September 28, 2005
YNAB and Yodlee update
Okay, so I did need a budget. Jesse Mecham at You Need A Budget was very helpful in resolving my problem with the YNAB Excel budgeting spreadsheet system. Apparently, the culprit was some clumsy-fingered doofus (me) who unprotected the spreadsheet and modified a formula or two by accident. Lesson learned: leave the protection on, and always make a backup before modification in the future.
If you check out the YNAB homepage, you'll get snippets of information about the creator of YNAB. He's in a Master of Accountancy program at BYU, has a wife and kids, and still manages to keep the inflow greater than the outgo, and maintain a budget at the same time. I'm currently working on a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration with an option in Accounting, and my spreadsheet skills are way too primitive to make something like YNAB, so thank goodness for those who have superior skills and knowledge.
For those of you who haven't used Yodlee Oncenter, it's an amazing financial aggregator website that takes all of your bank accounts, bills, loans, etc., and combines them into one easily viewable page that you can update with one click. They've just updated their system to include a Historical Net Worth function. This lets you see the change in your net worth over the past weeks, months, and years. Yodlee is how I keep an eye on my finances. Check it out, and you'll love it.
Comments on YNAB and Yodlee update »
[...] Setting up Mvelopes is pretty simple, as long as you have all of your financial information together. You'll need usernames, passwords, account numbers, PINs, Social Security Numbers, birthdates, and ZIP codes, depending on which banks and/or credit cards you use (ING Direct uses all of those!) Depending on how many accounts you have to enter, it will take from ten minutes to a half hour, or maybe an hour if you're one of those types that has ten different bank accounts and twenty credit cards. I entered most of my accounts in about half an hour. I was surprised to see all of my accounts listed in Mvelopes, because MS Money didn't have some them listed when I used it last year, and Yodlee still doesn't have a few of my credit card accounts listed. That's a definite plus for Mvelopes, because who wants to keep track of only most of their accounts. I've done that before, and it's annoying. Mvelopes currently has support for 9,152 banks, so yours is probably (almost definitely) included. Another bonus is that Mvelopes lets you classify Roth IRAs as non-taxable accounts, which comes in handy at tax time. [...]