Quicken is one of the only subscriptions I have that I don’t consider canceling.
Ask HN: How do you record your personal finances?
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Re: Ask HN: How do you record your personal finances?
#12I use Pocketsmith for their automated bank feeds, but I'm thinking of moving as they don't support the bank I have my mortgage with, leading to periodic statement imports.
Re: Ask HN: How do you record your personal finances?
#13I used to do it by hand with a spreadsheet I built, but after finding a few bugs in my spreadsheet and getting tired of manually managing things, I switched to YNAB.
The risk there is that they use Plaid on the backend.
Re: Ask HN: How do you record your personal finances?
#14https://actualbudget.com/ it is now open source and free
Re: Ask HN: How do you record your personal finances?
#15I don’t at all. Sometimes living “paycheck to paycheck” has its perks. Make sure to have enough money with the last check of the month to pay the mortgage, while having the largest 401k contribution you can manage. Without active investing or any real savings there doesn’t seem to be much benefit to calculating cash in vs cash out any more than my bank app does. If there’s something out there useful for my case let me know! I’m just not sure how much optimization can be done with this lifestyle.
Re: Ask HN: How do you record your personal finances?
#16Moneydance, using the technique described here https://youtu.be/eIcsMHL0NJ0 and https://youtu.be/QOtZ6Bwzlf8.
It's a super simple way to use envelope accounting (ala Dave Ramsey), without using actual cash.
Re: Ask HN: How do you record your personal finances?
#17Gnucash. Not that hard to learn and use, free, libre, and pretty solid community support. It's served me really well for several years including some changes in my financial situation and complexity.
I switched from YNAB to Gnucash and I am very happy with it. I even wrote a couple of scripts to convert Shift JIS encoded csvs to work with Gnucash transaction import. I have an accounting routine that I run through every month and import everything from dozens of bank accounts.
The community is also very nice and they were very accommodating towards my bug reports and fixed them very quickly (it had something to do with IME not working well on macOS).
Re: Ask HN: How do you record your personal finances?
#18I don’t at all. Sometimes living “paycheck to paycheck” has its perks. Make sure to have enough money with the last check of the month to pay the mortgage, while having the largest 401k contribution you can manage. Without active investing or any real savings there doesn’t seem to be much benefit to calculating cash in vs cash out any more than my bank app does. If there’s something out there useful for my case let m…
You should still be building an emergency fund at least to cover unexpected expenses, and if you can afford to contribute extra to your 401k than it sounds like you can afford to do that.
Not to shill for YNAB, but it's specifically designed to help break the paycheck-to-paycheck cycle, even for people with a decent amount of cashflow.
Re: Ask HN: How do you record your personal finances?
#19I used to use YNAB, but they kept on jacking their price up, and I kept on procrastinating with keeping up a record. Having lately used Google Sheets along with AppScript for other purposes, I think I would go with that.
I was looking into YNAB but $14.99 a month seems a lot
Yeah that price is just insane for my needs.
I was paying, as long as it was in the ballpark of $60/year, and that was already a lot. (I live in a country with lower overall income.)
However, my impression is that they have gone through a pivot. From their messaging it looks like the customer they’re after is someone going through more serious financial trouble. Someone in need of a sophisticated set of tools and methods to get out. That user is probably willing to pay more and for longer than someone like me.
I just wanted to know how much I’m spending on snacks and fast food.
Re: Ask HN: How do you record your personal finances?
#20I used to use YNAB, but they kept on jacking their price up, and I kept on procrastinating with keeping up a record. Having lately used Google Sheets along with AppScript for other purposes, I think I would go with that.
I was looking into YNAB but $14.99 a month seems a lot
I've kept YNAB4 running. That was the last non-subscription version.