Does anyone recommend YNAB

[FrankWelker]

Does anyone use and recommend or not, YNAB. Can you tell me if it did/not work and if it did how much it saved. I am massively guilty of just spending however I feel and need something to keep me accountable. Now that you have to pay for it I want to get some ideas whether it's worth it or not. Thanks!

Splendide, what you're proposing is how we do it. I have a category for DH and I know how much he roughly spends a month on himself (haircuts, lunches, coffee and etc). He texts me the amount and I put it in YNAB. If it's getting low, then we decide whether to put more in and take it out of the joint fun money, or he will rein himself in a bit. It goes up and down depending on our income for the month which varies a lot.

One other thing, the texting when he spends something isn't infallible, so I reconcile every few days on the accounts I have online access to and once a month against a paper statement for the credit card. We've always forgotten something so I never spend everything. I leave about £10 in various categories and we have an "emergency" category with £100 in it which hardly gets touched, but is handy if DH we get a parking fine or something.

I'm not clear if you have managed to link all your accounts or not. I import transactions occasionally, and the matching up of what we've manually entered against those can be useful. It can also be confusing. Personally I prefer manual entry because it forces you to check your budget and think before you spend.

Yep, likewise Callmecordelia. I've been using YNAB long enough to remember when it was considered de rigeur to enter your transactions manually so you had to think about each one. I only occasionally use the import function and basically put everything in by hand.

I think I'm going to unlink my accounts and do it manually.

Apart from anything else it shows my allowed overdraft as available so it's telling me I have £3400 more than I do!