BUILD YOUR BEST BUDGET

TWO BUDGETING BEHEMOTHS GO HEAD TO HEAD

- BY AUGUST GARRY

Come on a journey with me, reader. A financial journey. A budgeting journey. A budgeting program odyssey.

I volunteered for this assignment—telling you, dear reader, which budgeting tool you should choose to manage your finances—in the hopes that over the course of my research, I would find out how to manage my own. Back in 2016, I used Mint long enough to get emails from them until Mint was “reimagined” by Credit Karma and shut down in March 2024. Otherwise, my budgeting experience looks something like this: Once every two years, I start to feel stressed about finances or excited about planning for the future and open a spreadsheet, where I enter all my income and expenses. I usually determine I should be spending less on groceries and struggle for a few weeks to do that before giving up and forgetting I ever made a budget in the first place.

For this article, I chose two of the top-rated budgeting platforms. I chose Monarch Money and You Need a Budget (YNAB—frequently pronounced "why-nab"). Both are well-reviewed and widely used: the main difference is that YNAB uses what is called a "zero-based" budget, and Monarch uses a more traditional, flexible budgeting model. Don't worry about what those terms mean right now—we'll go over the differences below. Now, let's break down building your budget in YNAB or Monarch Money.

LINKING YOUR ACCOUNTS