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Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

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Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#151

Post by jon-wood »

spodek wrote: post #9

I tracked my finances for a while with GnuCash and found myself in the category he describes here: > If you’re happy with just knowing that your credit card balance is less than a certain amount each month, that’s great! You don’t need GnuCash. I'm curious what fraction of people track personal finances versus those who don't. I don't know if I'm in a big majority, small majority, big minority, small minority, or wha…

I’ve been tracking my finances on and off for a few years, but finally made the habit stick around Christmas last year. I do it not so much to know what I’ve spent already, more to know how much I can spend in any given category.

I’m using YNAB, which has honestly changed the way I think about money. Historically I’ve always taken the approach that there’s no point having money and not spending it, impulse buying things, and then being screwed when an unexpected bill comes in. Or the need to eat just before payday.

YNAB pushes you into allocating money at the point it comes in, anything from rent and groceries to a pot for renewing my Amazon Prime subscription when it comes up. Somehow the act of allocating the money seems to trigger the same mental reaction as actually spending it used to, and I’ll now often find myself with more money left over to go into savings at the end of the month because I actually didn’t need to spend most of what was allocated to my generic “fun money” bucket.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#152

Post by Consultant32452 »

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…

Sticking to a budget is an emotional problem, not a mathematical one. Helping solve emotional problems is extremely difficult.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#153

Post by aidenn0 »

spodek wrote: post #9

I tracked my finances for a while with GnuCash and found myself in the category he describes here: > If you’re happy with just knowing that your credit card balance is less than a certain amount each month, that’s great! You don’t need GnuCash. I'm curious what fraction of people track personal finances versus those who don't. I don't know if I'm in a big majority, small majority, big minority, small minority, or wha…

I track All non-cash transactions and any large cash transactions.

I did it from when I first started working full-time so I could get some idea of savings/spending &c.

It was "meh" usefulness, but pretty easy since I could auto-import the transactions and it takes me maybe 1hr per month to categorize everything.

Now that I'm married its incredibly useful. "Can we afford X?" "How much are we spending on Y?" "I feel like I've been overspending on Z, how bad is it?" are the sorts of questions that can be answered very quickly.

Neither my wife nor I are in "charge" of spending, but I keep the books (because I had been before getting married). These money discussions could very easily become divisive if we didn't have easy-to-access data.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#154

Post by TheApexTheater »

mtrower wrote: post #83
TheApexTheater wrote: post #74

Like many people here, I tried GnuCash. I enjoyed it, but when I would import data from my bank, it would crash. That, and not having any real way of categorizing my expenditures was annoying. The other thing that annoyed me was not being able to select multiple items I recently moved to KMyMoney and everything just clicked. I found the interface to be nicer, especially combining the filter functionality with the abi…

No way to categorize your expenses? Could you elaborate and compare to KMM? I've used both programs, so I'm curious which of us is missing something.

I think I may have misspoken. What I meant to say was that, at least for me, KMM is a little easier to view both accounts and categories, and search within them.

A more accurate phrasing would have been "Filter all the payers that contain this string, and allow me to select them and see how much money was transferred to/from them."

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#155

Post by [deleted] »

igpay wrote: post #35
brnt wrote: post #3

Hold up. Did Gnucash get better reporting or did he make his own? Last time I used Gnucash, which admittedly was 10 years ago, but for a business, I found reporting and the lack of budgeting lacking. The latter could be solved by envelopes (but I find hacky), but the former only by learning Guile, something I was and am not up to. Alternatives like Money dance have a more complete solution, certainly for personal use…

The very first plot shown in the article was generated with custom scripts, published here ( https://github.com/csun/simple_gnucash_budget_plots ) I'm not sure how much it's changed since 2014. I think the "budgeting" system is still probably as bad as it was back then, though (and by bad I mean not really applicable for personal use, probably good for businesses). That's why I wrote this budget plotting script.

