Services that I love and pay for
My digital ride-or-dies: YNAB, Fastmail, and 1Password
In this post, I 𝚎̶𝚟̶𝚊̶𝚗̶𝚐̶𝚎̶𝚕̶𝚒̶𝚣̶𝚎̶ share some digital services that I rely on and pay for, and will continue to do so until they shut down, completely change, or someone pries the apps away from my cold, dead fingers.
(This also represents the first of what I hope will be more regular posts that touch on personal, or at least not exclusively work-related, topics, that I hope others find interesting or useful in some way. I’m posting here in a purely personal capacity, and nothing in this space should be construed as a view or statement connected to my employer/institution.)
I use YNAB, Fastmail, and 1Password every day. They are my three digital ride-or-dies.
(Just to be clear, nobody is paying me to say any of this… I’m not famous enough and I just like sharing things.)
1. YNAB 💸
YNAB, which stands for “You Need A Budget”, is exactly what it sounds like: a budgeting app. It’s also a lifestyle — but before you think “ew, gross” and move on, read a bit more. I’m a relatively new YNABer (👋 to any other wine hamburgers1 in the room!), just since February 2021, but it has totally changed my approach to spending/saving money. This has resulted in a major (positive) trajectory change in my personal finances, and in my mental health surrounding money. For the first time in a long while, I feel in control money-wise (at least, of the things that I can control).
At first glance, YNAB offers a synced website and mobile apps for creating a personal budget and keeping track of your income and expenses. They are also a fantastic company2, that provides excellent support and training around using YNAB. (If curious, check out any of their YouTube videos, the YNAB podcast, or the extremely supportive r/YNAB subreddit.)
YNAB follows an envelope method, zero-sum budgeting model. This means that you create categories (or envelopes) for the areas where you need or want to spend money (e.g., rent, groceries, utilities), and you allocate only the money you currently have to these categories. (In YNAB’s language, you give those dollars “jobs”.) Then, when you spend money, you track those expenses and subtract from the appropriate category.
The zero-sum part means that you should allocate all of your money to your budget categories, whether for expenses or savings goals. When you receive income, you immediately allocate those dollars to one or more categories, and if you overspend in a particular category (dropping its balance below zero), you need to pull from another area, otherwise you end up with debt or an overdraft.
OK — that all probably sounds reasonable, if more extreme than most household budgets, right? But wait, there’s more! Where YNAB really changed the game for me was their encouragement to embrace your “true expenses”: irregular costs that may not show up every month, or are unexpected. These are things like car/renter’s insurance, car maintenance, your annual Amazon Prime subscription, unexpected medical services — these (typically larger) expenses can appear and wreak havoc on your monthly budget. Instead, consider these as true expenses that should be included in your monthly budget, along with your actual monthly expenses. These are also known as sinking funds. (Your response to doing this may be “oh shit, I don’t have as much money as I thought I did!” — mine certainly was. Sadly, this was always actually the case. Incorporating these real expenses into your monthly budget will allow you to face them without surprise or budgetary shock.)
Since embracing YNAB and its budgeting approach, I am in much more control of my finances, and have been able to not only start saving much more, but also more-aggressively paying off my student loans. Feel free to reach out if you’re curious about my budget categories — I enjoy talking about this. It may also be a subject for a future post.
Now, YNAB does cost money: the annual price is $84, or $11.99/month, after a generous 34-day free trial. (Why 34 days? It’s enough time to complete an entire monthly cycle and see how it works for you.) You can get another free month (plus one for me!) if you use my referral link to sign up for your trial and eventually subscribe. I can nearly guarantee that YNAB will more than make up for its price.
College students (including graduate students): you can get an entire year of YNAB for free! Read more about this program at their website.
Personal aside: Before discovering YNAB, my “budgeting” approach involved a basic spreadsheet that tracked my monthly income (salary after taxes and other deductions), monthly unavoidable expenses (rent, student loan payment, utilities, car loan payment), and my credit card balances (where I put nearly all other expenses). This just told me how much I could pay towards those credit cards without overdrafting my checking account.
Now, I managed using this approach, because I make a good salary. (I’m a tenured engineering professor — no point in pretending otherwise.) I didn’t have… horrible… overspending habits, though I definitely wasted money on unnecessary things, and managed to pay my credit card balances in full nearly every month. But, I realized that I was relying on the credit cards (known as the “credit card float”), and needed my salary to pay off the previous month, rather than set me up for the next one. I also felt like I couldn’t save much at all (and wasn’t putting any of my own money towards retirement), which felt ridiculous for someone in my situation. YNAB changed the game for me.
I will probably write an entire post about my newly found approach to (and appreciation for) budgeting. I may be a bit excited about it and want to share. 🤓
2. Fastmail ✉️
I signed up for a Gmail account as soon as I could, back in 2006 when you had to be invited by someone with an account. (For those not quite as old and/or nerdy as me, Gmail launched in 2004 with 1 GB of free storage, and that limit increased constantly — you could see the storage limit growing on the website! Strangely, my university email account had less space than that until 2020 or so.) I happily used that as my personal email account for more than a decade, until I became creeped out by the unavoidable privacy issues surrounding Google services. As the saying goes, if you aren’t paying for the service, then you are the product.
