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Ask HN: Any nicer alternatives to Mint for personal budgeting?

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Re: Ask HN: Any nicer alternatives to Mint for personal budgeting?

#11

Post by geoelectric »

I'll join in with recommending YNAB, with a caveat that it's really an opinionated methodology encoded into software, and the main benefit IMO is from the methodology. A comparison might be OmniFocus vs. GTD.

I haven't used the newer web-based version enough yet to know whether you can really roll your own system on top of it, but I suspect you'll find path of least resistance is to do it their way. The good news there is that they explain their way very well, with lots of supplementary material available.

Re: Ask HN: Any nicer alternatives to Mint for personal budgeting?

#12

Post by mod »

aeharding wrote: post #4

Any chance you could check out my side project, Financier? https://financier.io I just recently launched, so there might be rough edges. It's almost feature complete, though. It's very similar to YNAB 4. It's $12/year with syncing. No signup is required and no internet connection is required -- it syncs when you have a connection. Mobile app to come! I would really appreciate any feedback. :) For the next week, I'm g…

That's an interesting subscription model. I'm curious how it'll turn out.

In the meantime, I wasn't sure what "sync" meant in the context of your app. I had to read a lot of your page before I understood (even after reading this post first).

I actually thought you meant syncing bank accounts or something similar.

Re: Ask HN: Any nicer alternatives to Mint for personal budgeting?

#14

Post by ecubed »

mod wrote: post #12
aeharding wrote: post #4

Any chance you could check out my side project, Financier? https://financier.io I just recently launched, so there might be rough edges. It's almost feature complete, though. It's very similar to YNAB 4. It's $12/year with syncing. No signup is required and no internet connection is required -- it syncs when you have a connection. Mobile app to come! I would really appreciate any feedback. :) For the next week, I'm g…

That's an interesting subscription model. I'm curious how it'll turn out. In the meantime, I wasn't sure what "sync" meant in the context of your app. I had to read a lot of your page before I understood (even after reading this post first). I actually thought you meant syncing bank accounts or something similar.

+1 for not understanding sync. Was also looking for a way to sync transactions from bank account.

Re: Ask HN: Any nicer alternatives to Mint for personal budgeting?

#16

Post by pjbster »

Have you considered getting by without a budgeting app? I used to go through exactly this sort of mental exercise that evaluating and selecting the perfect personal finance app would bring. It's like I could solve my financial problems forever through the power of thought. That my ability to see where the money was being spent was somehow impeded because I lacked the right software.

In the end, there's only one rule that counts: spend less than you earn (or earn more than you spend - either way, you need to have control over at least one of these variables or you're totally fucked anyway).

Sorry to be so blunt. Of course, some people like the process of keeping on top of statement reconciliation - hell, I used to be one of them. And there's no doubt that watching your net worth increase will bring pleasure to your day.

But it's easy to become obsessed. It's only now that I've surrendered the "comfort" of knowing where my money went that I realise I was actually stressed out all the time. These days, I'm a little more relaxed about things - so long as we stick to normal spending patterns and don't splurge on spontaneous things, we'll probably be ok.

In my case, I can live with this level of uncertainty. Ignorance is bliss, and all that.

(I'll echo the other sentiments around here: YNAB was my favourite. I never tried Mint.)

Re: Ask HN: Any nicer alternatives to Mint for personal budgeting?

#17

Post by aeharding »

mod wrote: post #12
aeharding wrote: post #4

Any chance you could check out my side project, Financier? https://financier.io I just recently launched, so there might be rough edges. It's almost feature complete, though. It's very similar to YNAB 4. It's $12/year with syncing. No signup is required and no internet connection is required -- it syncs when you have a connection. Mobile app to come! I would really appreciate any feedback. :) For the next week, I'm g…

That's an interesting subscription model. I'm curious how it'll turn out. In the meantime, I wasn't sure what "sync" meant in the context of your app. I had to read a lot of your page before I understood (even after reading this post first). I actually thought you meant syncing bank accounts or something similar.

Thanks for the feedback, I'll try and clarify "sync" wording in the future.

Re: Ask HN: Any nicer alternatives to Mint for personal budgeting?

#19

Post by afarrell »

I've tried a few of them: GNUCash, YNAB, and BudgetSimple. Neither of them were useful to me. What was useful was just every other week taking a half hour with my wife and looking through our accounts and recent spending and medium-term plans and just talking.

I fail to see the value in sorting my personal spending into categories, especially when it means that I have to take a couple hours a week to either manually enter each item or to correct the mislabeling.

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