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Ask HN: Spending Tracking Tools

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Re: Ask HN: Spending Tracking Tools

#61

Post by n144q »

YNAB was often recommended, although I cannot personally understand "budgeting" as a concept and how YNAB helps you achieve your financial goal.

(When I was a graduate student with $20k income, I spent a lot of time thinking about how to save money. Then, one day, all of a sudden, I realized that I should use that time thinking about how to earn more money instead. These days, I earn more than 10x that number, and the only rule I try to abide by is do not buy things I don't need, as I already have a good spending habit. I never felt as financially constraint as when I living on ~$2000/month.)

Re: Ask HN: Spending Tracking Tools

#62

Post by linsomniac »

blakeburch wrote: post #13

I highly recommend LunchMoney ( https://lunchmoney.app/ ). It's built by a solo developer who is very responsive and continues to make the app great. Lots of automation and ability to create custom classification rules. I've been happy for the past 3 years. I've also heard good things about CoPilot ( https://copilot.money/ ) but have not had the chance to experiment with it yet.

I loved the idea of Lunch Money, but I bought it for a year and really never got anything out of it. This was probably 4 years ago so maybe it's changed now.

I think my biggest lack there was that I really needed to see INTO my spending to get value, in particular Amazon is a large blob that I really needed more information on: I get groceries, home repair, toys, tools, work, clothing, health, entertainment. Without seeing into that, all the action I took on Lunch Money really only gave me information on my non-discretionary spending.

Re: Ask HN: Spending Tracking Tools

#63

Post by holletron »

n144q wrote: post #61

YNAB was often recommended, although I cannot personally understand "budgeting" as a concept and how YNAB helps you achieve your financial goal. (When I was a graduate student with $20k income, I spent a lot of time thinking about how to save money. Then, one day, all of a sudden, I realized that I should use that time thinking about how to earn more money instead. These days, I earn more than 10x that number, and th…

I'm in the same boat, but have decided one day to take a closer look at my spending and trends over time, but it appears all the apps are budget-first. YNAB is one of the better ones though, you can install a browser extension for better reports and completely ignore the budgeting parts and use it mostly for the bank sync part, and it works. For US banks I suppose it will work like a charm. I'm in the EU and due to specificity of my bank there were issues, so ultimately I ended up with a custom solution processing .csv files exported from the bank.

Re: Ask HN: Spending Tracking Tools

#64

Post by linsomniac »

For tracking Amazon spending, "Amazon Order History" is a Chrome extension that will walk through your Amazon orders and give you a spreadsheet of specific items in your orders. It's kind of kludgy, but does seem to work well.

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/amazon-order-histor...

Re: Ask HN: Spending Tracking Tools

#65

Post by linsomniac »

I've been using Qube https://qubemoney.com/ for a couple years as a bank to help with my money management. It has some nice features, but I'm looking to migrate away from it over the next year. I'm a "Simple" refugee, who got here via "One".

The big down side is that it is fairly expensive, I spend almost $200/year on it. Which would be fine, if I felt like I was getting something for it. But, in the 2 years I've had it, I've not really felt like they've done much improvement of it, and my customer support experience has been pretty bad. For example, one time some of my "auto transfers" just vanished, leading to a couple hundred dollars in late fees, and when I contacted support they "recovered" them, but then I ended up with a bunch of duplicated auto transfers.

I also really just don't ever feel like I have much of an idea of how much money I have available. Simple was always very good about that: I could look and it would tell me an exact number I had that was unused.

Now, that $200/year is for a family plan, so it covers 4 people. Having debit cards and accounts for the kids is fairly nice. Transferring money to the kids for chores is handy.

Re: Ask HN: Spending Tracking Tools

#66

Post by loloquwowndueo »

Semaphor wrote: post #19
rocketpastsix wrote: post #3

YNAB generally gets mentioned as one of the de factor budgeting options. I used it a lot a few years ago and it works. Their system is a little wonky if you aren't used to the envelope method but they have great docs, a great little podcast and a healthy community.

Love YNAB, been using it since 2011 and never switched to their subscription cloud service. YNAB Classic still works, though I don’t think you can legally acquire it anymore.

Look into Actual Budget, it’s a free self-hostable clone of YNAB. Or could be thought of as an independent implementation of the same budgeting methodology - but it felt close enough in UI and concepts that I feel comfortable calling it a clone.

Re: Ask HN: Spending Tracking Tools

#67

Post by cfiggers »

entrepy123 wrote: post #9

GnuCash [0] has looked the best for this every time I looked. The initial setup seems the most inundating, and is why I haven't started using it. I asked my highfalutin wealth advisors if they could set this up or knew someone who could. They said to just use a spreadsheet. (Not the answer I was looking for.) [0] https://www.gnucash.org/

I gave GNU Cash a real honest try about a year ago and couldn't figure it out. I don't think I'm above-average intelligence, but I'm very software-savvy. And I simply could not do it. Like at some point I got angry and decided I was going to crack this code if it killed me to do so, and I literally failed.

GNU Cash may or may not be beyond the ken of mere mortals. But it's certainly beyond me.

Re: Ask HN: Spending Tracking Tools

#68

Post by andy_ppp »

I just did this and used the app Emma but it is awful at breaking down and categorising transactions and the analytics seems to take a back seat to selling you some debt or investments. I’m tempted to build my own to be honest I think there’s a lot you can do to help people understand savings and becoming wealthy over decades rather than becoming an overnight crypto billionaire.

Re: Ask HN: Spending Tracking Tools

#69

Post by howeyc »

hirvi74 wrote: post #47
wbadart wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 While I don't think this approach meets OP's requirements (they seem to be looking for something a little more turn-key), I hope other readers of this thread will fall down this rabbit hole. I'm now in my 5th year of tracking every penny in and out of my life with hledger[0], with a mostly manual approach. Some benefits: - as noted by a spreadsheet user, it adds friction to spending money, which has curbed frivolo…

Only reason I stopped going down the PTA path was I always struggled to figure out a viable way to organize everything. I tried one file per account, one file per account per month, multiple accounts in one file per month, and eventually everything in one massive file per year. No matter what I seemed to choose I always seemed to end up with just a complete mess.

I just put everything in one file. Over 15 years worth of transactions in a single ledger file ordered by date.
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