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Show HN: Penny, an easy way to track your spending

pennyapp.io

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Re: Show HN: Penny, an easy way to track your spending

#41

Post by HerpDerpLerp »

kdamken wrote: post #28
bvanslyke wrote: post #22

"Where did my money go" budgeting has never worked for me. I've been way more successful with planning ahead every $ of income as I get it and then manually tracking expenses. Budgeting had to become an actual activity for me, and not just something done automatically by a webapp. I'm a huge shill for YNAB[0]. The software is really nice but basically it's a glorified (paid) spreadsheet. My fiance and I agree that th…

I couldn't agree more - I tried mint for a while and I basically did nothing with it besides checking my transactions. YNAB completely changed how I view my money. Now when I go to buy something, I don't just go spend. I see how much I have in that category, and if it's not enough, I either move money to it from another category, or not buy it. It's been very helpful for me in my goal of saving more than 50% of my ta…

Shame it has gone subscription only :( I hate ongoing charges for that sort of thing.

Re: Show HN: Penny, an easy way to track your spending

#42

Post by oniMaker »

enraged_camel wrote: post #40
oniMaker wrote: post #39

This must be for those people who cannot manage their email, operate a calendar, or create a spreadsheet. I hope the HN audience hasn't degraded to the point of being incapable of handling their personal finances without needing the help of a cutesy avatar painted over a faceless algorithm owned by people who are excited at the prospect of exploiting your financial data to the fullest.

>>I hope the HN audience hasn't degraded to the point of being incapable of handling their personal finances without needing the help of a cutesy avatar painted over a faceless algorithm owned by people who are excited at the prospect of exploiting your financial data to the fullest. Maybe not, but it definitely has degraded to the point where people like you spitefully shit on other people's hard work.

Grow up.

Re: Show HN: Penny, an easy way to track your spending

#43

Post by dontmitch »

curun1r wrote: post #32
dontmitch wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mitch here, one of the co-founders. I don't want to throw Mint under the bus: I used it for ~6 years before starting to work on Penny and it's a great tool for people that enjoy spreadsheets and crunching numbers (myself included). That said, it can be pretty intimidating to just to about everyone else. Penny requires a lot less effort on your part, since the number crunching is all done behind the scenes to generate…

My main concern in using sites like this is that they'll leak my banking credentials. Mint uses Intuit's service for communicating with financial institutions, which is also used for Quickbooks and TurboTax. Credentials are encrypted and housed in a datacenter owned by Intuit. The Mint application only ever stores a token representing the account and uses the service to pull transactions from a read-only service. Whi…

There are actually three major players in the transaction aggregation space: Intuit, Yodlee, and Plaid. We use Plaid, but it works the same as Intuit. In fact, Plaid has a partnership with Intuit to backfill support for bank accounts.

We never store any credentials on our system, and our access is read only. I can go on for days about why I think our system is more secure than, say, Chase[0], but if you trust Mint's practices it's probably sufficient to say that we use an almost identical system.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_JPMorgan_Chase_data_breac...

Re: Show HN: Penny, an easy way to track your spending

#46

Post by largote »

dontmitch wrote: post #20
cookiecaper wrote: post #17

I'm not really into the simulated live chat interface. It'd be a lot easier to click a button that said "Your spending" than to type out "Please show me my monthly spending Mr. Robot" (or to type out anything, especially on a phone).

There's actually not a lot of typing involved since the responses are pre-populated for you. You can see an example of what that looks like on the marketing page.

This relies on you actually remembering the text commands though, as opposed to just seeing the different buttons and taping whichever one you care about.

Re: Show HN: Penny, an easy way to track your spending

#47

Post by cossatot »

bvanslyke wrote: post #22

"Where did my money go" budgeting has never worked for me. I've been way more successful with planning ahead every $ of income as I get it and then manually tracking expenses. Budgeting had to become an actual activity for me, and not just something done automatically by a webapp. I'm a huge shill for YNAB[0]. The software is really nice but basically it's a glorified (paid) spreadsheet. My fiance and I agree that th…

What's worked best for me is putting all of my income into one account and then just giving myself a fairly low monthly 'allowance' into my personal checking account (at a different bank), from which I spend out of (including rent, student loans, etc.). It took a few iterations to get the monthly value correct so I wasn't running much of a deficit or a surplus.

But now it's good and I don't sweat the small stuff, and I can skip eating out in order to buy a new bike part or whatever. I do look quarterly-ish and see what I am actually spending on.

Re: Show HN: Penny, an easy way to track your spending

#49

Post by dkyc »

zrail wrote: post #35
dkyc wrote: post #16

This looks great, really good UX/UI from a first glance. My bank has a pretty modern banking app, so some of the features (like spending graphs) are familiar to me (though not as pretty as in Penny). Two things that I dislike with my banking app: - No real differentiation between fixed, monthly cost and variable expenses. It would be nice if the automatically separated monthly expenses and one-time expenses. - Lots o…

Simple method: don't pay cash. At this point the only thing I use cash for is the occasional Powerball ticket.

I try to, but there is all kinds of scenarios where I revert back to cash: I have to have cash in my wallet anyway for things like parking tickets, so sometimes when I'm in a rush I use it. Or for example when I purchase something via card, and split the cost later on with somebody. He pays me back in cash, and it's back in my wallet.

Re: Show HN: Penny, an easy way to track your spending

#50

Post by zo1 »

dkyc wrote: post #16

This looks great, really good UX/UI from a first glance. My bank has a pretty modern banking app, so some of the features (like spending graphs) are familiar to me (though not as pretty as in Penny). Two things that I dislike with my banking app: - No real differentiation between fixed, monthly cost and variable expenses. It would be nice if the automatically separated monthly expenses and one-time expenses. - Lots o…

Do you know what their SDK pricing is like?
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