
Thanks Warren! I’m glad this comparison started to make you pay attention 🙂