Ask HN: How do you record your personal finances?

I am trying to start recording the day-to-day flow of my money as part of a larger goal of implementing some in my life.

I have done some research and some self-hosted software solutions that interest me include [Firefly III], [Transity], [Ledger]. Maybe I'll write my own personal finance record keeping software.

Since this will be the first time keeping track of my own finances, I'd like to hear what has worked for others members of the Hacker News community.

[Firefly III]: https://firefly-iii.org/ [Transity]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17242136 [Ledger]: https://www.ledger-cli.org/

keep it simple. use mint.

I use a basic LibreOffice spreadsheet. There's a fair bit of manual inputting of the data but the advantages are that it takes care of all sorts of cases, from bank to cash transactions.

Importing bank transactions is easy. Regarding cash, one needs to keep a regular track - I do this by tracking them on my phone as a note or something and about once a week I'll enter in all the data into the spreadsheet.

I've been doing it for 8 years now and it's been amazing to see where the money goes and where we can cut down :)

I’ve been using YNAB (You Need A Budget) for four years now and it has made a big difference in how much we’re saving. I used spreadsheets or other DIY solutions in the past, but they aren’t very multi-user friendly (wife and I share a family budget) and didn’t make me think of savings in the same way.

Here’s a good review: https://thewirecutter.com/money/best-budgeting-apps-and-tool...

There's simple Android app called Expenses (red circle, dollar bills with a yellow graph arrow). It's fairly fleshed out and allows for exporting to CSV. Been using it almost a year. I plan on analyzing my data from it once I have more.