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Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

csun.io

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Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#141

Post by 6510 »

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…

Imagine simple government software that acts as a middle man and sends out automatic fines if the api is not up to spec.

I would like to see a complete log of every purchase made like my bank keeps only with much more detail, each bill broken down to well described products with pictures, serial numbers and manuals. As that involves sensitive data we would have to think of some way to wrap it.

I also want tax office to have real time access to a relevant sub set. One administration with every purchase in the country and ever hour worked.

Then do salaries and taxes by the second and split off tax payments right where the transaction happens.

Might as well aggregate everything for sale into one giant government web store.

If everything is made insanely convenient it doesn't matter what it costs. No more sloppy fuzzy business but everything by spec.

I wonder how many people want to start a business but are simply to terrified by the paperwork.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#142

Post by mjs7231 »

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've tried a ton of online apps before eventually writing my own. YNAB can be used to help track spending very well. The budgeting aspect is more to help with self control. For example.. Say you want to tighten down on things a bit, and you notice you spend $230/mo on going out to eat. You can set the budget to $200/mo which basically makes the number red instead of green if you go over.

I would place Lunch Money above YNAB right now. It tracks money in a bit intuitive way, and is easier to use in my opinion.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#143

Post by awinder »

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…

I keep a personal capital sync around for pretty much their retirement planner which pulls data from your synced accounts and does some light portfolio checks / some good visualizations of sectors that you’re invested in.

https://www.personalcapital.com/

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#144

Post by freddie_mercury »

haberman wrote: post #118
cobby wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> beancount wants everything to live in One Giant Journal file Actually, beancount supports include directive. See includes section [1] of the language syntax document [1]: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wAMVrKIA2qtRGmoVDSUBJGmY...

Thanks for the reference. But a single transaction can span multiple financial institutions. Say you pay off a credit card. One half of the transaction comes from the credit card statement, the other half comes from your bank. The two halves sum to zero. My understanding is that the whole transaction has to live in one file with Beancount. This doesn't seem amenable to having each bank statement generate a single Bea…

If you really want to do that, there is a beancount plugin called ZeroSum that does it

https://github.com/redstreet/beancount_reds_plugins/tree/mas...

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#145

Post by vimslayer »

6510 wrote: post #141
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…

Imagine simple government software that acts as a middle man and sends out automatic fines if the api is not up to spec. I would like to see a complete log of every purchase made like my bank keeps only with much more detail, each bill broken down to well described products with pictures, serial numbers and manuals. As that involves sensitive data we would have to think of some way to wrap it. I also want tax office…

> automatic fines if the api is not up to spec

Fines As A Service?

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#146

Post by jkhdigital »

jonahbenton wrote: post #20
boromi wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for this. Looks compelling. Is there a simple installation guide, I find it hard to figure out how to get going.

As a longtime beancount user- it should be easy to install- there are packages for most OSes, they mostly work, the maintainer, Martin Blais is amazing and indefatigable, and the community is active and friendly and technical. But the "how to get going" part is where I find the real difficulty lies. There is a conceptual friction in double-entry accounting, which beancount enforces. If you do not have prior exposure…

A thousand times yes! the abstraction of double-entry accounting is absolutely central to understanding the modern economy and why (large) economic agents behave the way they do. It’s also essential for understanding fiat money, which is more or less just numbers in a double-entry ledger.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#147

Post by freddie_mercury »

boromi wrote: post #12
rcMgD2BwE72F wrote: post #2

I've used GnuCash for years before switching to beancount ( https://bitbucket.org/blais/beancount/ with smart_importer: https://github.com/beancount/smart_importer ) and fava ( https://github.com/beancount/fava/ ). Much easier to work on your journals (ledger, trades, prices...) since they are just text files. Really great if you're using the beancount package for Sublime: https://packagecontrol.io/packages/Beancount…

Thanks for this. Looks compelling. Is there a simple installation guide, I find it hard to figure out how to get going.

The documentation says to type "pip install beancount". That doesn't seem hard, so I'm guessing you're having some other problem? If you post on the mailing list, people will help you.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#148

Post by 6510 »

anitil wrote: post #140
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 lik…

Nice!

I just stop spending money unless I absolutely have to. A cup of coffee and a bit of candy at the gas station every other day (2+4 euro) * (365/2) * 10 years. Thats ELEVEN THOUSAND euro I could probably be doing something more interesting with. At 7 euro/kg and 30 gr/liter 11k is 52380 liters of coffee or 314285 cups or 86 cups/day for 10 years. 2/3 was candy (we are not buying that) so we only have 28 cups left per day. At 2 cups per day (which is 4 times as much) it still is 140 years of coffee every 10 years.

I pick 10 years because its short. If we take 50 years it is 55 000 euro. Now imagine throwing money around like that all day long.

Think about that when you get a free coffee.

I know it doesn't sound very convincing but most people manage to match their spending with their income. It really doesn't matter how much you earn. Real wealth is in not spending it.

Also, if you hoard enough cash and enough discipline it eventually stops making sense to work. More time to enjoy life! (jay!) Also, that bag of candy is probably killing me. If I'm hungry I must have planned things poorly.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#149

Post by jkhdigital »

cascom wrote: post #60

I’ve been using Gnucash for my personal finances for a several years now, and really love it - it’s not dead simple, and requires an understanding of double entry bookkeeping, but where it really shines is flexibility. A couple of examples are as follows: 1. Expenses in the future - If I book a bunch of plane tickets for later in the year today, I can book those expenses in those months in which I’m traveling (pre-pa…

Future-dating transactions allows me to run my household finances like a comptroller. Cash is never idle in my bank accounts!

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#150

Post by aidenn0 »

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 just want a bank account and to have that bank record my spending and let me download it, securely, and automatically.

My (US based) bank and both my credit cards do this just fine and I download them to gnucash; it does this with a third-party library AqBanking, which includes both a GUI configuration program and a command-line tool for downloading to a CSV, which you can the process with whatever you like.

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