My Tiller / YNAB Journey... Decision Time

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I use both Tiller and YNAB. I started YNAB in 2022 and Tiller on and off since in 2023 I think. Transactions in both go back to 2022. I need to settle on one so I’ve been trying to figure out what is important to me. Today I used AI (Gemini) to help sort things out. Gemini’s response to the information I gave it was pretty detailed. I thought I’d share some of it here. Let me know if you might be interested in the whole exchange.

The Core Conflict

  • YNAB is a prescriptive behavioral tool. Its goal is to force you into the “envelope” mindset. When you overspend, it forces you to immediately find the money (“Whack-A-Mole”), which is good for in-the-moment discipline but bad for post-mortem analysis. It hides the “crime” after you’ve done the “time.”

  • Tiller is a flexible data analysis tool. Its goal is to give you raw, transparent data in a powerful environment (a spreadsheet). It shows you the unvarnished truth of your overspending but lacks the refined, automated features for proactive budgeting and daily management that make YNAB so smooth.

Feature YNAB Tiller
Budgeting Philosophy Envelope System (Proactive) Data-Driven Ledger (Reactive)
Tracking Overspending Major Weakness. Hides overspending once covered. Major Strength. Clearly shows overspending as a negative value.
Day-to-Day Workflow Excellent. Easy transaction clearing, satisfying balance matching. Painful. Clunky, multi-step reconciliation process.
Long-Term Planning Excellent. Automated sinking funds/targets are a key feature for you. Weak. Manual entry for monthly budget targets.
Mobile/Spouse Access Excellent. Great app and dedicated widget for category balances. Good. Google Sheets app is powerful but less purpose-built.
Data & Customization Weak. A closed system. Analysis requires stale exports. Excellent. Infinitely customizable with Google Sheets.
Data Integrity High Confidence. Calculated balance proves all transactions are entered. Lower Confidence. Balances are pulled, not calculated. Transactions feel disconnected.
Support & Community Slow support. Community is not an option for you. Slow support. Community is helpful.
Annual Cost ~$100/year ~$100/year

Recommendation: Commit to Tiller, but “Fix” Its Flaws

Based on your primary unmet need, the choice becomes clearer. You stated: “I need to be able to see my overspending each month to have a chance of curbing it.”

YNAB fundamentally fails at this. Its entire methodology is designed to make that specific piece of information disappear from your main budget view. You have to actively dig into reports to find it. Tiller, on the other hand, puts it front and center in bright red ink.

Therefore, the most logical path is to commit to Tiller and use the power of Google Sheets to replicate the YNAB features you love. You are retired and have the time and inclination to tinker. This is a perfect opportunity to build a system that is truly yours.

It goes on to provide an action plan to fix (actually fix is wrong but you know what I mean) Tiller. It’s basically saying Tiller can be anything I want if I take the time to figure out Google Sheets. I need to start doing that. I know there are Tiller official and community templates. I use some of them today. I’d like to know how they work and how I can adjust them or even build new to suit me.

YNAB is wonderful. 2022 was a turnaround year for my finances and, shortly after starting YNAB I was essentially debt free (except a mortgage). I now pay my card balances each month and have a 0% loan that paid for a medical treatment that will be paid off before interest is applied. YNAB did this for me. But YNAB has become a bit of a gilded cage.

Hope I didn’t bore you! :grinning_face:

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@kkinderen Kevin, Very interesting breakout of the needs and issues. I’m curious what part of your post is “Gemini” created versus your comments?

Also, I’m a little confused on the YNAB Long-Term Planning section. Is this comparing Tiller Categories and budget amounts functionality to something YNAB does automatically for you?

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Hi Clint. I reformatted the original post to make Gemini’s response clear. The information I sent to Gemini was not included, just my comments about its response. See prompt below.

Concerning Long-Term Planning. I think that was in response to my comments about being able to set up targets in YNAB. For example, I can set a target for my auto insurance to $1000 every 6 months starting 1 Jan. YNAB automatically calculates what I need to put aside each month in that category to have money ready when due. I can skip a month (snooe) and YNAB will update the budget requirements for subsequent months.

Tiller is quite a bit different. I enter $1000 in 1 Jan and 1 Jul. But, that’s not really helping me put aside a monthly amount (a budget) to have $1000 ready when due (planning). In fact, I’d say this is one of the fundamental differences between YNAB and Tiller. Not a limitation, just a different way of doing things I guess.

Here is the prompt I used with Gemini:

I use both YNAB and Tiller HQ for budgeting. I really should only be using one. I can’t decide which to use.

