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Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

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Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#181

Post by sanderjd »

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 because once I started doing it I found that I didn't actually know what I spent money on, not really. I found that my rough estimates for where my money was going were way off and lagged actual changes in my behavior by a number of months. Just as an example, I still don't feel like my family is spending close to double what we used to on groceries during the pandemic, but I know that we are because I have months of history to compare against.

So then you could say, great, so you know that for sure now, so what? Well, this is actionable! Continuing with the example, now we can look at the upward trend in groceries and ask whether we're happy about that. Is it an overall upward trend, or is it coming from something else that we've deprioritized? In this case, yeah, it's pretty directly coming out of eating out and socializing, so not something we need to worry about. But in other cases it has provided data to inform hard decisions about where to cut.

And that actionable trade off thing isn't even my favorite part! My favorite part is peace of mind when we buy stuff. I don't have to wonder whether we can afford things, we either have the money for it, or we can move money for it from some other thing we were gonna spend it on, or we just can't afford it. But there's no guesswork, which is so much more relaxing than what I used to do (guess and hope).

Your mileage may vary, but for me, it's some of the best invested time I spend.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#182

Post by cjlovett »

Yep, this is the same reason I've been using https://github.com/clovett/myMoney.Net for the last 20 years and I have to say the data I have now is invaluable. But I have noticed a lot of banks are shutting down their OFX gateways which is disturbing. I think Intuit is moving them all to online backend closed systems which sucks. We should start a citizen initiated referendum to stop that trend and force banks to remain open, letting consumers download their data!!

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#183

Post by endgame »

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…

In Australia, the "consumer data right" is about giving fintechs (and probably AUSTRAC too) standardised access to banking data, but if you go and say "I'm a consumer and want to access my data", the banks are all "lol no": https://github.com/ConsumerDataStandardsAustralia/standards/...

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#184

Post by adamnew123456 »

xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #176
crowbahr wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?).

I have a similar pipeline (bank and credit cards included) although I run my own SMTP server to capture the transactions as they're forwarded from my main email account. It's a pain to setup the first time but not hard to maintain if you lock it down.

It started out fairly basic (just CSV files dumped somewhere monthly) but the more history is there the more I find to do with it. I recently rewrote the whole thing and added auto-reconcile support, so it can tell if my record in Ledger is wrong and point out the exact discrepancies. I have a tendency to be lazy about recording things so making the machine check everything is nice.

It sucks that there aren't any good APIs for this sort of thing. But until that happens I'm stuck running Postfix and scraping HTML out of mbox files.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#185

Post by EE84M3i »

oehtXRwMkIs wrote: post #172
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.

Is this a critical issue for you? How often do you `ls -a` in your homedir?

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#186

Post by feteru »

nitemice wrote: post #180
PascLeRasc wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

No, I think the point is that you shouldn't make this distinction with respect to your budget. It's saying that if you take care of other wasteful spending, get your big wins, then plan for $500 of spending, then it doesn't matter if you make a dumb purchase. Don't feel guilty that you didn't get the best deal, don't feel guilty about the concept of a "good" or "bad" purchase, it just was within your budget, you wanted it and someone was selling it. You can't always do this comparison and avoiding dumb/wasteful decisions.

Yes, I am exaggerating a bit, but I think you missed the point.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#187

Post by alexmingoia »

sanderjd wrote: post #181
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 because once I started doing it I found that I didn't actually know what I spent money on, not really. I found that my rough estimates for where my money was going were way off and lagged actual changes in my behavior by a number of months. Just as an example, I still don't feel like my family is spending close to double what we used to on groceries during the pandemic, but I know that we are because I have mont…

Do you put savings and necessary expenses aside when paid? To each their own. If it works for you great. I can’t imagine sitting down and tracking whether my grocery expenses fluctuated from one month to the next, since it can’t impact my ability to pay bills and save. If I was worried about not having money for groceries I would set that money aside when I get paid.

I also have a family and am the sole income earner. I just set aside everybody's spending money / allowance and they can do with it as they wish.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#188

Post by Pmop »

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…

Wouldn't it be nice if they provided all of that and more with a REST API?

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#189

Post by sequoia »

6510 wrote: post #148
anitil wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lef…

> More time to enjoy life!

What if I enjoy life by buying a fancy coffee & drinking it on my walk to work?

The downside of your formulation of "why buy coffee? you could be enjoying life instead!" is that this worldview encourages people to feel guilty about buying coffee. Extreme frugality has its place, but remember that "your life" that you have to enjoy isn't something that starts in 5 years or 10 years or once you save $x, it's what's happening right now, all the time. I might not be alive in 5 years, none of has that guarantee. So I enjoy my coffee.

It sounds like you enjoy frugality for its own sake which is fantastic, and more power to you. But I think most personal financial planners would suggest that you have a goal you're working towards rather than "hoard cash." What's the point of that? "Thats ELEVEN THOUSAND euro I could probably be doing something more interesting with" figure out what that "something more interesting" is and it might make sense to forgo your daily coffee. Hoarding cash is not a goal.

> If we take 50 years it is 55 000 euro.

Yippee! I'm 85 years old (assuming I haven't died already) and I have an extra €55k. Am I allowed to drink coffee now?

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#190

Post by mgkimsal »

Moodles wrote: post #173
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

> Chase has pie charts showing dining vs travel vs utilities, etc.

Bank software almost always miscategorizes something.

My bank categorizes my purchases from the liquor store as 'home improvement'. The house certainly looks better when I'm drunk, but that's probably not what they had in mind.

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