Converting a string input from user to a numeric (int) value.

I think you meant to ask them to Enter 0 for yes and 1 for No ? Maybe?

You're asking the user to type Y or N and then you're trying to parse that to an integer. That will always throw an exception.

EDIT -- As others have pointed out, if you want to continue to use Y or N, you should do something along the lines of

String addNewUser = answer.readLine();
if ( addNewUser.toLowerCase().startsWith("y") ) {
// Create new profile
}

parseInt is just for converting text numbers into integers: everything else gets a NumberFormatException.

If you want the decimal ASCII value of a character, just cast it to an int.

Use if (addNewUser.startsWith("Y") || addNewUser.startsWith("y")) { instead. Or (as Mark pointed) if (addNewUser.toLowerCase().startsWith("y")) {. BTW maybe look at Apache Commons CLI?

You cannot convert String to int, unless you know the String contains a valid integer.

Firstly, using the Scanner class for input is better, since its faster and you don't need to get into the hassle of using streams, if you're a beginner. This is how Scanner will be used to take input:

import java.util.Scanner; // this is where the Scanner class resides

...

Scanner sc = new Scanner(System.in); // "System.in" is the stream, you could also pass a String, or a File object to take input from
System.out.println("Would you like to ... Enter 'Y' or 'N':");
String input = sc.next();
input = input.toUpperCase();
char choice = sc.charAt(0);
if(choice == 'Y') 
{ } // do something

else if(choice == 'N')
{ } // do something

else
System.err.println("Wrong choice!");

This code could also be shortened to one line (however you won't be able to check a third "wrong choice" condition):

if ( new Scanner(System.in).next().toUpperCase().charAt(0) == 'Y')
      { } // do something
   else  // for 'N'
      { } // do something

Secondly, char to int conversion just requires an explicit type cast:

   char ch = 'A';
   int i = (int)ch;  // explicit type casting, 'i' is now 65 (ascii code of 'A')

Thirdly, even if you take input from a buffered input stream, you will take input in a String. So extracting the first character from the string and checking it, simply requires a call to the charAt() function with 0 as a parameter. It returns a character, which can then be compared to a single character in single quotes like this:

   String s = in.readLine();
   if(s.charAt(0) == 'Y') { } // do something

Fourthly, its a very bad idea to put the whole program in a try block and catch Exception at the end. An IOException can be thrown by the readline() function, and parseInt() could throw a NumberFormatException, so you won't be able to handle the 2 exceptions separately. In this question, the code is small enough for this to be ignored, but in practice, there will be many functions that can throw exceptions, hence it becomes easy to lose track of exactly which function threw what exception and proper exception handling becomes quite difficult.