Budgeting Archives

My monthly Savings Rate report: May 2020

As eluded to last month, May was a life-changing month. I even received a little surprise windfall at the end thanks to my grandmother's inheritance. With all of the preparations done in April, May was relatively calm in terms of expenses. This further improved my Savings Rate and pushed it to an all-time high.

YNAB Vs nYNAB Vs Excel: A Helpful Budgeting Tool reviewed

Disclaimer: This post contains a referral code to YNAB.

Important Note: As of November 2021, I decided to stop using YNAB. Their recent price increase makes it a less interesting option for Europeans who don’t benefit from Sync functionality.

The aptly named budgeting tool YNAB, short for You Need A Budget, stopped supporting their legacy tool YNAB4 on 31 October 2019. I’ve been an avid user of the tool for over 7 years, so seeing their support completely disappear made me question if a change was needed.

So using the end of support, I decided to do a review of my YNAB-usage and see what I should do:

Do the effort of moving to the new YNAB (aka nYNAB), and pay a subscription fee -the horror!-
Or move to a good old Excel spreadsheet

My monthly Savings Rate report: April 2020

April was the prelude to a life-changing May. Quite a few preparations were made in April for a big moment in May so it's only a given that some money was spent. Add to that the higher grocery expenses due to the corona measures and you can already guess that April wasn't a cheap month. Luckily I received my profit participation which prevented me from going negative.

My monthly Savings Rate report: March 2020

This page can contain affiliate partner links to products that I purchased this month.

February Savings Rate

Well, this was an interesting month for obvious reasons. The Coronavirus took a hold of the world this month after it caused a lockdown in China. It’s not exaggerated to say the coronavirus has the world in its grip. The upside to this for me personally is that it means I barely made any expenses besides groceries. I did make one large purchase after receiving a tax deduction on my apartment.

My monthly Savings Rate report: February 2020

This page can contain affiliate partner links to products that I purchased this month.

February Savings Rate

This February update is finally a lighter one. The start is the end of my trip to my fiancee’s home country. After this, things have remained relatively calm beside the occasional date night. We saw “Little Women” for example. Unfortunately, my Savings Rate still isn’t above 50%.