Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Lunch Money, a personal budgeting tool with multi-currency support

lunchmoney.cc

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 135 posts

Re: Show HN: Lunch Money, a personal budgeting tool with multi-currency support

#21

Post by ryandvm »

I really like where this is going. It looks like a much more polished version of my own personal solution for this problem.

The one thing I really dislike is the way transactions are brought into the system. I get that it's preferable to outsource that to entities that specialize in it, like Yodlee/Plaid/whatever, but when I get to that IFRAME asking me to enter my banking credentials... sorry, I just can't bring myself to do it.

I understand banks are probably unbelievably slow to support standard authorization schemes like OAuth, but of all the credentials for me to get sloppy with, my bank credentials are pretty much at the top of "no way" list.

Any chance as an interim you could support manually importing CSV?

(And yes, beware of the non-paying "customers" that like to suggest the _one_feature_ they need...)

Re: Show HN: Lunch Money, a personal budgeting tool with multi-currency support

#22

Post by peteradio »

ryandvm wrote: post #21

I really like where this is going. It looks like a much more polished version of my own personal solution for this problem. The one thing I really dislike is the way transactions are brought into the system. I get that it's preferable to outsource that to entities that specialize in it, like Yodlee/Plaid/whatever, but when I get to that IFRAME asking me to enter my banking credentials... sorry, I just can't bring mys…

I agree, I'd never give credentials through something like this. CSV import sucks way less than getting credentials scalped.

Re: Show HN: Lunch Money, a personal budgeting tool with multi-currency support

#23

Post by bszupnick »

jnfr wrote: post #2

Hi Show HN, I'm really excited to share what I have been working on the side since late November last year. I am a one-person team and this project has allowed me to harness and grow from my few years of experience working as a software engineer. I was also able to flex my design muscles a little bit, while learning some marketing along the way. Stack: * Node.js w/ Typescript backend * React + Semantic UI w/ Typescri…

Hey! It looks awesome!

I'm a die-hard YNAB person and evangelist. The being said, I have bank accounts in two currencies and it's REALLY tough to balance that. Would you say there's a fit between the YNAB philosophy and the flow you created?

Re: Show HN: Lunch Money, a personal budgeting tool with multi-currency support

#24

Post by _0o6v »

jnfr wrote: post #14
chopraaa wrote: post #8

Kudos. You've gone and done something a lot of us only plan to do but never get around to. I have a few questions though. 1. Does this work for everyone around the world? 2. How many ways do you have for sorting through transactions and making sense out of these? 3. My bank statements are a huge mess and I'd love a way I could aggregate all of my spend across multiple banks and cards. Sometimes, I send money to a fri…

Thank you so much!! 1. Right now I'm using Plaid to connect to bank accounts which currently only supports US and Canada-based banks (but even then, some banks are not supported fully). The next plan is to allow people to manually import their bank transactions via CSV, and after that, look into a European-based and/or Asia-based version of Plaid. That being said, anyone can use Lunch Money to add transactions manual…

Really great job and I'm digging the UI. I see that Plaid has just launched in the UK so hopefully you can add support for us Brits soon (if we haven't self-combusted in a Brexit meltdown by then).

Re: Show HN: Lunch Money, a personal budgeting tool with multi-currency support

#25

Post by jnfr »

rcconf wrote: post #10

This looks fantastic! I've used Mint to track my expenses and this looks way better (especially the course correction concept.) The biggest issue that comes up when entering financial data into something like this is how is the data stored and what security measures are in place? If my financial data was leaked, I know that hackers could use that to get access to my bank accounts. Please don't take this personally, b…

This is a great point and a valid question and I'm glad you brought it up. I wrote up a Privacy Policy (https://lunchmoney.cc/privacy) to address some concerns users might have about their data and how it's handled. In terms of connecting your bank accounts, all of Lunch Money's interactions with your bank is through a third-party service called Plaid which is also used by many other financial apps on the market. They've written up a few white papers on their security. That being said, I only have read-access and don't do any sort of interaction with your bank (i.e. depositing some funds and having your verify it). No personal information is pulled either.

