Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

csun.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 323 posts

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#171

Post by PascLeRasc »

monksy wrote: post #166
6510 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lef…

I agree with the "I will teach you to be rich" (it's a book) approach a bit more than "i can't buy a $5e coffee daily". Their approach is more like a performance engineer. You look at the biggest costs first and reduce it down. I.e. Ask for a raise, refinance your place, find a cheaper place to rent, etc. When you get down to the coffee you would be faced with: is it cheaper to make good quality coffee, or am I payin…

I love the IWTYTBR philosophy too. My favorite part is the concept of "guilt-free spending". Once you get the "big wins" down like you talked about, you can set aside 15-20% of your monthly net income to be spent any way you like. This seems intuitive at face value, but the example Rami uses with buying a $150 pair of cashmere sweatpants brings it home. It was inside his $500/month or whatever "guilt-free spending" budget, so it doesn't matter if it was a good deal or not. You just have to want it. He says his friends all commented how it was a dumb purchase and he could have gotten regular sweatpants for $20 instead, but that's missing the point.

I've taken the same approach, and this month some of my guilt-free spend went to a nice burr coffee grinder to replace my old blade one. But I'm not going to try to calculate the amortized joy per $ or long-term savings I'll get out of it, I just love brewing coffee, this makes it better, and I could afford it.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#172

Post by oehtXRwMkIs »

every wrote: post #15

I've been playing around with ledger[1] recently. On one level, it is the simplest of tools requiring only a command line and a text editor. But once you wade into the documentation[2] you will begin to see it quite differently. Its capabilities are staggering... [1] https://www.ledger-cli.org/index.html [2] https://www.ledger-cli.org/3.0/doc/ledger3.html

The plaintext accounting ecosystem as a whole is pretty great. Only thing however is that literally none of them comply with the XDG Base Directory Spec. So to have hledger with a web-ui and auto-importing for example means like 3-4 dotfiles littering the home directory.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#173

Post by Moodles »

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…

If you just want to know what businesses you tend to spend money on, many credit cards in the US do this. E.g. Chase has pie charts showing dining vs travel vs utilities, etc.

If you want more fine grained data, you can download statements for the month or year to date, etc

If you want to see your net worth across every bank/brokerage over time you can use an app like weslthfront or personal capital

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#174

Post by PascLeRasc »

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 use Wealthfront to handle this. It lets you do everything you described and can make recommendations based on your goals. You can play with things like "what if I moved to another city" and it'll tell you about housing costs, or "what if I took a 2-year sabbatical, could I still retire at 50?". I really value using them as a roboadvisor too, as someone who used to be addicted to Robinhood. I'm a huge fan.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#175

Post by alexmingoia »

I will never understand why people spend time on expense tracking spreadsheets and apps.

I mean, you’re the one spending money you already know what you spent it on... Your bank already has a history of transactions if you want to look at it.

Put 30% of your income in a savings account, the money for necessary bills in another account with auto-billing, and the rest for spending in a spending account.

I see so many people categorizing everything with spreadsheets and budget apps and I just ask myself... why? If you set aside savings and necessary expenses what’s the point of categorizing your spending?

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#176

Post by xyzzy_plugh »

crowbahr wrote: post #159
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.

It never occurred to me that this might be an option. Great idea. I wonder if credit cards have this too...

I've been downloading monthly statements manually and feeding them into my data woodchopper, but email sounds like a good alternative (or maybe complimentary?).

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#177

Post by dublinben »

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…

The only level of detail you need to track your finances to is subtracting your expenses from your income each month. As long as you spend less than you earn, you don't need to worry more than that.

If you'd like be saving more money than you currently are, then you can drill down into each side to look for things to improve.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#178

Post by echelon »

alexmingoia wrote: post #175

I will never understand why people spend time on expense tracking spreadsheets and apps. I mean, you’re the one spending money you already know what you spent it on... Your bank already has a history of transactions if you want to look at it. Put 30% of your income in a savings account, the money for necessary bills in another account with auto-billing, and the rest for spending in a spending account. I see so many p…

It's even easier if you don't spend at all. So many of the things we buy are temporary, ephemeral pleasures.

I'm not saying don't invest in fun and experiences; life is short, and you should enjoy it. But picking up random things at Target and idly browsing Amazon might not be necessary. And might be keeping you working harder, longer. Cheap drinks are just as enjoyable as expensive ones.

I've started putting money I would spend on stupid things into savings and investments. Nothing would be better than buying my freedom to work on whatever problems I want to 100% of the time.

I've got mutual funds and growth stocks, but my favorite thing is my dividend stocks. I like watching those returns come in because I'm doing nothing to earn them. It feels magical and has helped curb the desire to buy anything I don't need. If I put it into an investment, the money works for me instead of me working for the system.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#179

Post by julianeon »

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…

This reminds me of that Upton Sinclair quote: 'It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.'

I think banks benefit from a certain amount of sloppiness. Get hit by a finance charge here, accumulating unnecessary interest on a credit card there? Who cares! Let the bank handle it, don't worry, banking should be convenient...

So despite endless paeans to customer service and 'community' and whatever horns the banks are tooting these days, seeing how you spend your money simply remains difficult.

By design.

Which is why the fix is not coming, and never will be coming, unless you implement it yourself.

Because it is difficult to get a bank to build a tool when the bank's profits are improved by them not building it.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#180

Post by nitemice »

PascLeRasc wrote: post #171
monksy wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with the "I will teach you to be rich" (it's a book) approach a bit more than "i can't buy a $5e coffee daily". Their approach is more like a performance engineer. You look at the biggest costs first and reduce it down. I.e. Ask for a raise, refinance your place, find a cheaper place to rent, etc. When you get down to the coffee you would be faced with: is it cheaper to make good quality coffee, or am I payin…

I love the IWTYTBR philosophy too. My favorite part is the concept of "guilt-free spending". Once you get the "big wins" down like you talked about, you can set aside 15-20% of your monthly net income to be spent any way you like. This seems intuitive at face value, but the example Rami uses with buying a $150 pair of cashmere sweatpants brings it home. It was inside his $500/month or whatever "guilt-free spending" b…

I think there's a distinction to be made between "guilt-free" and "dumb/wasteful" spending. I can totally understand spending $150 on a pair of sweatpants if they "bring you joy" and are useful and will last you a decent amount of time. But just because you're willing and able to spend your money without guilt, doesn't mean any and every purchase is a good one. At the very least, spending a lot of money on a series of low quality items that you end up having to replace is a sustainability issue.

And that doesn't preclude you from getting a good deal either. That doesn't mean you should spend days shopping around for a few dollars off every purchase, but "voting with your wallet" is always worth doing.

Post reply on HN