I've always have a vague idea of how much money I make versus my expenditures. I've tried to make my own budgets in excel but my lack of a basic understanding of a budget made it pretty useless. I picked this up on sale for about $15 and I'm very glad I did. It gave me a crystal clear view of my finances complete with graphs and charts. I had a small amount of debt that YNAB helped me get out of, all while still saving towards my own goal of home ownership. I'm 100% unworried by living paycheck to paycheck, and soon enough I'll have an emergency fund to ensure my own peace of mind. Steam is amazing for games, but this single program improved my life significantly.

YNAB is quickly becoming one of my favorite games. It is a real-time augmented-reality resource management simulator. Every time you earn money in real life, you get the same amount of resources to manage in the game. You decide which pools you want to allocate them to, based on the things you have to spend your own money on, the things you would like to spend your money on, and ultimately the things you would like to save your money for later. Those pools are depleted throughout the game by various costs to your kingdom that reflect your real life spending and bills.

There is a companion mobile app, allowing you to continue playing the game anywhere you go. Stopped for lunch? Use the mobile app to enter how much you spent for lunch, and see immediate effects to your gameplay. Did you allocate enough resources to your "Dining" pool? If not, you will have to reduce one of your other pools to free up enough resources to cover the difference. You can even check your resource allocation from the mobile app to help decide if you really want to make that purchase, or if it will negatively impact the game too much.

YNAB's playing field is randomly generated on start up, based on your actual debts and account balances, so the game is unique to each player, and no two games are exactly the same. While every game is different, there is a high probability that your kingdom will start out with some degree of debt. Your quest is to reduce that debt as quickly as possible, inch far enough ahead that your incoming resources are being allocated to pools for future months, and restore harmony to the land by setting aside small, manageable portions of each resource-gathering period to cover big dips into resource pools that you know (or sometimes don't know) are coming months from now.

This is a game that could take months or years to play, but it is one of the most rewarding gaming experiences I have ever had. My kingdom started out well over 6,000 units in the red. Figuring out how to split my resources took a week or two to get right, but the beauty of this game design is that you can reassign your resources from pool to pool, so there is flexibility built-in if you find you need to change how you're doing something. After a couple of months (and thanks in large part to a resource gathering period that included my tax refund), that amount has nearly been cut in half. Based on my estimates, I think I will comfortably have my kingdom out of debt within half a year.

Even though it seems like the game would end there, the open world design makes it infinitely playable. Gameplay at that point is generally the same, but your quest changes to raising your kingdom's value as high as you can, while continuing to manage the costs incurred within your kingdom. Having eliminated your kingdom's starting loss, you find yourself with a lot more resources to allocate, and you can start applying those towards some of the various DLC packs, like Dream Vacation, New Car, and Early Retirement.

The graphics are quite nice, well out-classing games like Microsoft Excel 2013: GOTY Edition. Co-op gameplay is possible if you are married or sharing expenses with a significant other. Community support is extensive, with many players offering gameplay strategies, and detailed video and text walkthrus from the developer. This is one game that can literally make your life better.

This sofware has proven to be a huge help to my family finance. I've heard criticisms that it's really a glorified spreadsheet, and I can understand that it may appear that way. But the fact is that it really helped me to (first) track my spending and (second) plan my spending more carefully based on my income. It's also a nice help that the manufacturer sends a series of emails to get you started, adding things to think about while you set up your budget. This one-step-at-a-time process made the transition easy. I also took advantage of one of the on-line seminars that are offered as part of the package.

There is nothing earth-shattering here, but for anyone who wants to get control over their home finanaces and isn't sure where to start, I would say THIS is the place to start.

Kind of like EVE Online except it's with real money.

