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Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

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Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#131

Post by DavidPeiffer »

downerending wrote: post #122

Related: Does anyone know of free-ish software to do cash-flow/retirement projections, etc.? For example, I'd input some guesses about income, 401ks, Soc Sec, rent, major necessary expenditures, rates of return and inflation, etc., and have it output balances for several decades. Extra credit for multiple runs with random variation on assumptions. I could write this myself, and have done a trivial one in the past. Is…

www.cfiresim.com is also a great resource. It does monte carlo back testing of your probability of success, with success defined as "not running out of money" on a given timeline.

A big takeaway (adjustable on "Spending Plan") is "if you can reduce your expenses modestly during a downturn in retirement, your chance of success is much higher".

Sequence of Returns risk is also shown pretty well. The failure instances are commonly when your backtest year is immediately prior to a recession or The Great Depression.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#132

Post by mumblemumble »

whycombagator wrote: post #28
gonehome wrote: post #7

I'd be curious if anyone has used this and also used YNAB (and can compare them). I'd put YNAB along with 1Password (and probably Fastmail) in the class of best single purpose pieces of software that I pay for.

I've looked at YNAB before, I keep wanting to try a finance tracking tool - but I can't ever decide which one is worth my time. What's so good about YNAB? It seems to be marketed at a certain segment that I'm not in. At least, based on their homepage line: > Stop living paycheck-to-paycheck, get out of debt, and save more money. As for 1Password, given your username I'm assuming you've tried Bitwarden? What is better…

I used to use GnuCash, and recently started using YNAB.

In a nutshell, I would describe the difference as, "GnuCash (and Mint, Quicken, Moneydance, etc) are for monitoring your finances. YNAB is for controlling your spending."

The more mainstream personal finance apps have all sorts of tools for tracking investments and assets and all that good stuff, and a lot of rich reporting functionality. They also generally have some version of budgeting, typically with a fairly straightforward, traditional approach.

YNAB, by contrast, is really just about budgeting. I'd argue that it's not just an application, it's a whole budgeting method that happens to come bundled with an application to help you in implementing it. When you sign up to YNAB, what you're really doing is subscribing to (founder) Jesse Meacham's personal spin on Dave Ramsey's philosophy of money management. You might as well subscribe to his podcast while you're at it. In fact, I'd suggest listening to a few episodes of his podcast before even signing up for the free trial. If you don't like his way of thinking about money, you probably won't get a whole lot out of YNAB, either.

And YNAB really doesn't even try to be anything else. You can stick your 401(k) balance in there, but YNAB's own documentation encourages you not to bother. All you'll get out of it is that it will show up in one of the reports. It only has three reports, by the way, and they're all spartan and minimally customizable.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#133

Post by brewdad »

pstrateman wrote: post #63

Importing records in GnuCash is a pain. Credit card payments end up with two records of the payment, one from the credit card and another from your bank. There's no way to merge records in GnuCash, ideally you would be able to mark them as the same record, but keep them both to keep the import logic happy.

I manually input my checking account since it is almost entirely payments towards other GnuCash accounts. When I import the credit card payment from my CC company, GnuCash matches the OFX payment record with the existing entry and automatically reconciles it. So I don't get double payments.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#134

Post by mumblemumble »

jonjohn84 wrote: post #73
gonehome wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually hadn't heard about bitwarden (thanks) - I'll check that out. I'm not in YNAB's target market either, but the value they provide is useful even if you're not struggling month to month with finances. You get really good control over your money and a much better understanding of how you're spending it and where. Being really aware of that makes it easier to actually leverage it more because you know exactly w…

I'll give the opposing opinion that YNAB's auto-import works well for me (I use it with a local credit union, 2 credit cards, and an online savings account). In fact, I used my own homebrew budgeting software for over a year before I found that YNAB exists and does everything I needed from my own software plus imports from banks automatically which was my biggest pain point with my own solution (it involved painful c…

They are using Plaid, and yeah, it varies wildly by bank.

FWIW, I don't know that having a bank that doesn't play nice with Plaid is a deal-killer. There is a school of thought among many YNAB users that you should not use the auto-import, or even csv/ofx/whatever import, because manually entering transactions takes only a few minutes a day, and gives you much better awareness of your outflows. I can see some merit to that, insofar as tightly controlling your spending is kind of YNAB's whole thing.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#135

Post by djhaskin987 »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #125

Aaaaaaaaarrrrrrrgggggggghhhhh! I just want a bank account and to have that bank record my spending and let me download it, securely, and automatically. I mean the European Union has taken years to force, yes force banks to do this, and it is basically still broken. I don't want to spend this much effort on something so obviously solvable. It just offends me. Yes that is the right word. And, finally, none of this matt…

Tracking your own finances independent of any other party is very much not a solved problem and is more a matter of trust than of technicalities. This is your finances were talking about here.

