Ask HN: How do you manage your financials?
11–20 of 113 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage your financials?
#12Lots of reading (books, blogs, etc.) has been helpful for me the past few years and it seems like I pickup new things all the time. A few things I use/reference:
- YNAB (You Need A Budget) - budgeting/tracking app, plus lots of great content on how to use the software and generally manage your budget/expenses
- /r/personalfinance subreddit - checkout their wiki [1] and flowchart [2] in particular for a really helpful overview
- For investments I use spreadsheets to track allocation, targets, etc.
- Bogleheads wiki - investing, heavy on index funds, low fees, etc.
- Whitecoat investor - a lot of good content, mostly aimed at high income earners plus some content specific to medical doctors [3]
- A variety of books - there are a lot of good ones out there
1. https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/wiki/commontopics
2. https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/wiki/commontopics#w...
3. https://www.whitecoatinvestor.com/new-to-the-blog-start-here...
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage your financials?
#13My 401k is maxed out and all in on FSKAX. Taxable brokerage is all in on VT and VTI. I have a Roth that I max out and invest more aggressively in due to the favorable tax treatment. 6 month emergency fund I’m thinking about bumping up to 9.
I don’t have any debt at a rate that makes me feel like I’m in any hurry to pay it off.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage your financials?
#14I have my budget in a spreadsheet. Top line is income, then the rest are expenses. The spreadsheet is really just for projecting what fixed costs and savings I can afford, I don't follow it strictly.
The key thing is the way all my accounts are set up. All money flows into the checking account, and then automatic deductions take the savings into different accounts for short term and long term. Money does not sit in the checking account for long (except for a small-ish cushion.) All spending is done on credit cards, which I pay off in full with automatic payments from the checking account. This way, I know when I'm over-spending, because I have to transfer money back into the checking account. This is key, because it means as long it's planned (for a vacation, for example), it's fine. But if it's unplanned, I know I need to be more careful.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage your financials?
#15I can't express enough how YNAB has changed my habits and make me realize _how_ to plan, forecast, and save money. They have lots of video tutorials and it's been worth every penny. Here's my referral link, happy to answer questions on how I use it too!
https://ynab.com/referral/?ref=ASH303nViLPCKyr-&utm_source=c...
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage your financials?
#16I use beancount to track every expense I have. It's really a powerful tool, check it out: http://furius.ca/beancount/ .
I started using the various tools the country I live in has for personal finance (it's France): Assurance Vie, PEA, Livret A, …
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage your financials?
#17Well, we have weekly budgets for living costs, monthly budgets for savings ect. We keep track with an app and avoid card payments if possible.
This works good for us. Pretty manual, but works out well.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage your financials?
#18I use Quicken, but not happy with it since they moved to annual subscription model. But with more than 20 years of data in it, I'm locked in. Looking to migrate to beancount, but the data migration is hard. I'm contemplating starting anew with beancount and forgoing my historical data. I could easily do without the data, but something psychological is at play, and I can't get over it yet.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage your financials?
#19I can mention that if you use mint.com and have anything that isn't quite perfectly standard about your financial accounts it won't work well.
for example- My wife and I have a joint brokerage account at Fidelity, and my wife also has a 401k at fidelity. She has a login associated with the brokerage account, and one associated with the 401k. However, via each login, all of her accounts are visible.
mint.com cannot understand that these accounts are duplicated. There are manual overrides to disable certain accounts, but these overrides work on some portions of the site (such as the overview page) and not other portions (such as the net worth tracker over time chart).
I feel that mint has already reached peak revenue per user and is now trying to glide through the rest of its lifecycle with minimal investment in the site, so these problems might not work out ever.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage your financials?
#20I draw a big rectangle with a line down the middle. On the left is Assets. On the top right is Liabilities (aka debt, the remaining lease payments for housing, etc). On the bottom right is Equity. This is the number that must compound at an acceptable rate no matter what happens to the market, my income, etc (I'll leave it up to you to decide what rate you want to commit to in the near term). I have found that drawing and redrawing this on paper beats most software approaches. If someone asks, "what if my equity number is negative?" I say take steps to get it to positive. If you get it to 1 dollar, great, your first year ROE is going to be 1000% if you happen to save 10 bucks that year. https://awwapp.com/b/uybcpyttt/