Personal Finance Software

[dta]

YNAB changed my life. I got it right after I got serious about acquiring credit cards, because I didn't trust myself to know how much I could spend. Took about a month to get the hang of it but it's totally transformed my finances. About manual entry -- I spent more time cleaning Mint's guessing up than I do logging stuff and tweaking my budget in YNAB, and Mint's budgeting never did anything for me. Manual entry really doesn't feel like that much work because it actually feels like sort of a hobby. It's rewarding. It makes you sound like you're in a cult.

[Revelate]

I simply use the USAA-supplied track my spending; finding a number of banks / credit unions are starting to have this functionality.

I don't really need a budgetting software (maybe when I get married / have kids I suppose) but it's handy or at least interesting to see just where all the money is going sometimes... vis a vis if I spend a couple hundred in escapist books in a month, I know I need to be getting outdoors more as one practical example .

In a less tongue-in-cheek example, occasionally I'll have a **bleep** moment looking at my aggregate balances and money outflow, then realize it's January and my insurance and car registration and a couple other semi/annual bills land there.  Given the transaction associations, it's fairly easy to see how much I'm spending eating out vs. random ass entertainment expenses, vs the necessities of life in a pretty graphical interface.