There's a new version of YNAB (people call it nYNAB) which uses subscription model. YNAB4 will be discontinued after December 30, 2016 (and, in fact, the Steam version has not received the latest update compared to the non-Steam desktop version, which offers the migration to nYNAB). If you can't afford USD 5/month or USD 50/year for nYNAB, buy YNAB4 instead. The price tag of IDR 390.000 may be a little bit steep, so wait until it's on sale (unllikely though) or there's any news about nYNAB one-time-fee model (if they will offer any, the SaaS is becoming a trend now). Don't worry about no updates after it's discontinued; Windows XP is still popular and usable even though it's "dead".

Great way to monitor your finances. Got it on summer sale 2014, worth every cent. Some usefull info you can get from two steam videos about this program, all I can add - YNAB REALLY helps. Usefull graphics, comparisons, simple way to add and monitor different accounts.

Small addition - steam can give a 75% discount on it, but very rare. So watch closely and dont miss it!

At the risk of sounding corny, using this software properly, and following YNAB's advice on budgeting can have a transformative effect on your finances. I was earning enough, but not ending up with enough, month after month, every time. YNAB's methodology of giving every dollar a job as soon as you get it (spending money IS a job!) makes a huge difference, and the software itself, after getting over a bit of a learning curve, makes keeping up with your finances vastly easier.

Don't be fooled into thinking this is just an off-brand Quicken. The difference between Quicken and YNAB is the diffrerence between watching your money closely as it disappears, and and plugging the leaks that let your money vanish, before it can. I truly can't speak positively enough about YNAB, and recommend it to absolutely anyone with an income.

If you are tired of making spreadsheets or need a simple yet effective solution to budget your money, YNAB is for you as it does it's job pretty decently. YNAB may be a bit lacking in features such as taking account of interest rates, importing bank statements and so on but the philosophy behind YNAB can be helpful to keep you in the black. It is also useful for international users as Mint does not support majority of the banks around the world.

Personally, I had found that this budgeting approach had helped me into developing "spend within your means" habit while encouraging me to save up for future such as an upcoming Steam sales or a new GPU for my PC. However, the YNAB's approach of personal finance will require you to be more proactive in your spending where you should be recording down each expense as soon as possible to make the most out of it. To make things easier, there is also a good mobile app for iOS and Android for you to keep track of your expense on the go then sync into your dropbox where you can access your data on both your PC and mobile devices.

I have been using it for almost a year and I found the software to be useful for my personal finance. I do recommend this software.

Nice tool for money stuff.
@ Students: YNAB is free for university students!
Details: http://www.youneedabudget.com/blog/2014/ynab-is-now-free-for-college-students/

I connot recomend YNAB anymore. I am disapointed that the YNAB Company has gone to monthly / yearly payments to use their software. (It seem that almost evey company is going this direction). I emailed YNAB and got this responce from a guy named Ryan, "YNAB 4 (which is on Steam) is a separate product from the new web-based YNAB. If you decide to switch to the new YNAB, you can choose between a monthly subscription ($5 per month) or an annual subscription ($50 per year)...If you sign up with the same email address you used to purchase YNAB 4 (most people bought it on STEAM. I did not sign up with there website when I bought YNAB on STEAM), and choose the annual subscription, you'll lock in a 10% lifetime discount, making it $45 per year right now.

My responce to that is. Do you think that is fair for the people who already spent $60.00 bucks for YNAB 4, then YNAB says that they want 45 dollars a year just to use the upgraded version of the software. I think they should have a costomer loyalty plan with better promotions, like giving us the new version for lets say...FREE. (Oh but they have a 34 day free trial) Wow a whole month and 4 days for already sepending $60.00 dollars for the eariler version. Seriously who wants to pay 5 dollars a mouth which comes out to 60 dollars for 12 months and or 50 / 45 for people who already own YNAB 4. Now you are going to have to budget the mothly cost of YNAB under your monthly expenses.

There are other alternatives to budgeting your money.

Mint.com is free to use

Quicken Starter pack is around $31.00 and their deluxe verson is around $39.00 on Amazon

If you are smart enough you could just use Microsoft Excel. There are plenty of bugeting templets out there on the web.

These are just to name a few, I am sure there are more options out there other than YNAB.

Happy Budgeting