The Secret of Contentment

Everything we do at YNAB has a pretty singular goal: To help people reduce financial stress.

And one of the best ways we can do that is to make your financial life very boring. Just so incredibly boring.

As the boring-ness of your finances increase, so does your contentment, peace, and control. Exponentially so. (Yeah, boringness, might not be a word, but you get the idea.)

We want it to get to a point where you just don’t have much to talk about when it comes to your money. You’re doing your budgeting, and when something unexpected happens, you already have money saved up, and you just keep cruising along. You are making progress toward goals, and spending money on your priorities, but there just isn’t much to fuss about along the way.

As a result, you won’t be stressed. But another huge benefit is a feeling that could be entirely new to many of you—contentment. You will feel more at peace overall. You know that you have the things you need, and are prepared for the future. And should some new big thing/dream/opportunity come up, you know how you would go about getting there. You are in control. It feels good.

What we’re trying to do with the software, with the method, with everything is just move you along to this place.

You don’t need to talk about your bill-paying process because you just pay your bills automatically.

You don’t need to talk about a big car repair because it isn’t really a big deal. You have money saved for this and it’s just time to spend that money.

You don’t even need to talk about all the “emergencies” that crop up, because you’ve redefined the idea of an “emergency” and most of them are categories you are already saving for every month.

Bor-ing.

I want people to come to me and say, “Well, my money is just so boring now. I don’t give it a ton of thought.” Because then I will feel like we did something really important.

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