After initially trying out another privacy-focused email service called Protonmail, I discovered Fastmail, and haven’t looked back. Fastmail integrates well with my existing email applications on my computers, phone, and tablet, and offers some great services such as throwaway email aliases and custom domains. Aliases are great for giving throwaway email addresses to websites or services that might end up on a spam list. I haven’t used their calendar, contacts, or note services, but the email alone has been worth it for me. Yes, you have to pay for it, and most of us have come to expect email to be a free service — but I know that they aren’t selling my information or showing me ads based on my email content.
Fastmail also supports two-factor authentication (2FA or TFA) using authentication apps and/or YubiKey one-time passwords, without requiring you to also use text-message-based one-time passwords, which I really appreciate. Services that only offer phone-based 2FA are better than nothing, but this approach has some vulnerabilities. A strong, custom password (stored in 1Password!) combined with real 2FA is essential, and I continue to be disappointed by services that don’t offer it at all. (Or, try to make up their own approach — looking at you, United.)
If you want to check out Fastmail for yourself, this referral link gives a 10% discount on your first year: https://ref.fm/u23014376
3. 1Password 🔑
We live in a password-saturated world, from our devices to practically all online accounts. It’s very easy for people to create one or two easy-to-remember passwords, and then reuse these on all the sites — even the ones where we know we probably shouldn’t. Then, perhaps one of those less-important sites gets hacked, and all the sudden your bank account password is out there 😳.
The easiest way to get around this is to use a password manager, like 1Password, that remembers all of these passwords for you. This lets you create unique, random passwords for each website and service, and then automatically fill these for you in the browser.
Web browsers like Safari and Chrome now come with decent built-in password managers, but in my experience 1Password still works far better, especially when it comes to syncing across all your devices, working in all browsers, and even in your mobile apps.
1Password does a great job at autofilling login credentials for you, once you install it and its browser extensions. It can also save your credit card information, bank account numbers, and beyond. I use it to store everything — from my passport number, Global Entry/TSA Precheck number, and redress number3, to my driver’s license and car information, and even software licenses.
If you do set up 2FA for your online accounts—and you should!—1Password can even store the necessary info for these. Then, when you log into that website/service, it saves the one-time password into your device clipboard, ready to be pasted. Magic 🪄!
1Password offers apps and browser plugins for basically all systems: macOS, Windows, Linux, and Chrome OS; iOS and Android. Their service syncs between all your devices, and you can also log into your account online. To be clear, they cannot access your information—it is encrypted using the keys that only you have. (Make sure you don’t lose your master password! They make a handy “emergency sheet” to print out and store in a safe place.) You can read more about their security on their website.
1Password also has a family plan, for sharing accounts between people, but I haven’t used it.
Conclusions
Hopefully I have convinced you to at least check out some of these services. I have found a lot of value in them. Thanks for reading!
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Honorable mentions
All digital natives, whose lives exist on our computers, should have their stuff backed up. After a disastrous hard drive failure in grad school, I embraced a multifaceted approach to safeguarding my files. One element of that is Backblaze, which silently backs up your hard drive regularly in the background. I’ve only had to rely on it once or twice, but I’m much more comfortable knowing it is there in an emergency.
NewsBlur is a personal news aggregation service, similar to Google Reader (RIP), which has continued to not just survive but thrive and improve. I use it to subscribe to all sorts of websites, from selected news sites to personal blogs. It has some great sorting and smart selection features, has a reasonable subscription fee ($36/year), and comes with excellent customer support. (Full disclosure: I’ve known and been friends with the owner/developer since college.)
Fantastical is my go-to calendar application. I switched to using that from Apple’s calendar app (iCal?) when I needed a better way to integrate my work’s Exchange calendar system with my personal and work calendars using Apple’s calendar system. Fantastical handles all of those great, and it also offers a snazzy natural-language parsing system for adding entries. For example, it understands “Meeting with Brian at 2 pm tomorrow”.
Former recommendations
Dropbox used to be my go-to and sole service to storing, syncing, and backing up all my personal and work files. It just worked, did its job, and didn’t try to do anything else. However, over time—likely as the company has needed to grow and increase revenue—the costs started to increase, they keep tacking on unnecessary features, and the company itself has done some things that I don’t like (both in terms of user security and politics). I still use it, because people I work with use it occasionally, but I don’t recommend it anymore, and will likely be dropping my subscription soon.
This is an inside joke to folks who watch YNAB’s YouTube videos: the auto-captioning turned “YNABers” into “wine hamburgers” 🍷🍔.
YNAB the company has been labeled the best small workplace by Fortune two years in a row. Obviously, I can’t personally speak to that, but that gels with the way their employees talk in the behind-the-scenes podcast episodes.
The reason I have a redress number for flying is probably worth its own post.