Ask HN: What is your financial “setup”?

I've gotten a lot of good recommendations for software from this community - most recently AVRFuses and pyenv. These both focus on being simple and "doing one thing really well". They're tools and don't require much active thinking to use them regularly, which I really like.

I'm trying to get my finances set up better, and I'm wondering if anyone can recommend a "setup" of bank account, credit card(s), investment platform, budgeting tools, etc along these lines. Ally Bank and SoFi seem good, as does Wealthfront, but I'm just not sure if I'm using them right. I have Mint but it spams me with notifications and I'm not sure what exactly it does for me. Credit cards feel stressful to think about with keeping track of what to use for what purchase or making sure they're all paid off - I recently got a Citi card and the app alone makes me want to get rid of it.

Does anyone have a "setup" for how you manage your money that you really like? Anything that follows the "don't make me think" philosophy?

I have;

1. One account for salary and bills

2. One credit card for large purchases and spending online which I pay off each month

3. One pre-paid card which I top up weekly to use for daily spending and when travelling (as it has multiple currency accounts)

4. One savings account

(All of the above accounts are available to me on one App, due to the Open Banking regulations in Europe)

(Would be a good idea to set up auto sweeps to move funds between accounts, so that it's automated. I don't do this as I like to view the accounts regularly to stay on top of things)

Rules I try to follow are;

- Maximize income - Minimize expenditure - Save or invest the remainder - Don't use credit/debt but save up to buy what you want

I don't have a go to investment platform, but my preference would be to use a broker and value invest for medium to long term. I can't compete with pro traders and algorithms.

How is the app called, that you use for your accounts?

I second YNAB, but as you said, it requires diligent tracking especially for those of us living outside the US and can't hook their bank account into it.

I happen to love the diligent tracking, though, and it's just part of my daily routine. Every time my wife or I charge a card or the money from the ATM, we log it in YNAB. Then every day I open my banking app and reconcile the charges with what we've input into YNAB. Sometimes we forget to log something, or mis-log something, or there are surprise charges to be dealt with.

Now that I'm in the habit, it takes a total of 10 minutes a day.

I have built myself a expense tracking tool, where I track my expenses. I have one "account" for my expenses and another shared one that I use together with my girlfriend.

I input expenses manually and each expense has a "category". For each category I can set a monthly "Bucket" (the maximum I wanna spent) and then I can track my progress during month.

Every month I get email with spending stats and I sit down together with my girlfriend to consider our finacial situation. We can change the buckets, etc...

I think the most inportant part is manually writing expenses and then talking about it after we get the email.