Ask HN: How do you manage your financials?

BTW, I'm not sure why more people don't do this, honestly. Savings amount, investment return, and expenses-per-time-period are the three absolute requirements you need to be able to project if you can successfully retire without going into debt. Beyond that it's about being accurate, and for that you have to measure. You can't just say "oh I'll probably make 7%", or "Oh, a million bucks should be enough."

I have used Personal Capital to pull in all the transactions and classify them into expenditure groups (entertainment, meals, utilities, etc.). Once you do it for a month or two, it pretty much knows what everything is (and knows a lot by default already). Then you can see where all your money is going and determine if you are spending too much in any one area like meals or something else that's discretionary and make changes. If you have your bank accounts hooked up along with your credit and retirement accounts you can also see your monthly cash flow as well as your net worth. You can also add your mortgage data to pull automatically like any other account. Also can log anything else that doesn't have an account which it can connect to and you can update manually to get the full picture.

For investments I'm restricted at work for compliance/legal reasons so I'm limited to ETFs and similar products (no individual securities). I've heard great things about Robinhood and would probably just use them or another no-commission broker (there are a bunch now). The easiest way to get good returns is just use index fund products. They have low fees usually and aren't that risky. You don't way outperform the market unless you really just get lucky, but it's very simple and easy to do. Full disclosure - I work in this area of financial services, but it really is a far cheaper option than just about anything else. Unless you have a stellar financial adviser (top 15%), they aren't usually going to be able to justify their fees over the long haul.

I pay my credit card multiple times a week so that I never pay interest and never get tempted to do anything foolish. Every day on the way to work I log on and pay whatever has posted that morning. My card has 2% cash back on everything, no limits (Citi DoubleCash), so it's very simple and straightforward.

I contribute enough to max out the legal 401k contributions allowed by law. If you can afford that, you should definitely do it. At the very least, get the employer match if you have one.

I have free accounts with Credit.com and Credit Karma. Log in periodically when they update to see where it has moved and why. They give recommendations - sometimes they are silly or not-realistic. But at least you can see what's going on and monitor for free.

Your credit card also probably has an identity protection tool - highly recommend this as it is part of good personal finance. Register all your known accounts, IDs, etc. so that you can get alerts if that data is being traded on the black market.

As far as additional savings, it's a roller coaster because every time I up the checking account over a series of months some large expenditure is needed (home repair/improvement, car, medical, something). But I try to mentally have a bottom in my head that I don't want to see the account go under and if it does, I try to cut back on extraneous things until it goes up by a fair amount. Over time, I raise that bottom. That allows for some growth in additional savings without having to be micromanaging a budget.

I always buy used, cheap cars. Neither my wife or I are car people. We don't care. Just an A to B type of thing. Highly recommend that. Pay X up front out of pocket every 5-10 years and then only around $1,200 a year in maintenance. Far cheaper in the long run.

I work in this industry. We have detailed reports on damn near everything, including private hedge funds and how they perform. 80-85% of any active management or financial advisory services have not beat low cost index investing over the long haul. The top 15% or so can and do, but the vast majority of the active investments players (that 80% or so) don't make enough to beat passive investment once their fees are taken into account and an appropriate passive benchmark is used. Meaning, if they are actively investing for their client using only US securities and products, we use a major US benchmark to compare against. If they are global, Asia-Pac, Dev/emg, etc. we use one of those to compare against so we are looking at apples to apples. A lot of times they will simply invest in a high growth emerging market and tell their clients that they are beating the S&P 500. Yeah, of course you are. But you aren't beating the relevant emerging markets growth products.

I'm surprised to not see more Banktivity users. It's like Quicken with the option to do envelope budgeting. Unlike Quicken there is not a required yearly subscription fee, unless you want it to directly download your transactions from your bank. I prefer not to do that.

It does so much and the customizable reports and amount of info it gives you at a glance includes some things I don't see in other apps. Examples are savings rate (not present in any other app I've seen) and a calendar view of your finances (which is in a few apps, but not many)

> I don’t take investing so seriously

Then how do you know you aren't over paying for stocks? Your plan is to buy high and sell higher?

> it’s worked out well for me

My unvested RSUs have more than doubled in value over the past year, and ESPP has done just as well lately. The market has worked out great for everyone, especially those of us in high tech.

> if I need to derisk I will make that decision at a later time.

To me this reads as 'I will sell when the market drops hard enough to make me anxious.' A ton of institutional investors (think pension funds and university endowments) did exactly that, and it made them worse off in the long run. David Swensen calls that institutional strategy out as 'buy high and sell low.' IMO, buying into a down market is the real step the average person is unwilling to do, even though it's incredibly easy implement: sell off your winners and buy more of your losers.

If you have something more complicated in mind, I just am not ready to believe someone unwilling to bother calculating the present value of forecasted future earnings is bothering with looking at their Sharpe ratio and deciding 'welp, time to buy some VIX to offset this risk.'

> Again, I just thinking screaming “anything except index funds is stupid gambling and irresponsible” is untrue.

Even if you don't accept the premise (I don't[1]), doesn't mean active investors are a priori smart. I have yet to speak with anyone upset by the index investing philosophy I consider prepared.

[1]: There are clearly people who make a living doing this who dig far beyond financial statements. Random example I know of from a lecture given at Yale by a trader (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMbhgSBIUfk&t=3875s if you can stomach the umms and ahs) reading Bond contracts ("indentures") and looking for companies that were likely to delay financial statements and owed bondholders par immediately. One such notable source of delayed financials was backdated options, and this exact accounting irregularities even affected the tech giant you mentioned, back in 2007. You may recall another facet of this story from HN favorite 'Why I did not go to jail' (https://a16z.com/2014/02/06/why-i-did-not-go-to-jail/) as this was widely practiced at the time.