Toshl. I have been using it since 2015, perfectly suits my use case.
This also looks very promising, and $5 a month for the higher plan seems very interesting since it provides auto-sync with the bank.
Ask HN: How do you record your personal finances?
41–50 of 77 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you record your personal finances?
#42I'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..
Do you have goals bigger than $100/year? If so, are you hitting those goals? If you aren't achieving your goals, YNAB can help.
I knew I wasn't achieving the goals I had with my DIY spreadsheet and mint.com, and once I started using YNAB everything came together very nicely.
Re: Ask HN: How do you record your personal finances?
#43I almost exclusively via debit or credit card, so those expenses are tracked there. If I need a log, I can download a .csv file.
Income is only once a month and pretty predictable, more than we spend with a margin that goes to savings, so in short: I don't keep track really.
Re: Ask HN: How do you record your personal finances?
#44Anyone using Homechart?
Homechart dev here, Homechart is extremely similar to YNAB4 when it comes to finances [1]. One thing it has that YNAB4 does not is the idea of "Budget Goals"--you can set a budget amount for a certain date and Homechart will calculate backwards what you need to save for it. My family uses this for saving for vacations and property taxes, among other things.
While Homechart supports importing from CSVs and QFX files, I'm not sure when/if it will support automatic bank importing due to the costs/privacy/security associated with it.
Homechart is meant to be a "whole home data management" solution. Budgeting is a small part of its functionality and will expand in the futurel.
Re: Ask HN: How do you record your personal finances?
#45I'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 $14.99? Especially for "simpler" needs like someone living in EU, only one bank account, no investments, etc..
In my opinion, YNAB allows me to plan for the money I have in my accounts.
As I have more plans than I have accounts, I find YNAB inherently useful.
It has changed my inner hesitation to deal with exact financial situation and where my money goes to a good understanding on how much money I have planned for which purpose and priorize where my money goes (or shouldn't).
This gives me peace of mind. For this, I am willing to spend money. I think 15$/month is worth it. (Even without Bank-Syncing).
Of course I could achieve this by other (cheaper) means, but then again I like how frictionless it makes managing my situation. And economically the return of invest in my first year of using YNAB payed for it for quite some years ;)
As someone dealing with two currencies, I can recommend RMillan's Plugins for YNAB [0].
Edit: Not affiliated with YNAB, just a simple user somewhere in switzerland
Re: Ask HN: How do you record your personal finances?
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 mone…
I think the logic here is that you don’t want to rob your future self to cover your current self’s emergency. Imagine a prolonged expensive period (car breaks, then you get sick, then you need funds to help a desperate relative, etc.) - you need extra money over a period of months but you don’t have it coming in current cash flows. When you borrow from the 401k you have to pay it back, which you won’t be able to do right away, and once you can, your disposable income goes down (because you’ve got to make those payback payments now). While you are paying back you are missing investment growth. I think of liquid emergency funds (in both personal, and business contexts) as insurance - how much you need is defined by your risk tolerance, asset mix, and long term goals, but the answer almost never “none”.
Another thing to think about is increasing monthly disposable income with emergency deferment of payments - in this context stopping 401k contributions while you deal with an emergency. Depending on your debt type, debt load, and credit history you can often negotiate deferment on many monthly payments for months at a time (e.g. mortgage, student loans, some car payments, utility bills, etc.).
Re: Ask HN: How do you record your personal finances?
#47I'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..
Is it? I think so.
YNAB has taught me one thing (they had a whole philosophy of budgeting section when I started using it): budget for your expenses ahead of time. I pay yearly, I've been setting aside its monthly price along with my utilities for years. Another point of their philosophy which I agree with is a budgeting tool saves you money in the long run. I'm pretty sure it saves me more than $15 a month — with good budgeting practice, you can choose yearly billing on many services instead of monthly, which often is cheaper.
I've used this one for so long I really am not interested in learning something else, and in the grand scheme of things, I've spent almost twice that for a takeaway dinner yesterday. YNAB is as expensive as a pizza in London.
Lastly, I don't have big uses myself, but money tends to get complicated with time. I have a current account, a savings accounts, a business account, some crypto I bought years ago, a disposable credit card for travelling, my Vanguard investments. It's good to have them all together in one place. It's good to have a nice chart showing me my net worth change over a decade.
Re: Ask HN: How do you record your personal finances?
#48Beancount ( https://beancount.github.io/ ) plus a script for formatting bank statement CSVs.
Give Fava (https://beancount.github.io/fava/) a try: It's a web frontend for Beancount (Disclosure: I'm a former maintainer)
Re: Ask HN: How do you record your personal finances?
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it still worth the $14.99? Especially for "simpler" needs like someone living in EU, only one bank account, no investments, etc..
Do you have goals bigger than $100/year? If so, are you hitting those goals? If you aren't achieving your goals, YNAB can help. I knew I wasn't achieving the goals I had with my DIY spreadsheet and mint.com, and once I started using YNAB everything came together very nicely.
> I knew I wasn't achieving the goals I had with my DIY spreadsheet and mint.com, and once I started using YNAB everything came together very nicely.
That is exactly what I hope to express in my sibling comment. Increasing the friction (be it UX or multi-device usage) might make my hesitation to manage my financial situation bigger and I might cease to manage it. This would be quite a bad scenario (well, at least for my savings ;) )
Re: Ask HN: How do you record your personal finances?
#50Gnucash. 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?
It has a pretty thorough feature set baked in and extra scripts and coding shouldn't be needed. It can fetch balances and transactions directly from your banks, though I need to check if that's automatically run or manually triggered.