[deleted]

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#156

Post by movedx »

codazoda wrote: post #13
spodek wrote: post #9

I tracked my finances for a while with GnuCash and found myself in the category he describes here: > If you’re happy with just knowing that your credit card balance is less than a certain amount each month, that’s great! You don’t need GnuCash. I'm curious what fraction of people track personal finances versus those who don't. I don't know if I'm in a big majority, small majority, big minority, small minority, or wha…

I'll bite here... I used to track my finances and balance my checkbook. But, it took hours of my time. The best thing I ever did was create a separate account for my disposable income. My bills account gets the exact amount it needs and everything is payed automatically. The rest of my income goes into my fun account and I rest easy knowing I can spend until it's gone and my bills still get payed. After that worked w…

My wife and I do something similar.

We have our "Expenses" account that salaries go into. We have our "Offset" account that has our emergency fund in it and offsets the interest for our mortgage. And finally we have a "Goals" account that we use to save up for big ticket items like a new car, holiday, or something.

We take 10% of our respective incomes each into a personal, "off the books" account and we do whatever we like with that.

Simple.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#157

Post by Jorge1o1 »

ahnick wrote: post #43
john61 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Double entry booking is complicated but it pays off to learn if also for personal finance because errors are much less likely than with a spreadheet.

This is commonly stated, but I found it relatively straightforward once I saw the extended accounting equation ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accounting_equation ) and knew every entry needed a corresponding entry to make the equation balance. Assets = Liabilities + Equity + (Income - Expenses) For some reason the (Income - Expenses) part gets left off in many introductory explanations of the accounting equation. I…

I agree this is important to understanding double-entry accounting. Keep in mind that the Income - Expenses gets elided because the Retained Earnings go towards Equity

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#158

Post by kingaillas »

spodek wrote: post #9

I tracked my finances for a while with GnuCash and found myself in the category he describes here: > If you’re happy with just knowing that your credit card balance is less than a certain amount each month, that’s great! You don’t need GnuCash. I'm curious what fraction of people track personal finances versus those who don't. I don't know if I'm in a big majority, small majority, big minority, small minority, or wha…

I've been tracking my finances, with varying levels of details, since 1997.

I started with Microsoft Money, and tracked everything including cash and credit cards charges, for 10 years. It took a while to enter the info and I wasn't really using the info at that detail, so I changed up and also migrated to Moneydance, since Microsoft Money sunset in 2009.

I started over with Moneydance, and instead of recording cash to such detail, I just recorded it as a transfer from checking to "Wallet - Cash" and then balanced that every month by assuming all my cash went to restaurants. Not 100% accurate but mostly correct and way faster.

After a 2-3 years of Moneydance I decided to migrate again to GnuCash, for the various benefits of open source software. This time I also lightened up my recording to condense credit cards purchases down to one monthly entry. Which again saves a lot of time. I glance over my monthly bill to make sure the charges are correct but don't split out by category anymore.

So that's where I am now. Been using GnuCash for the last ~10 years, only record large categories of expenses and basically check credit cards bills for accuracy and keep my checking/savings accounts up to date. I only update retirement/investment accounts once a year, at the end of the year.

I am fortunate to be able to live below my means so I don't have to stress over balancing various accounts to the dollar. I just need a general idea of my position.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#159

Post by crowbahr »

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 have my financial institutions send me an email every time there is a transaction. Those emails are then scraped and forwarded on to a spreadsheet.

It works Ok, but I hit my zapier limit sometimes.

I'm currently working on setting up my personal server to receive emails from my account and parse them into a table locally, which I can then connect into Google sheets with an API key.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#160

Post by somebrody »

Consultant32452 wrote: post #152
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…

Sticking to a budget is an emotional problem, not a mathematical one. Helping solve emotional problems is extremely difficult.

Yep, emotional solutions work better for many. An example:

1) Pay rent and all bills on time, fully. This is sacred. It is called the Golden Rule for a reason.

2) After rent and bills, take the rest out in cash.

a) Split the cash into the number of weeks it needs to cover.

b) Split the cash for each week into two equal parts. Put one half in an envelope labeled "Monday" and the other half in one labeled "Friday".

c) Hide each week's envelope in a different part of your room or house.

3) Put the first week's "Monday" money in your pocket. Spend it until it is gone or not. You decide. If you overspend, hopefully it was on a Wednesday because you must make do. Eat oatmeal, eat rice, eat spinach. Get through it.

4) On "Friday" put the other half of the week's budget in your pocket and spend it before you go to bed on Sunday.

5) Repeat

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