Anyone using Homechart?
Ask HN: How do you record your personal finances?
31–40 of 77 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you record your personal finances?
#32I've been using YNAB (You Need A Budget) for more than a decade now. Big fan, not affiliated.
Re: Ask HN: How do you record your personal finances?
#33https://actualbudget.com/ it is now open source and free
Thanks for mentioning this. I've been procrastinating on finding an alternative since they hiked the price up so much (not even my grandfathered $45/year pricing is immune!). It looks a lot like YNAB from the screenshots, but I'll give it a shot to see just how similar it really is. Being self-hostable is just icing on the cake!
Re: Ask HN: How do you record your personal finances?
#34I only have one excel showed which contains all our bank accounts including brokering.
I don't live over my means so I stoped trying to record everything but because I'm saving for a house, I need to know roughly how much I have across different accounts.
And for everyone curious about why I have more accounts: I have my account, we have a shared account, my wife has one, 1 company brokering account, private brokering account and most critical an banc account for reserved funds/emergency/maintenance.
I assume that when we buy a house that we will throw everything together to get the best quote.
My mane bank account actually has this analysis feature but I disabled it again because it did not add any value.
I always wire money every month out of my account. Everything I have in there is money I can just spend if I wanted to.
Re: Ask HN: How do you record your personal finances?
#35A checkbook register, mostly, along with reading the credit card bill.
Re: Ask HN: How do you record your personal finances?
#36I've been using YNAB (You Need A Budget) for more than a decade now. Big fan, not affiliated. https://www.youneedabudget.com/
Is it still worth the $14.99? Especially for "simpler" needs like someone living in EU, only one bank account, no investments, etc..
Re: Ask HN: How do you record your personal finances?
#37I 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.
I've heard this for awhile, and I never really understood it but perhaps it's just my particular situation. I can take an interest-free loan from my 401k-type plan at any time. I figure if I lose a job or have an emergency taking $5,000 out of that would be basically the same thing as taking $5,000 out of a bank, except it's been earning returns before that emergency. Do most 401k plans not allow you to take out money from your plan as long as you pay it back?
Re: Ask HN: How do you record your personal finances?
#38I use a Google sheet, and look at my finances twice a month. Each time, I duplicate the sheet from a month back (so 2 new sheets each month). Each sheet has the bills to go look at and handle. Either to ensure they were paid (autobill) or to set up a payment. It's in need of an update to stop duplicating sheets and just either add columns, that way I could easier do things like compare over time or create charts, etc…
I use this same method and have been for over a decade. It helps to never miss a bill (which is much easier now that most bills are eft/ach) and to better predict how bills will effect each paycheck.
Re: Ask HN: How do you record your personal finances?
#39Gnucash. 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.
Is there enough integrations ready (like to autoimport from banks) or does everything need to be "coded in" whenever required?
Re: Ask HN: How do you record your personal finances?
#40One Excel spreadsheet, four bank accounts (only one of which is "actively managed"):
Protected Checking, Protected Savings, Discretionary Checking, Discretionary Savings
All income and all "regular bills" are aimed at Protected Checking. Every Friday, a fixed (but mutable) amount of weekly "discretionary" money transfers to Discretionary Checking, and a fixed amount goes to Protected Savings.
Discretionary Checking is ALL food, groceries, gas, dining out, random crap. If the I swipe my card, it is discretionary. Protected Checking is ALL bills, utilities, mortgage, etc.
To manage Protected Savings, I use a spreadsheet with 7 columns:
Date, Payee / Source, Category, Sub Category, Amount (all income is positive, all outflow is negative), Balance (=one cell up + amount on this row), Cleared (blank if in the future, "X" for when I reconcile)
I took a few hours about 7 years ago and added ALL expected paychecks (excluding bonus), bills/expenses, and transfers to Discretionary and Protected Savings for the next 5 years to it. So I only spend time reconciling the Protected Checking account - once a month or so I copy the ledger from my bank website and go down the list, checking them off and updating the amounts as needed.
Other than a quick glance for anything unexpected, I don't reconcile/audit the discretionary account.