As to financial discipline no amount of tooling is going to help you out with that. Tools can help you you what you already want to do but they can't make you want to do something that you don't want.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#136

Post by nickloewen »

hybridtupel wrote: post #107
raz32dust wrote: post #77

I've been using YNAB. I want to switch out because YNAB is too expensive. What I miss with open source alternatives is the mobile app. I don't like to link my bank accounts, so I enter expenses manually whenever I buy anything. The mobile app is critical for that to work.

For the same reasons I am still using the classic version of YNAB (paid once). But unfortunately the Mac version is not compatible with Catalina so I am also forced to search for a new app.

I have recently been experimenting with the mac app "Buckets," which seems conceptually similar to YNAB. It costs $50, but offers a full free trial with no feature or time limits.

Downsides are the data import process, which can be complicated, and the lack of a mobile app.

https://www.budgetwithbuckets.com

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#137

Post by andrepd »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #125

Aaaaaaaaarrrrrrrgggggggghhhhh! I just want a bank account and to have that bank record my spending and let me download it, securely, and automatically. I mean the European Union has taken years to force, yes force banks to do this, and it is basically still broken. I don't want to spend this much effort on something so obviously solvable. It just offends me. Yes that is the right word. And, finally, none of this matt…

Every bank I've used lets you download your transactions as a csv or qfx, which is then trivial to import onto gnucash (I still need to spend ~20m each month carefully sorting things in categories).

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#138

Post by city41 »

chad_strategic wrote: post #57

I tried GnuCash and generally liked it. However, it was a little more complicated than I wanted. In addition, I wanted to be able to access via the web, when I was away from my computer. (cause at the time, I thought it was only available locally) I also wanted my life partner (my lovely wife) to participate. This was going to be the hard part. Behavior modification. So I built a very simple "tracker".(php/codeignite…

I built my own budgeting app and I strongly modeled it after Google Inbox. After importing transactions, you then need to get to “uncategorized zero”, which is identical to inbox zero. I like that it’s much less tedious than manual entry but you still see and work with each transaction. After a transaction has been fully reconciled, it disappears. It’s very analogous to managing email.

It’s running on a raspberry pi in our house and my wife and I both use it. One feature I am adding is a “hey what’s this?” flag that tells the other person to reconcile/categorize the transaction that the other person has more context on.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#139

Post by mjs7231 »

mattbillenstein wrote: post #47

This all seems too complex for most people. I use Google Sheets, I import a year-to-date csv from my bank and credit card every month, categorize each transaction, then use QUERY to aggregate expenses by category. This data I feed into a rough budgeting sheet which I use for expense trimming. This monthly maintenance takes maybe 30 minutes. And I have another sheet to compute net worth - retirement and brokerage acco…

When I was using Google sheets I was really looking at this company Tiller to auto-fetch my transactions. I never actually tried them out, but the service looks pretty compelling: https://www.tillerhq.com/

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#140

Post by anitil »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #125

Aaaaaaaaarrrrrrrgggggggghhhhh! I just want a bank account and to have that bank record my spending and let me download it, securely, and automatically. I mean the European Union has taken years to force, yes force banks to do this, and it is basically still broken. I don't want to spend this much effort on something so obviously solvable. It just offends me. Yes that is the right word. And, finally, none of this matt…

I know you're not asking directly for advice, but if you'd be interested, I find the following is the easiest way of keeping a budget.

0. Forget about tracking things down to the dollar, or even the tens of dollars. That level of precision is unnecessary. If a coffee here or there is going to break your budget, it's already broken and you need to go in to panic mode.

1. Have a spreadsheet with vague monthly costs like 'transport', 'food' and the like. Combine that with your monthly income, and you'll know what your approximate monthly savings should be

2. Every month, manually record your savings.

3. Over time, compare your actual savings with your expected savings

4. If there's a discrepancy of a meaningful amount (however, remember step 0) then you might need to bury in to the details a little bit more.

Given that sort-of system, you have enough manual touchpoints that the budget is in your mind when you're making discretionary purchases, but not so much that it's stressing you out.

I've made a sheet that does basically the above with example budgeting for what I'm familiar with in Sydney - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1KW3i-m8BtJ2O9lKurhJr...

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