Why I came back to YNAB

So some time back, I left YNAB after discovering Moneywell. Moneywell is another take on the envelope budgeting system. It was more Mac like, supported downloaded transactions, reconciling, etc. All was well until Moneywell 2 came out. It just didn’t work for me anymore. The “simplification” made it difficult to get anything done. For what I needed, the new reports weren’t as good as the old reports. It was so painful for me to use that I stopped keeping track of my finances altogether for a while.

This is the icon for the old version:

And now for the new version:

And the hardest thing for me to look at in Moneywell 2:

I much prefer the old to the new. And that pretty much sums up the design changes. Everything went that direction and that combined with the functionality changes caused me to go from loving the software to becoming ambivalent about it.

You Need A Budget

Meanwhile, the people at YNAB have completely knocked it out of the park with YNAB 4. A gorgeous interface, iPhone App that supports cloud sync, and new reports. Take a look.

YNAB gained a lot of features and it finally has the ability to reconcile accounts. Most importantly, my wife likes it and uses it.