Haha, in the old days I was unfortunately the one IN the war, not watching on the sidelines

So many hours I'll never get back :')

Oh, excellent! :D

I just wanted to be extra sure, you never know with this place, right?

Sorry, it's hard to tell over text, but are you disappointed I didn't go into more detail about excel's functions? Because I wrote that comment to show how you can still use YNAB's methods without purchasing the program.

If anyone finds a lot of value in the product, of course they can keep using it! But the original comment seemed distressed about the price, so I wanted to let people know it IS possible to use the method without paying for YNAB, I myself did it. And I'm NOT some finance master, or even that good at excel lol

And I didn't go into any details about how I set up my spreadsheet because I learned my excel skills from google, and often have to re-google how to do stuff I don't do regularly, so I don't consider myself good enough at Excel to do any detailed teaching.

Or do you think I was being condescending by giving super obvious information? Because I never meant to offend, I was trying to uplift. I've posted before on reddit about using the YNAB method without spending money and got a few replies asking how, so I wanted to go ahead and offer up that information first thing, for anyone scrolling by, in case it was helpful. You never know who's reading and where they're at in life

When introduced to it, I had zero money to spend on YNAB, so I found a PDF of the book online, read it, and taught myself how to make an Excel spreadsheet. Excel can get pretty complicated, but basic functions like adding up all the numbers in a row are super easy, and you can google how to do pretty much everything if you forget. In fact you can just google "Excel budget sheet" can find a step by step guide or maybe even a template you can download that let's you plug in values. Even if you can't afford Excel, Google Sheets is almost the exact same thing for free. YNAB is more about a state of mind than the program anyway. Don't spend more than you have, and be mindful and purposeful about where the money you do spend is going.

Never spent a cent.