Joel has inspired me to tell my life story as well...
I attended college from 2000 to 2005. During that time I can't say I knew what I was doing with money. All of my tuition and a large chunk of my living expenses were covered with student loans. I worked a few part time jobs all the way through college, and almost everything I earned was spent on food, beverages, and entertainment. Anything I earned during the summers was spent on books. It was simple and easy, until I graduated...
I was lucky to have a good job right away, but I walked out of college with roughly $15 to my name. The only option I saw to get started was to apply for a credit card and cash advance my way to the deposit on my apartment, the processing fees on leasing a small truck, and some supplies & food until my first paycheck arrived two weeks later. I was making enough money right away to pay off that card, but I let ride for a year because I was now rich and could afford it!
Mistake #1 happened almost immediately. One of the perks for consolidating my student loans was a lowered interest rate (I think 0.50% less) if 100% of the payments were made on time. I was late on my first payment. Smart. At that time I was writing and mailing checks for almost all of my bills, and I had no system for managing them. A bill would come in, get put on a stack (somewhere in the apartment), and I paid it as soon as it surfaced again. I tried to keep a mental note of where I was at, and only had my checking balance to guide me. It was ugly.
After getting surprised by a few bills and smacked with some late fees and overdraft charges over the next 6 months, I decided that I needed a system. I got Excel out and started building a bill tracker. It started out as a simple list of bills with their dates & amounts. I would manually sort the list by date and did the math manually on how much money I would need. I got paid biweekly, so some months were a piece of cake with 3 paychecks, and other months were tight. It was better than nothing, and my late bills started to subside. I also started to move away from checks in favor of paying things online.
Being the programmer that I am, I started to enhance my document. I added tracking for more than bills like food, fuel, entertainment, etc. The bills section auto sorted by date with some macro magic, and the whole thing started to look like the budget and category list in YNAB/Financier. I added a transaction entry area, and started logging every thing coming and going, which was then tied to the category values automatically. Every time a change was made the main budget macro would fire and update the category balances and sort stuff out. It took a full year of programming and enhancing until I had a system that was working really smoothly. This was right around the time the YNAB spreadsheet was taking off, and I wonder how similar it was to mine.
A year after graduating from college I moved into an apartment with my sister and suddenly my finances got more complicated with a roommate. She was fresh out of cosmetology school and was starting out in about the same position I was a year earlier. I had this wonderful budget Excel document and I thought it would be a piece of cake to get her set up, too! Wrong. She was starting out in worse shape than I was, and she was easily frustrated when confronting reality. It took several months before she started making enough money to pay her fair share, and at least a year before she was able to save any money. Eventually, she learned to love the Excel document, and used it for several years after. That was a good learning experience for both of us, and really solidified the need to stay on top of my finances.
The Excel document got better and better, and I was really happy until I stumbled on YNAB3. I looked it over, and it seemed to do everything my document did without a single Excel macro. I played with the trial and was sold immediately. I ended up buying a license before the trial was up and sadly retired my long running Excel document. Not long after that, YNAB4 was released and I was thrilled with the possibility of syncing transactions with my phone through dropbox. The software was good, the rules were straightforward, and the company communicated with their users. It was refreshing to do business with a company like that, and their product was light years beyond what I could have programmed myself. All was right with the world.
Over the next couple of years I got engaged, married, and combined finances with my wife. I'm going to echo Joel when I say that I was excited with nYNAB was announced and significantly disappointed with the changes in philosophy and functionality. The attitude of the company also became much more disconnected and they're just not who they were during the YNAB3 & YNAB4 days. I had my suspicions that they lost some talent, which is the real reason their reputation has fallen off...
Unfortunately, and regrettably, I jumped on board with nYNAB hoping for the best over the last year. Most of the things I was hoping to see are either not returning or have been solidly disappointing (AoM??? No Income for next month??? Life Saver
™ themed reports???). If they had simply recreated their fantastic desktop software on the web, and then expanded on that, it would have been a home run. Instead, I started looking for alternatives, and here we are.
My nYNAB subscription ends on January 4th, 2017. I will not be renewing and do not want to revert to YNAB4, so Financier it is. The two things that will break me away from YNAB completely are the ability to import my transaction history going back to 2011, mobile budgeting/transaction entry, and
yellow flags. I'm finally excited about my budgeting software again, excited as I was when I first discovered YNAB4. My advice to
@Alex is this: focus on making good software, listen to your customers, and keep it simple. Do that, and you'll have support coming out of your ears.
