Ask HN: How do you manage your personal finances?

I am a huge fan of the six jar money management system, and I use an app called Split(https://split.bluepill.life/index.html) which helps me to implement this strategy for managing money

Two congratulations are in order, first for your graduation, and second for your awareness, early in life, that you can take control of your finances instead of letting your finances control you.

Invest in learning how to use Quickbooks.

Quickbooks is the industry standard for bookkeeping and accounting - the exact topics your OP references. Mapping (your vocabulary) to Quickbooks terms, you can budget by category (manage your finances), import and categorize your transactions daily (keep track of your finances), and run reports to see actuals vs. budgets (where your money has gone vs. where you planned for it to go). Also, every so often (monthly), you reconcile your categories against your financial accounts (banks, investments, loans, etc.) to make sure everything is in-sync. Quickbooks also has other advanced features to keep track of more complicated bits like depreciating assets, interest-bearing accounts, etc.

Your return-on-investment for learning Quickbooks will be many times higher than any other tool. You can grow with the tool as your financial complexity grows, something tools like YNAB can't do; easily handover your financials to an accountant for filing come tax season; transfer the skills you've learned through personal bookkeeping over into running the books for a side business.

To get started, I'd suggest taking a class that teaches how to use Quickbooks for personal finances, or hiring a bookkeeper to setup your books and teach you how to run them to meet your goals.

We do "envelope budgeting" but taking advantage of a bank (Starling in the UK) that makes this cash free.

Starling lets you divide your account into spaces and you can have virtual debit cards associated with a space, or pay bills by direct debit straight from a space. At the beginning of the month the monthly budget for each space is put into that space and most spending comes directly from its space using a virtual card (in Google Wallet for physical purchases or with the appropriate card info for online purchases) or via direct debit. A few transactions are on the main card and are categorised later by transferring from the right space in the app.

Some budgets we expect to pretty much fully use each month, like groceries or bills. Others like the car budget we aim for rollover to cover occasional big expenses like a service. We also have an emergency fund to cover unanticipated bigger expenses.

I've tried various methods and software in the past and this has worked best. Tracking everything in an app or using ledger / beancount is too much work for too little benefit in my experience. It also hasn't worked well for me for budgeting as it tells you after the fact where your money went but doesn't by itself help / force you to stick to a budget the way the envelope method does.