You Need a Budget: The Proven System for Breaking the Paycheck-to-Paycheck Cycle, Getting Out of Debt, and Living the Life You Want

I have always dreaded budgeting. I have tried it a million times and quit. However, I am sick and tired of my salary sounding amazing but my bank accounts and financial habits are not in alignment with what I make. This book, along with a couple others I read in the past have one central theme, mindset. I don’t know about anyone else, but this book was perfect for me. It was like having a friend sit me down and give it to me straight. In the past, I thought wanting money was enough, now I know what I want my money to do for me. #PositiveMoneyMindset

This book is about the YNAB system of budgeting, rather than the YNAB budgeting application. You could implement everything in this book with a spreadsheet or pencil and paper if you like.Whenever I used the YNAB application, I always felt that it was "budgeting lite." No complex forecasts, no detailed reports and (until recently) no automatic feeds pulled down from the bank. It also always seemed to be fighting me... that I could never get it to do what I wanted.I decided to dump YNAB. I already had years of experience with Quicken. I decided to try Mint and Personal Capital. Those applications had many of the features missing from YNAB. However, after switching to each of them, I felt lost. There was freedom to set things up however I wanted, but that didn't add up to better information or tangible goals.I could now tell you, to the penny, how much I spent on coffee two months ago... I could tell you how much I planned to spend on coffee six months from now. So what? How does any of that help me now? Somehow having all these new features and freedom resulted in less actionable information, and less peace of mind, than I had with YNAB.I eventually figured out that YNAB is not lite on features. It is opinionated.YNAB believes that there is a correct way to budget, and the application enforces those opinions with ruthless efficiency. It only makes you collect the information it believes to be useful, and it only presents information that helps you now. If you try to go outside its process, it will make your life difficult.That is not to say that it tells you where to spend your money. Precisely the opposite. Go ahead and budget $1000/month for iced lattes if you want. YNAB doesn't judge. But it does insist that you have the money.This book is about the YNAB opinions which are baked into the software. I have come to view those opinions as wisdom. Rather than saying "here's a bunch of features, do with them what you want", YNAB says "here is a proven process that has worked for thousands of people, follow it."This book is about explaining that process, why it is the way it is, and why it leads to better decisions and progress towards achieving goals. I already knew the basics from videos and podcasts, but this book does a great job of putting all of the information in one place and presenting it in a systematic manner. Now that some of the gaps in my understanding have been filled in, I'm sold on the process. I already learned via trial and error that I like what YNAB does. This book filled in the gaps of why it works.Highly recommended!

Follow the steps and u will find ur self in a really good position. Two things I will note are that:1. Ur not going to get this in one read. U have to read this multiple times and go back as needed to specific places to reemphasize or get the real understanding of a needed lesson.2. Like most books I read, unless I missed it, I don’t see how this works if ur in straight commission. It seems to be designed for a person with a regular job and paycheck.

Excellent primer on budgeting without getting too technical. Loved the section on getting children involved with examples from their own family. Lol m

Loved this book. Talks about money in a way that I’ve never seen before and feels like a conversation not a lecture. Always been big on budgeting and this just revolutionized my process!!!

Contrary to your potential reaction to the title, this book does not tell you how to spend your money. It encourages you to determine your own priorities, or what is most important to you, and it empowers you to align how you spend your money with those priorities. Rule 1 teaches to give every dollar a job, and, according to the author, the other three rules are actually this same rule, just restated to make sure every possible application of how you might try to justify not using a budget is covered. Yes, it's time to remove the cognitive dissonance between your actions and what you actually value most. And the content of this book is the remedy.The first four chapters cover each of the four rules. The author's perspective in these chapters was helpful and enlightening. But the chapters on "Budgeting as a Couple" and "Teaching your Kids to Budget" were the most helpful and enlightening to me. I made some serious changes to how I manage my family's finances based on the principles and examples shared in these chapters. I also found the real-life examples shared throughout this book to be relevant and insightful.Not only would I recommend this book to everyone, but I also bought a dozen copies for co-workers. You need this book so you can learn that you need a budget, meaning you can finally give every dollar a job that is aligned with what you believe is the most important job for that dollar. Then powerful things start to happen, mainly this - your happiness increases as you reshape your financial reality into a tool to help you accomplish whatever is most important to you.