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Ask HN: How do you manage your financials?
21–30 of 113 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage your financials?
#22i’m 28, i make 36k per year, i have a masters degree and two bachelors degrees, all in hard science. i pay $800/month for rent, i ride public transportation, i try to cook at home, i don’t socialize. i can save about $5k per year. i’m comfortable and could live for a lifetime on less than $40k per year.
> i don’t socialize
I'm curious why you've made this choice.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage your financials?
#23I used Firefly III. It uses double entry bookkeeping. If you don't mind self hosting I recommended checking it out. The docker image is very easy to get going with.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage your financials?
#24I 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 un…
I recently discovered PocketSmith which is a paid product. I found it sort of follows the mint model but it works much better. I tried using double entry accounting methods like YNAB but it just wasn't working for my personal finances.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage your financials?
#25I have a book recommendation: Your Money or Your Life. It was recently updated, mostly to bring the investment advice a bit more up-to-date. But either version will be amazing. It's not an overstatement to say that book changed my life. It gives you some tasks, like tracking your spending (down to the penny), and ultimately strives to make the point that: you trade your finite time on this planet for money, so you should value it and use it wisely.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage your financials?
#26Everything in excess of £1000 from my monthly salary I move to a separate plain savings account without any bells or whistles, and the £1000 is what I spend on a month's living; rent, bills, food, pleasures. The end.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage your financials?
#27beancount: Double-Entry Accounting from Text Files
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage your financials?
#28I use YNAB to manage my day to day money.
I use Personal Capital to manage my long term planning.
I invest via Robinhood, Betterment and Vanguard.
I use Ally's High Yield Savings as my long term savings such as a 6 month emergency fund.
I still use my credit union I had in Atlanta even though I am in Nashville. I prefer them because I've been a member there for almost 10 years, so I have a rapport with them. I rarely have cash, and when I do I just spend it. I go to Atlanta a few times a year so if I need anything, I can just pop in one of the branches.
That's really it.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage your financials?
#29I record my expenses with HelloExpense[1] on Android, and I wrote a small app to analyse the csv export (using Python with Dash[2]).
The code of the analysis app is available on Gitlab[3] and a demo is deployed on heroku at https://expenses-analysis.herokuapp.com/ (note that all work is done server side, so if you use it with your own CSV file, it will be uploaded to the server, so it's definitely better to run it locally)
It suits my needs perfectly, and I find it very useful, but from what I know I'm the only user of my analysis app :-D
Understanding where your money goes is a first good step in managing your finances.
[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.helloexpen... [2] https://plot.ly/dash/ [3] https://gitlab.com/rbauduin/dash-expenses-analysis
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage your financials?
#30I use beancount for text-based accounting (http://furius.ca/beancount/), and fava for budgeting and visualization (https://beancount.github.io/fava/).
But the tech just isn't that important, as far as I'm concerned... What actually makes a difference for me is, every morning (except occasionally on weekends), I enter the previous day's transactions, balance my books, and commit the changes to a git repo. I think balancing daily is important:
1) Balancing accounts can be a massive pain, but when I do it every day, it generally takes me about 5 minutes (so maybe 2 hours a month), while balancing at the end of the month, even if it only takes the same 2 hours, is very tedious and I have no motivation to do it, so it doesn't get done.
2) I've caught multiple instances of fraud and the occasional bank error or paycheck error within 24 hours of their occurrence. Not strictly necessary, but helpful to get it sorted right away.
3) One of the best ways to remember things is to review the next day. I find I have a much better picture of my financial state, and how much I've been spending recently, when I'm taking 5 minutes to look at yesterday's numbers, every single day.