When I married Annie seven years ago this past Monday, I knew immediately that we needed a good budgeting program to get us through our marriage. We both knew that finances can become a huge burden in marriage, and we wanted to be proactive. Fortunately, we found Mvelopes.
Recently, I have been changing things around financially and have preferred a program You Need a Budget (or YNAB for short) over Mvelopes. Both programs are created by Mormons in Utah who have a knack for budgeting (believe me, I grew up Mormon; they know a thing or two about budgeting). Both programs allow you to create a zero-based spending plan where every dollar you make is allocated to a spending category. Both programs allow you to separate categories into mini-accounts to allow you to save up for something over time (like your vacation, for instance) so you can plan ahead for a rainy day. But there are some distinct differences between the two programs. In the next few days, I'll write a few posts on the differences between the two.
When writing a program, you inevitably have many users come to you saying "Your program won't do this thing for me, can you add it?" Then you want to add it but there are other users who want it the old way. So what do you do? You can either make your program more complex by adding extra options or you can stick to what you're good at, hoping there's enough of a market for it, but leaving some people out.
And that's the story of the big difference between Mvelopes and YNAB. Mvelopes took the path of pleasing what it hoped to be a broad market and YNAB took the path of having a narrow, strict view of budgeting but within that narrow, strict view, simply excelling.
Take the approach to a spending plan, for example. With Mvelopes, you create a yearly spending plan, where you divide each check you get into your envelopes. While this sounds very simple to explain, in reality it's a huge pain in the neck. Who wants to be enslaved by their financial program to have to constantly divide all paychecks into envelopes? If they were reading this post, they would say that you don't have to do it that way. There's an option to live a month ahead, or to consolidate your checks into one, or probably a few other things I haven't heard of. Mvelopes is flexible, and so it can address a broad market.
What about YNAB? He says you live on last month's paychecks. Period. If you don't commit yourself to doing it that way when you get the software, you might as well not use the software. It's a simple rule. And it really makes the software much easier to use because it doesn't open up the dozens of ways people approach budgeting, like Mvelopes does. It's narrow in its thinking, and therefore, for those who adopt its methodology, it's simpler and easier. And, best of all, it works much better and is a lot less work.
It's much better for software to tell you, "Here's how you should do this" than give you a million options and choose yourself. This is especially true if those behind the software are the experts, not you. When I'm using software at work, I want options because I am a professional. When I'm using software for budgeting, I want a clear, simple plan for getting the most out of my spending plan without a lot of work. YNAB offers me that. Mvelopes offers me a lot of options.
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