The DevOps stuff in my blog post was more referring to stuff like CI, deploy infrastructure, and other behind-the-scene workflows. I've previously worked for 3.5 years mostly as a back-end software engineer at Twitter and was the founding engineer of a YC Fellowship &500-backed pet health start-up handling thousands of pet medical records, so I've gained a lot of experience when it comes to keep things secure.

All that being said, security and user data is really important and not something I take lightly at all. I hear this feedback a lot and am continuously thinking of ways to put my user's minds at ease. If you have any ideas or want to talk about it more, I'm always open to chatting.

Re: Show HN: Lunch Money, a personal budgeting tool with multi-currency support

#26

Post by jnfr »

ryandvm wrote: post #21

I really like where this is going. It looks like a much more polished version of my own personal solution for this problem. The one thing I really dislike is the way transactions are brought into the system. I get that it's preferable to outsource that to entities that specialize in it, like Yodlee/Plaid/whatever, but when I get to that IFRAME asking me to enter my banking credentials... sorry, I just can't bring mys…

I hear you loud and clear. Allowing manual import of transactions via CSV is very high on our feature list! Using a service like Plaid to automatically import transactions was a great way to attract our first users and validate our product. Going forward, we definitely want to also support more ways of importing transactions.

Re: Show HN: Lunch Money, a personal budgeting tool with multi-currency support

#27

Post by jnfr »

bszupnick wrote: post #23
jnfr wrote: post #2

Hi Show HN, I'm really excited to share what I have been working on the side since late November last year. I am a one-person team and this project has allowed me to harness and grow from my few years of experience working as a software engineer. I was also able to flex my design muscles a little bit, while learning some marketing along the way. Stack: * Node.js w/ Typescript backend * React + Semantic UI w/ Typescri…

Hey! It looks awesome! I'm a die-hard YNAB person and evangelist. The being said, I have bank accounts in two currencies and it's REALLY tough to balance that. Would you say there's a fit between the YNAB philosophy and the flow you created?

Thank you for the kind words! Lunch Money is definitely a different way of budgeting. I mentioned this in an earlier comment, but my target audience is more first-time budgeters. I know it would be an uphill battle to convert YNAB'ers since they are very loyal to envelope-based method. That being said, since you're a die-hard YNAB'er, if you have any ideas around this, I'm all ears!

Re: Show HN: Lunch Money, a personal budgeting tool with multi-currency support

#28

Post by jnfr »

dfsegoat wrote: post #9

You nailed it here. I've been waiting for something like this - Mint etc. don't give me enough functionality in terms of forecasting, seeing a trend and helping me to modify my behavior. If you could also add a "Simulate spending X {currency} on YYYY-MM-DD" type functionality for forecasting, that would be huge. This was something I miss from one of the old Microsoft Money desktop apps, and being able to see how maki…

Thanks for the feedback!

Upcoming expenses is a great idea, and was an original feature from my own budgeting spreadsheet but has not made it as a feature yet on Lunch Money. Your comment definitely helps boost up its priority :)

Re: Show HN: Lunch Money, a personal budgeting tool with multi-currency support

#29

Post by isaacaggrey »

YNAB user here - this looks great and I love new tools :) but what differentiates this from YNAB besides non-envelope budgeting method?

also nice - the ability for a partner/spouse to collaborate on the same budget which is also a nice plus Lunch Money has if there is an "last edited" feature and collaboration as a 1st-class thing (YNAB is stubborn on this point)

Re: Show HN: Lunch Money, a personal budgeting tool with multi-currency support

#30

Post by jnfr »

fjp wrote: post #12

I was halfway through building something like this just for msyelf. My main issues with existing options are: 1. Mint and others always seem to automatically count transferring money from Chase to an external savings account as spending which drives me insane. 2. Not being able to split transactions (which you solved) 3. Reassign the date of a transaction, or from a technical perspective, create an "effective date" i…

You can reassign dates for your transactions in Lunch Money. This is pretty common practice, especially with recurring expenses. For example, bills that get paid on the last day of the month but get posted the next month can be altered so they reflect the appropriate month.
Post reply on HN