Android apps aren't usually expensive but the good ones aren't free either. When you're playing around with your device, downloading games and wondering what else your gadget can do, it's not difficult to run up an unexpectedly high bill that eats into your savings.
YNAB, which stands for You Need A Budget, has long been a way for overspenders to apply a rigid discipline to their spending habits. The desktop application works by providing a way for users to assign budgets to different spending categories, such as rent/mortgage, insurance, and food. The budgets are adjusted as they spend their way through the month.
Outgoings can be compared from month to month and pie charts can be called up to display where exactly the salaries have vanished to. It's also possible to import bank details so that real account transactions are all added automatically.
It's the kind of thing that requires a huge amount of discipline to use in the first place – which suggests it might not be suitable for the spendthrift users that are most likely to need it. And with the app priced at $59.95 after a week of free trial, it's looking less and less likely to be used by the same category of users.
The desktop version is also necessary before it's possible to use the companion Android app, which is also not free. The app allows users to enter transactions on the move, check their category balances before they make a purchase and view all the historical transactions for each account. It syncs with the desktop version to call up all the financial data a household needs to keep track of spending.
That's likely to take much of the fun out of shopping but it is likely to make staying in budget much more effective. YNAB on the desktop suffers from a historical perspective: users are always stuck looking back at what they've spent rather than forward at what they're about to spend when they're in the shop.
Having all their financial data on hand reminds them that their purchase decision has consequences and by making financial data easily available to them, it ensures that she doesn't impulse buy a new pair of shoes and he doesn't blow the entertainment budget on a Samsung Note.
In short, YNAB is the perfect spoilsport.
