Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: How do you track your expenses?

news.ycombinator.com

1–10 of 15 posts

Re: Ask HN: How do you track your expenses?

#4
I have a budget on Excel (with 12-15 months planned) and download the data from my bank/credit card every month to assess how I'm doing vs the plan.

If I'm on a cash-tight period, I increase the assessment frequency accordingly. Typically, my biggest expenses are rent and groceries, so I pay closer attention to those.

Re: Ask HN: How do you track your expenses?

#5
For personal expenses, YNAB has literally changed my life. It’s also helped my wife and I’s relationship with money and forced us to plan each month. When my wife was furloughed due to COVID19 a month ago, we knew we’d be ok because we have been planning our finances for 5+ years.

Re: Ask HN: How do you track your expenses?

#6
An Excel file, manually updated from the bank when needed.

We are trying to avoid credit and loans which makes budgeting quite trivial, many times downloading bank transactions of the last months/years and putting them on a graph is enough

Re: Ask HN: How do you track your expenses?

#7
I have to comb through my monthly transactions for business income and expenses. I also get a notification for every transaction with N26.

I used to have a homemade tool that graphed my net worth across several bank accounts. It proved very difficult to maintain, but it was super useful. I could easily see my savings rate, and catch unexpected dips.

Re: Ask HN: How do you track your expenses?

#8
I used to track everything in a spreadsheet manually and early last year finally found time to turn it into an app which pulls in my credit card transactions automatically. I still input lots of expenses manually since I'm living in a primarily cash-based society and it works great for my needs.

Not sure what your idea of "sophisticated" is, but it's definitely the opposite of a terminal-based app. It's built on a modern web stack and it's called Lunch Money (https://lunchmoney.app)!

Re: Ask HN: How do you track your expenses?

#9
post #5

For personal expenses, YNAB has literally changed my life. It’s also helped my wife and I’s relationship with money and forced us to plan each month. When my wife was furloughed due to COVID19 a month ago, we knew we’d be ok because we have been planning our finances for 5+ years.

I’ve been very satisfied with YNAB too. It’s easy enough that even my spouse uses it. I really like having a clear picture of the budget.

Re: Ask HN: How do you track your expenses?

#10
post #8

I used to track everything in a spreadsheet manually and early last year finally found time to turn it into an app which pulls in my credit card transactions automatically. I still input lots of expenses manually since I'm living in a primarily cash-based society and it works great for my needs. Not sure what your idea of "sophisticated" is, but it's definitely the opposite of a terminal-based app. It's built on a mo…

Looks great! I’ve checked it out before. The primary limitation for me vs YNAB is iphone support.

I’m currently a YNAB user and I love it. There are a lot of YNAB users. They already understand the value of this type of tool. If you want to try and convert YNAB users you might want to consider a way for YNAB users to migrate to your tool.

Post reply on HN