1–10 of 111 posts
I’m looking for something that will give me daily / weekly notifications of how much I’ve spent. Might end up building it but was curious if there’s anything off the shelf like that.
Why?
One, I pay cash as much as I possibly can (fuck surveillance finance), so using something that brings in my transactions isn't that much of a time savings. I have a minimal number of monthly scheduled transactions, so bringing those in manually just isn't really that painful.
Two, it adds a tiny bit of friction to my spending. This is a good thing (at least for me). If I know I have to write down the amount, and if only briefly think about what I've already spent this month, it slightly dissuades me from conducting the transaction.
Again, this works for me. Sharing in case it works for you.
The added friction of having to manually copy everything over is a nice incentive to buy less stuff.
I used to use Mint, and now use Monarch since Mint shutdown. I'm pretty content with it as a tool to aggregate various accounts into a single place for review.
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.
Quite a bit of a ramp up to get used to it, but no other tool outside of spreadsheets comes close to flexibility.
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.)
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.