As a self-proclaimed budget nerd, I have spent waaaaaay too much time trying out budgeting programs. My first decade of budgeting was done on a spreadsheet, so I have a lot of strong opinions about what I want in a budgeting app or website. The reason that I use an external program now is mainly so that my husband can be more involved in the budget. We can share a log in and both see how much money remains in a category and add transactions on the go. In January of this year, I did an experiment where I logged every single transaction on three sites–YNAB, Everydollar, and Mint–for the entire month. Even though I have a favorite, and ultimately one of these platforms won out – there are still features that I like about all three.
Cost
This is a budgeting blog after all, isn’t it – so cost matters. Making my own spreadsheets didn’t cost anything, so at first I was reluctant to shell out a single penny for a budgeting tool. Here is the cost breakdown as of this writing: Mint.com is totally free (with ads), Everydollar has a free version with manual import, and a paid version with direct import (about $130 per year), and YNAB costs $84 per year, whether you use manual or direct import – or both!
How Pretty is it?
I think Everydollar has the cleanest, prettiest interface of all three. YNAB comes in second (though with each update, it gets prettier). Mint comes in last. Mint has some pretty graphs regarding trends and net worth, but the budget interface itself isn’t my favorite. All three programs have progress bars – visually showing you how much of each category you’ve spent so far for the month, but Mint takes it up a notch because it also has a guiding line overlaid onto the budget, showing the day of the month. YNAB, if you’re listening– this would be such a cool feature to add!
How does the budget work?
This, my budgeting friends, is key. This is the feature that puts YNAB leaps and bounds ahead of the competition. With YNAB, you budget actual money that you have in your bank account right now. You don’t budget your monthly income, you budget your account balances. What a game changer this was for me! Both Mint and Everydollar have you list your expected income at the top and your expected expenses below. You track your income as it comes in (and adjust if needed) and you track your expenses. But what happens if you get paid twice per month, and you spend more than half your income before your second paycheck comes in? You’re at risk of overspending your account. This is actually pretty common for most people whose rent or mortgage is due at the beginning of the month, if that makes up a significant portion of their monthly budgets. I used to combat this by keeping a couple of thousand dollars extra in our checking account as a buffer. But it bothered me that all those dollars didn’t really have a job – it was almost as though they weren’t really ours to spend, because their only job was to sit there, being a cushion. Another common tactic is “credit card float,” in which you make most of your expenditures on a credit card, which won’t come due until well after your next paycheck has cleared your account. Again, not ideal in my book! The other issue with income-based budgeting is that as you set up your budget on the first month, your budget doesn’t know about your account balances, it knows ONLY about your expected income. This means that if you have been budgeting for awhile and already have money saved up, perhaps even allocated to certain categories, you’re kind of forced to start over again at zero.
Importing Transactions
There are two ways to import transactions into a budgeting tool – manually, or directly from your bank. The functionality of Mint is based on direct import from your banks. You can link every bank, credit card, mortgage lender, and even Zillow to track your home value toward your overall net worth. If you link everything to Mint, then over time, you’ll have some nice charts and graphs depicting your net worth, your spending trends, your debt reduction, and so on. The problem with direct import is that it’s often buggy, and always delayed. Transactions will appear on Mint a few days after you make them, which causes your budget to always be a little behind and inaccurate. Mint also categorizes transactions automatically. You can change them if you want, and you can even set rules so that the software will be more likely to categorize them appropriately the next time. But it’s easy to just sit back and let Mint do the work. You can be very hands-off with Mint, to the point where it might not really even feel like you are actively budgeting — you’re just tracking your data. With Everydollar, you get to choose whether you will manually enter each transaction, or whether you’ll import them from your financial institutions. If you choose direct import, Everydollar will give you notifications for each new transaction, and it won’t categorize them for you. The web app has a handy drag-and-drop feature that’s super slick and easy to use. What I like about this is that you won’t miss any new transaction – you have to actively deal with them in order to get rid of the notification. Both Mint and Everydollar allow you to manually enter a transaction even if you’re set up with direct import – but then you’ll need to go back and delete any duplicates. YNAB has a super special feature here that I absolutely love! Like Everydollar, you can choose to set up direct import or not, but even if you use direct import, you can still add transactions manually. A few days later, when that transaction comes through from your bank, YNAB will magically match the transactions up! This transaction match will come through with a notification and in bold print, and you’ll need to approve it. This gives you the best of both worlds – the immediacy of manual entry, with the reassurance that comes knowing that you won’t forget a transaction and have something slip through the cracks. This is especially handy when you need to split a transaction into multiple categories. You can enter in the split right away, while it’s still fresh in your mind – and then when your bank sends the transaction through, the split stays right there with the match. Thank you, YNAB!
And the winner is…
As you can probably tell, I have a favorite – and that’s YNAB! Beyond all the features that I love so much, YNAB puts out some super fun and helpful articles and Youtube videos. If I ever have a question on how to use a feature, I can type it into my search bar with the word YNAB and I’ll usually find the answer in an article, discussion forum, or video. I haven’t even mentioned YNAB’s unique and awesome method for handling credit card transactions – but this isn’t a YNAB tutorial, it’s a review. Suffice it to say that it’s brilliant.
Everydollar comes in second. A simple, clean design and intuitive interface make Everydollar a good option. There are some workarounds to some of the issues that I’ve mentioned – like if you’ve already been budgeting and have built up some funds in specific categories, you can enter a starting balance in a “fund” line item. But you have to keep track of the total on your own – it doesn’t track this for you. So there’s no way to tell if you’ve overbudgeted the money in your accounts, other than pulling out your calculator and checking your fund balances against your bank account balances, minus anything owed on your credit cards. When I used Everydollar, I’d do this exercise every few months or so, and somehow we were always off by a little bit. If you’re not willing to do this, you could be looking at a budget that doesn’t actually reflect the reality of your accounts!
Mint is a fine tool, and I have to mention it if only because it’s a completely free app. It’s useful for beginning budgeters, and for those who don’t want to spend a lot of time on it. And it has that one feature that I just wish YNAB or Everydollar would adopt – the vertical line that lays over the budget to represent the day of the month! On Mint, you can see at a glance how quickly you are spending each category. I really liked this for the grocery budget, and would make it a game to see if I could stay behind the line!
If you’ve read this whole article, then you are probably a budget nerd like me! How do you track your spending and saving? Which tool is your favorite? Is “doing the budget” one of your favorite hobbies, too? Let me know!
Budget Becky 
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