41–48 of 48 posts
Give. I give away about a tenth of my income to my church and other projects.
Save. Put some money in stocks and shares monthly (I use a fund)
If money is tight during the month use cash, not cards.
Don't check your finances too often. Establish a fixed routine and stick to it. Mine is monthly.
I track my balances across various sources, updating once a month. I also set my outgoings.
Funnily enough I don't really use the buckets feature too much, simply the graph over time of savings, and ability to set goals / monthly costs for review is enough.
I used to use MoneyWiz but it couldn't handle both American, Irish, and Swedish bank or investment accounts. So I outgrew it quickly.
Then I did it manually in Excel, and Later Moneydance that is really a great product. That said it didn't really work for me due to my undiagnosed ADHD brain. There is some automation in Monedance but I never got forex exchange rates or Stocks to work like I wanted automatically. I know you can get it working but for some reason I never got it to. THey later got some automation for a 2 euro subscription fee, but it cant handle my Irish or Swedish banks only American banks.
If you are in to privacy then Moneydance is the software for you, they are really big on not wanting your data which is refreshing. It really is a great software, Im just not Neurotypical enough to use it though. https://moneydance.com/
Now I am using Banktivity that handles all European and American banks, with automatic updates. https://www.banktivity.com/
I love it. It just handles stuff for me, and my ADHD brain feels in control of economy again...
What are your needs? you mentioned that you need something daily, why? What do you want to achieve? balance at the end of each month, or "can I afford another latte today"? For the first a spreadsheet can work great, preferably with some system to arrange your budget, but that's not about tooling but simply being disciplined. For the second I don't think anything will last- writing every expense is not scalable.
The initial thought I have for something that I can use often is because I easily forget what I spent money on a single day since I often use cash. I'll have to re-think my approach on this...
A key thing to understand is - finance is the consequence, rather than the source. The practical sequence is productivity -> performance -> wealth.
And as a habit, I tend to be quite frugal, and always ensure I spend way less than I earn.
And whatever "spends" I do, 80% of them are of investment type:
1. Building businesses
2. Building teams
3. Acquiring new skills
4. Helping others
5. Serving customer better
6. New projects
As long as I remain highly productive, remain frugal, and keep investing time/energy/efforts into useful things, there haven't been any big financial troubles.
What are your needs? you mentioned that you need something daily, why? What do you want to achieve? balance at the end of each month, or "can I afford another latte today"? For the first a spreadsheet can work great, preferably with some system to arrange your budget, but that's not about tooling but simply being disciplined. For the second I don't think anything will last- writing every expense is not scalable.
Actually, maybe you are right. Based on what I've read in this thread, I feel like my approach to finance management is a bit wrong. I probably need something that I can do bi-weekly or monthly. The initial thought I have for something that I can use often is because I easily forget what I spent money on a single day since I often use cash. I'll have to re-think my approach on this...
I started with https://ledger-cli.org . Later built a GUI https://github.com/ananthakumaran/paisa on top of it
This looks fantastic ananth. I use beancount for tracking my finances, is there anyway to use this GUI on top of the beancount files ?
There is a clear separation between the cmd line tool and paisa. It should be relatively straightforward to add support for more. I will look into it later.
I've recommended YNAB to everyone who has asked me what I do for tracking my finances. I've been using it for 5 years now. I balked at the idea of paying for it but at the end of the free trial I was hooked, it just helped so much. All but one person I recommended to ended up integrating it in to their lives as well The idea of surprise charges is completely unknown to me. It takes a little setup initially, but it ge…
Is there any self hosted alternative to this? I am not comfortable at all with giving all my financial data to YNAB.