Two years budgeting towards financial flexibility with YNAB
It’s one thing to save and budget. It’s another to realize you can be flexible and resilient, even when you aren’t making a ton of money.
Today marks the end of my second full year of using YNAB (formerly “You Need a Budget”), an online budgeting app that has opinions about how you budget. In that time, it has immensely improved my relationship with my money. This post is not an ad for YNAB per se, nor will I claim it’s for everyone—I know some people who have tried YNAB and bounced off it, and that’s totally fair. Rather, I want to celebrate this feeling and also encourage people to take whatever steps are right for them to improve their relationship to money!
Why I started with YNAB
For a very long time, I was using Mint to keep track of my spending and nominally budget. Intuit eventually acquired and then, in 2023, shuttered Mint. This set me off on a search for a new and better way to budget. I knew I didn’t want to roll my own, despite my spreadsheet and coding skills: I need something that would hook into my Canadian bank accounts and import my transactions, or else I would never keep up with it.
YNAB was one of the few services that made the shortlist (a lot of apps available to Americans just don’t work with Canadian banks). As a math teacher, I find its zero-based envelope-budgeting philosophy very appealing for its practicality. Furthermore, its marketing is super approachable. Their website has an entire section of guides to walk you through the YNAB philosophy, including some very friendly and funny videos.
Month at the End of the Money
When I started with YNAB, I had a lot of financial anxiety. Some of this comes through in a 2022 post I wrote about spending money. I’ve always been a frugal person, often to the point of self-denial. As a single homeowner in my thirties, I’m acutely aware of my financial precarity: I am much better off than many, yet I feel a tremendous pressure to be responsible. If I don’t save now, my old age will be very challenging (and I plan to live a very, very long time!). I won’t have kids or a partner to take care of me. On top of saving for retirement, I also need to maintain—and hopefully enrich—this house I’ve been privileged enough to become the caretaker of (which is how I try to look at it—our houses generally outlive us).
And no matter what I did, it never felt like enough.
It felt like the financial floodwaters were rising, and my income was not letting me tread them. This led to cycles of austerity under the guise of frugality, denying myself the simplest of pleasures like takeout because I “had to save.” I was extremely anxious about money, and it also affected my comfort socializing (because you basically have to spend money any time you go anywhere these days, unless it’s a library). But I didn’t know what to do—I wasn’t spending a ton of money every month on frivolities, so where was it all going? What more could I cut from my expenses?
Enter YNAB. I won’t sugarcoat it: for the first year with YNAB, I actually felt more anxious and despondent about my financial situation. Despite using the service as assiduously as I could, I still felt like I was falling behind. I couldn’t get any traction. What else could I possibly do?
Slowly but surely, I began to work on getting a month ahead—the idea that you should be able to budget for this month’s expenses with last month’s income. This was a daunting task, especially because my summer income is radically different from the other ten months of the year. I am proud to share that, for the months of September, October, November, and December of this year, I was month ahead!! I’m not sure yet if this will remain the case in January—but I will be close.
It is very satisfying to look at my budget on the first of the month and see a big chunk of money waiting for me to fund all those categories. It is a great feeling.
A few disclaimers now. A confluence of events have influenced my current financial well-being. For one thing, retroactive pay from our collective bargaining agreement and Bill 124 settlement helped a great deal—my income in 2024 and 2025 was higher than it will be in 2026. However, while those windfalls helped me with my goal of getting ahead, I am confident I can stay ahead. Similarly, I was able to refinance my mortgage in September in a way that let me consolidate my other debt, lowering my overall monthly payments. But I’m not sure I would have had the wherewithal to do that had I not been running the numbers with YNAB.
Having the Money to Spend and Knowing You Have It Are Two Different Things
Today, I opened YNAB to catch up on my budgeting for the end of the month. I was nervous: instead of saving money gradually over the next few months to purchase parts for a new PC, I had spent all the money now, nearly $4000, to take advantage of Boxing Day sales even as part prices rise. So I was expecting a massacre.
Imagine my shock when I categorized all my expenses and started moving money around between categories to cover my overspending only to discover I could afford it??? What? Where did this money come from?
The answer, of course, isn’t miraculous. I didn’t just have $4000 lying around, not being put to use—that’s not the YNAB way. It was allocated to other spending categories. Some of it came from money I had set aside for “winter savings,” knowing I wouldn’t be paid for these last two weeks of December. Some of it I borrowed from other goals I am saving towards, like a trip to Paris. So yes, moving money from these categories to my “next computer” category sets me back on those goals. On the other hand, it means I don’t have to put any of this spending on my line of credit, and the money I save on paying off that with interest can go right back into those other categories starting next month.
This is the true revelation YNAB has brought me. For the first time in my adult life, not only am I budgeting, but I am giving myself permission to spend my money on what I want and surprising myself with my financial flexibility. If you had told me two years ago I’d feel this way, I wouldn’t believe you.
At the risk of really making this sound like a sponsored post (it’s not), I do have a YNAB referral link that gives each of us a free month if you use it (beyond the entire month everyone gets as a free trial before you have to enter your payment details, omg). Like I said above, not everyone will click with this particular service. But as I sat here moving money around my categories, I knew I wanted to capture how good it made me feel, and maybe I can give some people who are feeling like I did some hope that it gets better.
Life is rough for a lot of us right now, and I won’t pretend that my financial anxiety will ever go away. Even now, I’m nervous about what this summer will bring, how to drum up more copyediting business, how I will afford new basement windows this year, etc. I will continue to face challenges, and I will likely continue to be very frugal and to have very frank conversations with my therapist about my spending and saving.
But today? Today, as we close out 2025, which has been a dumpsterfire in so many other respects? Today feels good.