And I’m going to plug YNAB which is why I have these numbers, it costs $120/yr which is included. Highly recommend doing some kind of budgeting even if it’s on paper in a notebook once a month because all these costs can creep up. If you want free electronic use a spreadsheet.
My problem with getting and staying on budget is keeping up with data entry, YNAB and it’s ilk are all too manual. And the automatic ones have issues pulling together all my accounts and reconsilling the transactions between them. For example, a $10 PayPal debit from my bank account and it’s companion PayPal transaction should be correlated as the same transaction, but all the softwares I’ve tried would automatically treat them as separate no matter what I did. Which would ultimately throw off all the nice budget numbers making them uselss
I was hoping the genAI craziness would at least bore out a great fully automated budget system that would at least mostly solve my problem, but alas I still have yet to hear anything on that front :/
Don’t listen to that right-wing idiot Dave Ramsey. He says stupid shit all the time, like never ever go into debt for anything ever, which is just unrealistic.
For example, according to him it’s preferable for you to get a 500$ clunker that you will undoubtedly have to continuously repair over a reasonably priced reliable used car that you take a small loan out for. There’s a middle ground with debt, even credit cards.