YNAB good:

I like YNAB because it is an envelope budgeting system that I can understand. Each month it tracks what I spent, my income from various sources and my credit cards. At the beginning of the next month I can go through all the accounts and easily recover money I didn’t spend from the previous month. I mostly put that money back into a category called Piggy Bank. YNAB has a bunch of pretty decent reports. There is a widget for the Android phone that my wife and I can use that shows us our balance is certain categories. This makes it easy, while on the road, to see what’s left for eating out, fuel, groceries and personal spending. Also, the android app is pretty darn good. I like how I can clear items as soon as they are cleared at the bank. Daily (or more often because that’s just me) I log into my bank to check what transactions have cleared and then just hit the (c) checkbox in YNAB. In almost all cases the cleared balance in YNAB matches the balance reported by the bank. A very comfortable feeling. Also, the balances in YNAB are calculated based on a starting balance and all the cleared transactions. This gives me confidence I’ve recorded everything correctly since 2022 when I started. YNAB has a pretty good way of budgeting by setting targets. If I pay a bill annually in February then I just enter the amount due and when. YNAB calculates the monthly amount I need to reserve. This has worked very well for things like auto insurance and even property taxes. It is nice to have the money set aside and, if I need to “borrow” from that category, the rest of the months get updated to ensure I have the needed amount when due. This is a key feature for me. A bit inflexible but good enough.

YNAB not so good:

What I can’t tell from YNAB is how much I’ve overspent. Say I budgeted $100 for my personal spending but I spent $300. I have to move $200 from the Piggy Bank to cover that spending. Makes sense so far. But, at the end of the month I have no real way to tell that I’ve overspent that category by $200. Covering it makes it disappear. That’s really the only problem I have with YNAB I think. I have to export data into a spreadsheet if I want to analyze it further and the data becomes stale on the next transaction. Also, YNAB is what it is. It really isn’t extensible though they have an API. It is an application with a few new features a year. I’m retired, so I don’t have much that I count as income. Also, and this can be big, I’ve somehow messed up previous months. This means I go back over previous months to find that there is either overspending or money left behind. I try to fix this because I really appreciate accuracy but it sometimes takes days as I feel like I’m chasing numbers back and forth from month to month. Painful. But it seems like it has been pretty stable for about a month. YNAB offers assistance with a day at a time exchange with their help team and with Reddit. The YNAB community is one of the main reasons I left Reddit and do not plan to return so that is out.

TILLER good:

Tiller has some advantages such as it is already a spreadsheet. If I wanted to use the data for analysis, it’s easily done within Google Sheets either in the budget spreadsheet directly or in a separate spreadsheet that references the budget spreadsheet. I can use any of Google Sheets’ functions, filtering and tools to look at data in different ways. I can even add my own columns if I want to collect additional information. There are add-ons both from Tiller and from the community. Getting help from the Tiller Community has been gratifying and fruitful. With Tiller’s Monthly Budget tab I can tell at any time where there is overspending. Tiller does not force moving money between categories so if I spend $50 too much on personal spending the Monthly Budget View shows -$50.00 in red in the available column.

TILLER not so good:

Tiller’s direct support is as slow as YNAB - day at a time exchanges. Tiller’s add-ons are generally useful but sometimes a bit burdensome and buggy. Clearing items is a painful process of adding monthly statement information to a tab then going to the transactions to add the label from the statement tab. Then going back to the statement tab to ensure it all balances. Then going back to the transaction tab to figure out why things didn’t balance (seldom occurrance). The balances reported are NOT calculated from the transactions. They come from the banks directly. This means that all the transactions are pretty much stand alone. They are not used to update the balance and are not cleared individually to match the balance. Clearing, as mentioned, is done with a separate template where the balances are manually entered from the monthly statement. Tiller’s budgeting targets are absolutely basic. There’s a spreadsheet with all the categories and months and you manually add monthly budgets. There is an advantage to this if you have certain months where you want the budgeted amount to vary but I don’t use that often.

In general, I have not created any really useful extensions for budgeting. So I have not taken advantage of Google Sheets’ capabilities either with Tiller directly or with YNAB exports. Truthfully, I’m not even sure what I’d like to add. I keep thinking a dashboard but my attempts end up with nothing useful or interesting. I overspend and I wish I didn’t but that’s the fact. I need to be able to see my overspending each month to have a chance of curbing it.

I could keep using both but that is about $100/year each. I’d probably waste the money on something else but I’m also spending daily time with each and not sure that’s productive. Then again, I’d probalby sleep away the hour I get back by giving up one.

