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Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

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Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#191

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…

> It really doesn't matter how much you earn. Real wealth is in not spending it.

Have to add on that this is definitely not correct. Yes you must not simply inflate your spending to match your 100% of income if the latter increases, but while there's a limit to how much you can decrease outlays, income increase has no exact limit. Bob makes $60k, never buys coffee, brings lunch from home every day, stays focused on his personal finances, saves $5k/yr on lunch & coffee expenditures. Alice makes $60k, buys a $5 latte every single day, spends $12-15 per workday on lunch, focuses on job skills & networking, and negotiates a $10k raise upon switching jobs. Who comes out on top in this situation?

My point is not that budgeting or frugality isn't useful, but that focusing on changing outlays and considering income fixed or even irrelevant, as you suggest, is not a useful or accurate way to look at things.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#193

Post by someuser54541 »

Pmop wrote: post #188
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?

This is what's confusing me about this chain of comments. All the big banks i'm aware of have APIs (Wells, Capital One, etc.). Most of the "neobanks" do as well (Monzo, Mercury, etc.)

If that's not enough, you can just use Plaid. Am I missing something here?

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#194

Post by arnarbi »

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…

I use beancount, and a somewhat custom importer and categorizer. (happy to expand on those but this comment is about the multi-transaction).

I have the categorizer send such transactions to a temporary "limbo account". So I have two transactions:

  # This TX is imported from checking acct statement:
  2020-05-15 * "ACH Payment BankA credit card"
      Assets:BankA:Checking  -500
      Equity:Limbo:CreditCardPayments

  # This TX is imported from credit card statement:
  2020-05-16 * "Payment applied THANK YOU"
      Liabilities:BankB:CreditCard  500
      Equity:Limbo:CreditCardPayments
In both cases the second posting is added by the automatic categorizer based on the description.

After doing a bout of imports, I look at the Limbo account, which should always sum to zero. Sometimes the two TXs don't appear on the same day, so occasionally there's a temporary balance there but that's fine.

I use the same to match up my direct deposits (one end from paystubs import, other from checking account), wire transfers between banks/brokerage, etc. I tend to put them in different subaccounts of "Equity:Limbo" so that I can more easily spot any discrepancies.

Edit: Should've first read the previous reply that says the same thing!

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#195

Post by zelly »

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 only there were a currency that existed completely transparently on a public ledger that can be integrated into any finance tracking application without asking a company for API keys or scraping wouldn't it be crazy if someone made something like that money without permissions

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#196

Post by koyote »

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…

> It's easier to justify the cost of a 200+$ espresso maker if I'm really that big of a fan and already have a defined habbit.

That's exactly what I did: Started a small spreadsheet to work out how long it would take to pay off a $400 espresso maker. Turned out I would make my money back within a year.

Then there's the added bonus that I now own a decent espresso maker which has been great for making guests coffee/showing off. I also get to choose the beans and milk which means that if I wanted to, I could substantially lower the price of my self-made cup of coffee if I was ok with lower quality beans/milk (turns out that I am not ok with that, so no savings there :().

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#197

Post by Yhippa »

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…

When all the financial aggregators (Wealthfront, Personal Capital, Yodlee) fail me and I need to get a clear understanding of my finances, I always regress to something like this.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#198

Post by tzs »

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…

> 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.

I'd suggest considering using a separate payment method for those things, and only those things, that you just think are going to be just a little expense here or there that doesn't need detailed tracking.

Track the total spent via that payment method every month on your budget. It's then easy to tell at a glance if you were right about not needing to track these things in detail or if you have missed some things that you should be tracking in detail.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#199

Post by jonahbenton »

someuser54541 wrote: post #193
Pmop wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This is what's confusing me about this chain of comments. All the big banks i'm aware of have APIs (Wells, Capital One, etc.). Most of the "neobanks" do as well (Monzo, Mercury, etc.) If that's not enough, you can just use Plaid. Am I missing something here?

Generally speaking, bank APIs are for use by businesses that want to be able to pull bank customer data. There are integration hoops and so forth. They are not for end user use.

Plaid has, or used to have, a mode where in preprod you could give it your credentials to a limited number of organizations and then pull in your data. Not sure that survived the Visa acquisition, but even if it did- personally implementing a Plaid integration gave me the willies. Handing over creds was in clear violation of bank terms of service. Plaid seemed to be playing fast and loose from a security perspective (IMO) and retained the right to keep your data even if you removed credentials. Was not comfortable.

Having implemented scrapers to pull my data- that option also painful.

OP is not wrong.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#200

Post by unlimit »

elric wrote: post #6

"Simple" is not an adjective I'd associate with GnuCash. Maybe it is if you're coming from a background in accounting or have a penchant for numbers. It's pretty complicated, and I wouldn't recommend it to someone who just wanted to keep an eye on their budget. A simple spreadsheet will suffice. Or any number of more user friendly tools. That being said, GnuCash is a powerful double entry book keeping system which ca…

I agree with it being simple. I used it when I needed to learn about accounting for my day job. I used it for 2 or 3 months for my personal expenses. I could not continue because I got lazy. But I learned a lot about accounting from using it - certainly helped me with my day job.
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