I use personalcapital.com to track accounts, investments and cards. they try to get you to use their expensive investment management, ignore that but besides this its pretty good.
Ask HN: What is your financial “setup”?
91–100 of 146 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is your financial “setup”?
#92My setup wouldn't work for the majority of people, but I freelance and have set up a corporation. I pay myself a salary that's about 2x my rent. The rest of my funds stay locked in my business account. This forces me to limit spending. After paying rent, I only have about the same amount left over for personal expenses. Any money left over in my personal account at the end of the month is transferred into a mutual fu…
What are the advantages and disadvantages of this setup?
I can't really speak to the financial or tax advantages of this setup - I've never been particularly good at these things.
But the big advantage to me is behavioral. If I have just a limited amount of money to spend in my account, I spend, well, a limited amount.
It's simpler and thus, easier to stick to than complicated rules that require more fiscal discipline
Re: Ask HN: What is your financial “setup”?
#93We have a checking/savings account, and then various investment accounts at vanguard. All income goes to vanguard. Each year, we move our total budget for the year to checking. Then, we pay for all spending from checking. We can easily track whether our budget is on Pace at any given time. If we run out of money, we went over. (Technically, we subtract out year end expenses like property taxes to avoid a year End sur…
Any link for that budget spreadsheet?
Re: Ask HN: What is your financial “setup”?
#94I'm in Australia so have fewer options than many others here.
We use a mutual bank for most of our transactional banking. We have several companies, trusts and superannuation (think IRA) accounts there.
My wife and I also have a joint account at a commercial bank. This is solely used for personal purchases on a debit card. The account has no international fees, which is unusual for Australia.
We use Ledger CLI to automatically ingest all transactions each day. I wrote a scraper for the mutual bank and commercial bank (needed to OCR the PIN pads they like to jumble around). This gives us great visibility into all expenditure and origins of funds. My wife and I get a daily email with PDF attachments for our various entities.
We use Interactive Brokers for most investments, along with IG Markets to mitigate some counterparty risk. We've mostly retired (thanks to a startup) so most of our wealth is held in there. I use IB's FTP delivery service to receive detailed daily account statements (with GPG encryption). I also use IB API to do some algo trading.
We also have some crypto with 5 different exchanges given we don't trust any of them so it's straight-forward counterparty risk management. These are also algo traded.
We avoid cash use because it doesn't auto-categorise into Ledger CLI. I wish we had more privacy but by spreading things around between the banks, brokers and exchanges no single institution has any real clue about us. Sure the government does, but they get that all the important info freely anyway via tax returns or simply asking nicely.
It's all reasonably automated, but I have to shuffle money around each quarter or so.
Re: Ask HN: What is your financial “setup”?
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you are expecting to be in a higher tax bracket in retirement (counting traditional IRA/401K income) then Roth IRA/401K may be a better choice, since it is after tax when invested but tax-free when withdrawn. Most workers will have substantially higher income subject to income tax during working years than in retirement even with IRA/401K withdrawals as taxable income, but that's not always the case.
For a roth IRA there are two other benefits (not familiar with Roth 401k, so won't speak to that). * Hedge against different tax rates in the future. Even if now you think you'll be paying a lower rate when retired, there's no guarantees. * You can withdraw your contributions, though not your earnings, without penalty before retirement. If you add 5k/year for a number of years, that starts to add up should you need t…
I believe you can withdraw early on roth 401k funds as well. You can at least roll it into a roth IRA which I know for sure you can withdraw early from with no penalties. It seems like nobody talks about this, but it's a really nice perk. I put half of my first 2 years of 401k contributions into roth when I started working, and it was great knowing it was there just in case.
Re: Ask HN: What is your financial “setup”?