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Thank you Kevin for clarifying. I appreciate it and understand the post better now. It’s interesting to see how the AI tool helped you with your questions.

I think it is amazing what some people have created within Tiller to develop solutions like the envelope method, a more automated budgeting process and Mint like reports / dashboard to name a few. Hopefully, you will soon be able to setup Tiller to meet your current needs. I’ve enjoyed reading about your AI comparison and look forward to reading about your Tiller journey.

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Thank you for sharing Kevin. The flexibility with Tiller including especially the worksheet based approach has been invaluable for me. There are potentially widely differing aspects or preferences for long term planning. For me, the Tiller Cash Flow Forecast add-in and the Retirement Planner add-in are outstanding for my priorities for long term planning.

For me, the bank feed reliability is the main weakness with Tiller. I verify my bank feed data each and every time as there are often issues. There is a years long issue with duplicate bank feed entries with one entry being an out of date value and the other being the correct amount. The nasty issue is that both entries are made with the exact same date and time stamp to the balance history tab with the out of date value being – almost always – the one that is picked up and used across Tiller.

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Would it be possible for you to share the prompt you submitted to Gemini AI, or a sanitized version of it, so that others and myself can try it on other platforms. Lately I’m addicted to Grok. Tiller is the way to go!!

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Great share thank you @kkinderen and so glad to hear about the turnaround you’ve made with respect to debt. We strive to help you maintain that with Tiller Money Feeds and are always looking to improve our product, so you don’t have to! - I thought Gemini could’ve toned down the “You are retired and have the time” :sweat_smile:

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I do use Tiller to do envelope budgeting with some modification. I use the Savings Buget template and I’ve done some alterations to it to make it a little more envelope-y with rollover budgeting. It’s not quite as insistent as YNAB about “you better find the money from somewhere else,” but it does make clear where we’re over and where we’re ok, and lets me move money around in envelopes. The Categories sheet budget basically lets me automatically add money to my virtual envelopes every month, and I can always up that or reduce that if I need to, as well as add money into savings for the envelope through the template tool. I use that to see a) how much did we actually budget for that category? vs. b) how much did I ad-hoc put into the envelope over the year to keep it going? That’s quite helpful to us as we consider finances going into our next fiscal year - do we need to up the actual budget, or do we need to stop overspending and ratifying it later with extra income?

We can also see if an envelope is “overdrawn” through the available calculation column. For example, this summer, we had a wedding and an extra birthday party and we ended up overspending June by so much that we were negative clear into August’s budget. I could either allocate some extra funds to it to make up the difference, or (what I actually did) just let it sit so the big red box would stare us in the face and remind us that we don’t actually have any money in that budget.

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Hey @pkrug539, what modifications did you make to the sheet? Was it difficult?

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It wasn’t too hard, but it did take some creative planning. I’m trying to learn enough about the mechanics of the template sheet to just overhaul it entirely.

The major modifications were around figuring out essentially how much of my accounts was “spoken for” and how much was actually available outside of that, or how far into emergency funds/reserve cash were are. Savings Budget calculates out the “available” in the budget, and that’s great, but doesn’t tell you if you actually have that money in your bank account, it just tells you how much is in the budget.

I referenced my accounts that I wanted included (this is a thing I want to learn how to dynamically reference better), and totaled them up as a sort of “liquid net worth,” then totalled up the remaining available budgets in my categories, which I treat as sort of digital envelopes with month-to-month rollover. You have to set every category to “savings” in the Categories sheet to make it work, but so far that hasn’t screwed up anything else.

From there, I had to calculate out my expected monthly income, which I just used a reference to the top of the Savings Budget stuff, and how much I’ve already gotten vs. how much maybe surplus we got. (My wife’s hours are variable and occasionally I get some beer money from a few side job things.) I apply that to the monthly budget so we don’t have to essentially fund a month in advance and that draws down as we earn our expected income.

I added some boxes at the top to tell me if I’m under budget, if I’ve overspent any categories and total how much in the month, and what our “available unallocated” is.

If I learn more about spreadsheets, I know I can do more about this, it’s just been a bit of a backburner project.

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@pkrug539 I believe I have a similar idea of what i am trying to achieve. I found @jpfieber’s 🏆 Budget Status - Google Sheets template which is kind of doing what I want, but I am trying to do it on a weekly basis with rollovers.

I figured I could split the budget amount in the categories by the numbers of weeks in a month and assign it and use the savings budget template, but it would be nice to have it all on 1 tab.

Would you mind sharing a copy of an empty sheet? I could try and see if I could maybe make it work. :slight_smile: