We didn’t sign up for the paid version of You Need A Budget (YNAB).
I signed up for the free trial mid-December. I did some research and found why it seemed better than a lot of the free tools out there. I figured it would help Meagan and I plan our finances better.
About a week ago, we logged in to update our budget and found the free trial had ended the day before. It’s $6.99/month, billed annually at 83.99. That means it’s really 6.999166666 per month (83.99 divided by 12), which isn’t a big deal except it always feels like someone’s lying to me when they do pricing like that with the cents, like the gas stations. At least the gas stations display it in a small, giant number on their sign, typically.
Back to YNAB. I probably have a poor person’s mindset because I really didn’t want to pay 83.99 for this thing. The monthly, $6.99, seemed like a decent trade for managing our finances better. But $83.99 stings a little more. Extrapolate that out, though. Like what if we get locked into using it and keep it for the next 10 years? That’s 839.90.
I’m sure it could save us that much in the process. I mean, hopefully it would save us a lot more than that. But part of me is still like, “Really? Isn’t there something we could buy outright for a lot less than that and have it forever?” Or the DIY version, “Couldn’t we make something for free that would get us 80% of the results or better?”
Again, maybe it’s a poor person’s mindset. Oscar Wilde wrote that a cynic is someone who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing. Someone else is like, “Just pay for it, take care of your money, and move on with life.”
But to me, recurring monthly fees just feel like debt without interest. My adage would be more like, “A poor person knows the price of everything but the cost of nothing.”
So we didn’t sign up for YNAB. Instead, we pulled out our trusty Google docs and created a spreadsheet, for free. It’s not as fancy, not nearly as automated. It doesn’t show the age of our money, which might have been the single coolest thing about YNAB. YNAB literally shows this up in the corner of their software.
But we used what we learned from YNAB to set up our spreadsheet. We mimicked it as well as we could. And now, whenever we want to customize it further – like by adding better goal tracking next to each line item like we did – we can just add it.
So some lessons:
- Even if I think I can keep track of when a free trial ends, I probably won’t.
- Because I’m a thinker, it’s often better for me to start doing something than to ponder more. YNAB might not be a good fit for us right now, but we learned from the setup, we were able to make a better spreadsheet, and we can always go back to it if we find we need it.
- More specifically, maybe trying free trials of things is a good idea, especially if the free trials don’t require a credit card up front that automatically rolls into a subscription if it’s not canceled. I don’t have any other subscriptions in mind yet, nothing else I really want to try, but if I find anything like that in the future, it’s probably a better idea for me to give it a try than sitting on it.
And we’ll see in a month or two how this goes with the spreadsheet.