#96My "system" works on gut feeling. I live in the Netherlands. Everything is paid automatically, I only buy things I need, I only use my bank card which is accepted everywhere, I don't really pay attention to what shopping cost. Online purchases I make using Ideal. Every 6 months or so I log in to check my bank balance to see if I'm spending to much or not enough money. I could make luxury purchases but I prefer ignoring finances. I never happened but if things get "out of hand" I would negotiate unpaid leave. 1 day per week is perfect. (I also spend my vacation days like that.) I only work 3:7 days, if I take a day off it leaves only a 2 day work week. It's a pretty hilarious formula. I might need software to avoid getting lazy.
Re: Ask HN: What is your financial “setup”?
#97My "system" works on gut feeling. I live in the Netherlands. Everything is paid automatically, I only buy things I need, I only use my bank card which is accepted everywhere, I don't really pay attention to what shopping cost. Online purchases I make using Ideal. Every 6 months or so I log in to check my bank balance to see if I'm spending to much or not enough money. I could make luxury purchases but I prefer ignori…
Are you self-employed? If not, how did you negotiate 3:7 work week? Any tips to someone who values work-life balance and want to try negotiate 4:7 instead of the current 5:7 standard?
Re: Ask HN: What is your financial “setup”?
#98Striving for low complexity and high flexibility:
- low fix cost per month
- should be possible to cancel subscriptions within a month
- rather rent than buy (flat, car sharing etc.)
- no loans
- money to save goes on a saving account
- define low limits for max. amount of money to withdraw on accounts
- get proper insurance coverage
- avoid Paypal and other 3rdparty banking services
No need for any fancy tools and I have more money available to put away than ever. I only use a tool for my tax declaration, but since I simplified my financial setup so much I could even do it without a tool nowadays...
Re: Ask HN: What is your financial “setup”?
#99My "system" works on gut feeling. I live in the Netherlands. Everything is paid automatically, I only buy things I need, I only use my bank card which is accepted everywhere, I don't really pay attention to what shopping cost. Online purchases I make using Ideal. Every 6 months or so I log in to check my bank balance to see if I'm spending to much or not enough money. I could make luxury purchases but I prefer ignori…
Are you self-employed? If not, how did you negotiate 3:7 work week? Any tips to someone who values work-life balance and want to try negotiate 4:7 instead of the current 5:7 standard?
There is a legal limit to the number of night shifts. Employers may chose either to have employees work a maximum of 140 night shifts per year or a maximum of 38 hours of labor between 0:00 and 6:00 every 2 weeks. (the mandatory 30 min lunch break is not labor)
But I do have an idea for your negotiations. I notice that people who also work day shifts and work 5:7 are tired all the time. If they push themselves either at work or in their private lives the weekend is to short to recover. They just gradually burn up over the year, go on vacation and look 10 years younger when they return.
I can push myself to [measurably] be more than twice as productive during my shifts for 2 reasons: 1) I don't have to worry about wearing myself out, on the contrary, I make an effort to wear myself out completely for the sports of it. If I don't recover in this weeks 4 day weekend I certainly will in the next.
And 2) Because I'm pushing myself and I take time to recover I'm building up endurance rather than slowly decaying. Working as hard as I can is actually beneficial.
Consider what it means: I do 6 days of work and they do 5.
During my 4 day vacation I'm available for messages and phone calls and they call me to fill holes in the schedule. If they call the full time employee he is very unhappy with the request (to put it mildly) and he is only "available" for 2 days.
It doesn't happen very often but if they have to work 2 weekends in a row their productivity gradually drops to something like 40%.
At that point I'm doing 5 times as much work as my coworker. That difference is so ridiculous I think it makes for a fine argument.
Re: Ask HN: What is your financial “setup”?
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I'm hoping the arrival of PSD2 in Europe early this year will finally mean we get apps that will be able to auto report as opposed to manual accounting like it has to be done today
There are already plenty of providers (at least in the UK) that offer the APIs YNAB need - yet for some reason they've opted to use two obscure North America only aggregators. Salt Edge and Yodlee are two very heavily used providers that work internationally.