My wife and I were discussing this a few weeks ago. If YNAB could automatically grab my bank transactions like Mint, I would be sold. I love their philosophy on budgeting.
The whole point of YNAB (Rule #1 of their program) is that you need to proactively allocate every dollar you have. Every dollar has a job, and then you need to manually enter when that dollar is doing its job so you feel when that money actually gets spent.
I tried for years to use Mint, but it's too passive. Too easy to ignore. With YNAB, every purchase goes in when we make the purchase, and I found it keeps us more honest about our budget estimates and also helps to curtail frivolous spending.
To be most useful, YNAB should know my passive spending, and then harass me about all the dollars I am not reporting. Otherwise, I can just leak money and not talk about it.
I fully agree. It seems a little silly that if you have a busy period at work and forget to pay attention for a few weeks, that's just a black hole (short of going through credit card statements and trying to remember every cash purchase). This happens all the time with Mint, and I can just go back and categorize all the purchases that need doing so, with the only loss being that the cash purchases I forgot about show up as non-specific cash spending (through the initial ATM withdrawal).
Have you just tried it first? I'm not being hard, but I had the same feeling until we did it for the 34 day trial. Frankly, I now love the fact that it doesn't do anything automated in the background, now I actually have to consciously track my spend. Mint just became a passive record of spending. YNAB is active.
I tried for years to use Mint, but it's too passive. Too easy to ignore. With YNAB, every purchase goes in when we make the purchase, and I found it keeps us more honest about our budget estimates and also helps to curtail frivolous spending.
To each his own, of course.