Letters to the Editor
This letter is associated with the following article:
-
Making a real budget
I kept getting frustrated with the lack of a usable budget feature in the mainstream personal finance programs (Quicken, MS Money, etc.)
I finally found youneedabudget.com and got a budget that works. When I was a little kid, "budgeting" meant divvying my allowance up into envelopes for various categories. If I didn't spend everything in a particular category, I could "carry it forward" into the next month. YNAB is the only budget program I've found that lets you carry unused balances forward in this same way.
Without this capability, the other programs' "budgets" are really just frustratingly irrelevant measures of how closely the current month is following the pattern of previous months. Useless.