Budget software for multiple users, with data privacy
December 22, 2019 9:42 AM   Subscribe

My partner and I would like to budget together, with the specific goal of sharing the work equally. Privacy is important to her, and transaction syncing is important to me.

We recently set up joint checking and savings in addition to our own separate accounts. A perfect app would let us each budget separately and also share a budget for the joint accounts. We each transfer money into the joint accounts and can budget for those transfers from our personal accounts. Ideally it would sync with our bank and credit card accounts. Ideally we could mark certain expenses as shared and adjust the proportions we both owe. Ideally we could set goals for savings and retirement. Ideally we could do all this from our phones.

I’m a current user of YNAB. It is nearly perfect for what we need, except that it doesn’t have a way for separate accounts to share a budget.

I found Honeydue, but their privacy policy makes it clear that they can sell your data in aggregate so that’s a No for her. It is also free, so that’s a No for both of us. I assume they want to be acquired by a larger company that will then do bad things.

Is there anything we can use that is secure and private and does all these things? We would be willing to pay quite a bit for the privilege.
posted by flannel to Work & Money (5 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 

I’m a current user of YNAB. It is nearly perfect for what we need, except that it doesn’t have a way for separate accounts to share a budget


Can you clarify what you are wishing it could do? It seems like you could each get your own YNAB subscription and sync with your personal accounts and the joint accounts. When setting up the budgets, distinguish shared expenses in the category names, e.g. "RENT (shared)" or by putting them all under a special section of the budget...

SHARED
---Rent
---Utilities
---etc.

...and budget the amounts you've agreed you're each responsible for. There's no way to automatically adjust proportions of shared expenses, so that decision would have to be manual. Transfer enough to cover your part into a joint checking account each month, and pay the bills from it.

What am I missing?
posted by jon1270 at 11:12 AM on December 22, 2019


......and budget the amounts you've agreed you're each responsible for.

On reflection, no, that's not it. You'd each have to budget enough to cover all the shared expenses, but when your partner transfers money into the shared checking account, you would categorize that as income to be budgeted. It's a little funky but I think it would work.
posted by jon1270 at 11:24 AM on December 22, 2019


Buy two more subscriptions for YNAB, one for her and one for the joint account? If you are going to have a shared bank accounts, you might also want a shared email account so that you can use that for the account user names. You each keep your own as well, of course, just like the bank accounts.
posted by soelo at 1:29 PM on December 22, 2019 [1 favorite]


You can create multiple budgets on YNAB and select which one you wish to view on the mobile app. Here is a discussion of various uses of that feature, which sound in some cases close to yours.
posted by Wavelet at 6:26 PM on December 22, 2019 [2 favorites]


Response by poster: Thanks all who suggested creating multiple budgets. It feels weird to me that we couldn’t limit each other’s access to our personal budgets that way. I contacted YNAB and they suggested we try a new feature they are testing out called Family Budgets, which won second place in an API contest they had. With the holidays and wedding planning we have not had a chance to actually look into it yet but I will report back. My partner is still deciding which things she is even comfortable with having as shared expenses, as she is very sensitive to some things, like her food purchases, feeling controlled or scrutinized. We don’t have that dynamic at all but it’s an understandable feeling.

As I am sure everyone knows, the mechanism for budgeting is probably the easiest part of budgeting, as opposed to the communication and recalibration about the process and the feelings and issues it brings up for both of us.
posted by flannel at 12:06 PM on January 1, 2020


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