Show HN: Penny, an easy way to track your spending • Hacker News Board

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

#81

Post by oniMaker » Thu, Jan 07, 2016, 11:02 PM UTC

dang wrote: post #68

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.

Please don't post comments that are dismissive of people's work. Substantive criticism is fine; nasty swipes are not. This is particularly the case for Show HNs: https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

Ok, that's fair. I shouldn't have been so dismissive in tone.

The underlying criticism was meant to be substantive.

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

#82

Post by cossatot » Thu, Jan 07, 2016, 11:19 PM UTC

mmanfrin wrote: post #79

cossatot wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 do something similar, albeit a bit leakier. I have all my money coming in to one nexus account, and then I have weekly/biweekly/monthly outflows of everything (bills, stock investments, transfers to 3x different banks, mortgage). I keep that account with a bunch of buffer, but ignore all my other accounts. Each month I keep that main account 'floating' is another month where all those other accounts are growing. If…

> It's not a great solution, but it's the one that I've stuck with best.

Far and away the most important part of any such strategy...

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

#83

Post by enraged_camel » Fri, Jan 08, 2016, 12:07 AM UTC

dang wrote: post #69

enraged_camel wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>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.

Please don't react to a bad comment by posting an attack that only makes the thread worse. Instead, flag it (by clicking on its timestamp to go to its page, then clicking 'flag').

I can't flag comments that are immediate responses to mine, unfortunately.

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

#84

Post by dang » Fri, Jan 08, 2016, 12:29 AM UTC

enraged_camel wrote: post #83

dang wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't react to a bad comment by posting an attack that only makes the thread worse. Instead, flag it (by clicking on its timestamp to go to its page, then clicking 'flag').

I can't flag comments that are immediate responses to mine, unfortunately.

Ah yes that's true. But in that case you should just leave it to other users to take care of, or (if the comment is egregious) let us know about it at hn@ycombinator.com.

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

#85

Post by bgaid » Fri, Jan 08, 2016, 12:37 AM UTC

dlsym wrote: post #76

HerpDerpLerp wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What I hate more is the thought of having my financial data stored in some shady, cobbled together, cloud service, hosted somewhere on Amazon AWS. I predict, that it is only a question of time until they will encounter some disastrous data leak. Begin a YNAB user for more than a year now, I am really angry at them for this move. So I'll guess I have to move on to something else after the support for the YNAB4 apps wi…

I completely agree. We've got support until December so I'm considering replicating as much of YNAB 4's methodology and functions as possible in either Excel or Google Sheets when I have free time.

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

#86

Post by toomuchtodo » Fri, Jan 08, 2016, 3:15 AM UTC

tcfunk wrote: post #67

hardwaresofton wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Congratulations on shipping! I wouldn't worry about complaints like this too much, it kind of happens a bunch on hn. Have you studied what mint and personal capital are doing right/wrong? Just wanted to say a word of caution as I've heard of different banks making life hard for mint.

AFAIK they won't experience the same issues as Mint until they achieve a similar userbase size. The complaints from the banks was the server load that Mint was putting on them for information they felt users potentially weren't using.

So silly. They should've just provided Mint with a dedicated endpoint on a dedicated server or two in their colo. Load problem solved.

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

#87

Post by cosinetau » Fri, Jan 08, 2016, 4:29 AM UTC

dontmitch wrote: post #29

hardwaresofton wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this might (should?) be standard phrasing for any app that accesses another company's API on your behalf... We may not think of it this way, but this seems like correct legalese for any sort of assistant app, whether it takes your username and password, or you give it an API key.

That was our understanding too. One thing to clarify: it's just me and one other guy (imalex) working on this, although we're hoping to hire another person soon. We're not trying to screw anyone over with the privacy policy. We just don't know anything about legalese, so we relied on existing terminology.

I hope my comment didn't make for sour feelings. I'm positive your team is working in good faith (more legalease!) and I'm cheering on for Penny's success.

While that may be standard language in a ToS, I can't waive that broadly written right.

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

#88

Post by sdrider » Fri, Jan 08, 2016, 6:43 AM UTC

kvcrawford wrote: post #51

curun1r wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's... moderately comforting. I recently started using Mint and it's proving very helpful for tracking my spending and budgets. It's really worrying having to hand over my bank account username and password, though. I really wish banks could provide a read-only API token instead.

Good ones do. I use CapitalOne360 as my primary bank exactly for this reason.

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

#89

Post by ionised » Fri, Jan 08, 2016, 10:32 AM UTC

I tried using the Wallet app from Budget Bakers for a while and failed miserably.

The app seemed fine but I could never consistently remember to enter all my puchases into it right away. After a few days or even a week or more of forgetting I would struggle to remember exactly what I spent and where, especially from generic ATM withdrawals listed on my bank statement.

The app became useless for me because of that.

I really want a budgeting solution that works for me but haven't found one yet, beyond just making an Excel spreadsheet of monthly incomings/outgoings and then using that to work out what my remaining 'fun' money is.