Originally Posted by maverickstruth
Four big differences that come immediately to mind:
1) Mint's budgets tool is based on projections of future earnings. In other words, you tell it how much income you expect to earn in a month and then you allocate from there. YNAB is based on actual earnings. In other words, you enter your income (or how much you have in each of your accounts) and you allocate based on that. Every time you get new income, you can allocate it to future spending. But you can't allocate money you don't have yet.
2) Mint is passive budgeting, YNAB is active. Mint reads from your bank accounts, does automatic categorizations, and basically does as much of the work for you as possible. YNAB, you have to enter your transactions one-by-one (they have an app that allows you to do it while you're out and about, too), though it does remember how you categorized previous transactions from a given vendor.
3) Moving money around / transferring between budgets was always a pain for me in Mint because I had to create fake transactions to reflect a 'spend' from one budget item and an 'income' into another budget item. This really screwed with the reporting tools when I wanted to see spending levels (for example). In YNAB, it's just a matter of adjusting your budget amounts; no mucking with transactions.
4) YNAB doesn't handle investments particularly well, whereas Mint reads them just like any other account. I've created what they call 'off-budget accounts' in YNAB and update the 'balance' monthly to keep my net worth figures up to date, and that's good enough for my purposes.
If you're OCD about this stuff, then I'd say definitely go YNAB. For me it's almost like a game -- how much can I optimize things this month? With Mint, I didn't have the fine-grained control to let me play with the details.
As a tip, if you (or anyone else reading this) goes with YNAB, definitely go through their getting started tutorials. YNAB works really well just as a budgeting tool, but they have an ethos (things like 'give every dollar a job') that aligns with how the tool works, which makes really makes it more than just a spreadsheet. Even for someone like me who has always been really good with finances - no debt, pretty frugal, good with budgeting, etc. - and YNAB gives me the control I wish I'd had with Mint.
(I feel like at the end of all that, I need some kind of "I'm not affiliated with YNAB" disclaimer :P)
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