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Actual is going open-source

actualbudget.com

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Re: Actual is going open-source

#241

Post by sbehere »

nerdjon wrote: post #89

I am curious, what do people use for budgeting? Mint seems like the most feature rich, but not only do I not want to support their parent company because of their Tax lobbying... but I don't trust them from a privacy standpoint (Considering its free). YNAB and Monarch both seem like really good options. But I have not looked into them much yet. I currently use Copilot (iOS only... really just iPhone, no iPad app). I…

I use a home-grown system[1] that does not require sharing credentials with a third party, has partial/fully automated (depending on financial institution) fetching of transactions, auto-categorization learned from your previously categorized transactions, and the possibility to create pretty dashboards that can be shared with others.

It's surprisingly simple (just a few lines of code) for personal use.

[1]: https://sagar.se/blog/where-is-the-money/

Re: Actual is going open-source

#242

Post by sbehere »

michaelsalim wrote: post #209

Awesome how James handled this! Unrelated, I'm looking for something that can help me create finance projections. Eg: How's my account going to look like in the next 3 months if I go for a holiday. Any suggestions for that?

This seems to be exactly what ProjectionLab[1] is for. I am not a user or affiliated with it.. just learned about it the other day on some HN thread and thought it looked cool.

[1]: https://projectionlab.com/

Re: Actual is going open-source

#243

Post by presentation »

LesZedCB wrote: post #196
jeromegv wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are not "reduced" to do that. You are making that choice, that's all. Nobody is forcing you. If you badly wanted to create a business, you'd just go ahead and do it.

> > will require insurmountable efforts regardless of whether or not you believe it's just "making that choice," completely discrediting somebody's claim the effort is insurmountable _to them_ makes you a breaker of Rule 1

Well it is objectively surmountable and if it personally isn’t to them that means that the money is more important to them than achieving that goal to make a business. I don’t see how this isn’t a choice? “I’m not doing it since the insecurity of not having a high income is scarier than my desire to open a business”

That said I do bet that if you try to do your thing and it really doesn’t work out you probably can go back to software afterwards if you’re open to the risk of burning through your savings in the process.

Re: Actual is going open-source

#244

Post by abirch »

rglullis wrote: post #161
Dig1t wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I grew up in the US, my parents are very blue collar, neither of them went to college, and they worked hard to give me and my sibling a decent childhood. I went to the cheapest college I could (a local university you've never heard of) to get a BS in Computer Science. I worked my ass off, grinding on interview studying, working internships and jumping companies whenever I could get a better offer. I'm about to turn 3…

You were born and raised in the US. That by itself is already a huge privilege.

It really depends where in the USA. This Harvard project tracks intergenerational mobility. I make more annually than both my parents made combined for their three peak years. https://opportunityinsights.org/ I come from one of the highly mobile counties.

Re: Actual is going open-source

#246

Post by neill »

brushfoot wrote: post #175
encoderer wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Went full time in 2020! Immediately took an 80% pay cut, but I spend 0 hours in bullshit meetings and no longer have to play the corporate employment game.

Was hoping for that answer. Good for you! I've been weighing when to take the plunge myself. I can't support my family with what mine is making on the side right now (10% of my day job salary), though I know if I were full time on it I'd be seeing more return. Just feels like a high dive into a small pool and I'm trying to suss out the right moment. Any tips/lessons learned?

Have you considered working with anyone else to help advance the product/business while still working to support your family?

Re: Actual is going open-source

#247

Post by zargon »

dwild wrote: post #203
twobitshifter wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a chance they just needed to raise the price. I wonder how people land on something like $4. At that price your demand for something like this is not price sensitive. $5 and you have 20% growth, $8 and you’ve doubled. To the users it’s just a few bucks.

The thing is, YNAB increased pricing recently and that didn't went well, it caused a pretty negative outlash... Actual was actually a pretty good alternative that was pushed by many people on Reddit, they got quite a bit of free advertising through that. Yearly YNAB is only 8.25$ a month and support syncing through Plaid (which add a few dollars per month for sure to the cost and it also add quite a bit of negative f…

I feel like Actual should have way more users, but people were waiting to switch from YNAB until it had every unnecessary feature added. If they knew that postponing their subscription would end in the service shutting down, maybe they would have chosen differently? Actual is completely usable, and reliable as it is. I'm sad that it ended in burnout this way, it is such a good product.

Re: Actual is going open-source

#248

Post by rglullis »

abirch wrote: post #244
rglullis wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You were born and raised in the US. That by itself is already a huge privilege.

It really depends where in the USA. This Harvard project tracks intergenerational mobility. I make more annually than both my parents made combined for their three peak years. https://opportunityinsights.org/ I come from one of the highly mobile counties.

The privilege I am talking about is related to the chances of access to $200k jobs.

Just being born and raised in the US means that you don't have to worry about visa issues, for example. And when I was in the US, I only managed to get my H1B through a quota-exempt employer, meaning I couldn't move around for better offers. I also lost count of how many times I received the "you have very good qualifications but unfortunately we can not sponsor visas" email.

Re: Actual is going open-source

#249

Post by ineedasername »

daenz wrote: post #49
mellosouls wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you can have a cushy tech job making 200K relatively easy Some of these claims seem to come from people living on a different planet to me. Yes you can make that, but only if you are in a tiny (and normally very privileged) set. The way it's breezily posted on this forum at times shows perhaps just a leeetle disconnect with the mainstream tech world

My read on that is that it is total comp, so it includes bonuses/RSUs/options. If you're not negotiating for those things, what are you doing. Though $200k base salary is not a crazy salary for a staff/principle/high-level engineer. I don't think people realize how corrosive to mental health a $200k engineering job can be though. I was making very close to that as a base salary, and the amount of responsibilities I h…

I think of it like this: They can't pay me enough to take a $200k job. By which I mean that for most $200k jobs, the money would not be enough to justify the trade off. But everyone makes their own choices on that sort of thing.

Re: Actual is going open-source

#250

Post by ineedasername »

sciurus wrote: post #125
rglullis wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, what part of the world are you on? Even in Berlin, with all the talks about it becoming a top destination for tech people, I'm yet to hear any 6-figures offer. Even the blockchain companies that were flush with cash were paying 90-95k€ to their top people, maybe a 10-20% performance bonus. Mind you, we are talking about Germany where the tax is ~42% of your income at this bracket if you are single. When I was…

I've personally worked with people who I know made 6-figures of total comp in Germany. Checking the relatively-new https://techpays.eu/ , there are plenty of 6-figure entries for Germany. I'm not saying this means it's the norm, just that it's achievable for people whose posts make it to the front page of Hacker News. You mentioned taxes. When people talk about comp in the US, we aren't taking out taxes. Effective ta…

30% is just federal. State can add between 0%-10% on top of that. So depending on where you live it may be very close to Germany. Then there's medical insurance, which is usually paid out of a portion of your paycheck. It's optional, but it would be a poor risk/reward tradeoff for even for a young healthy person to not at least have a high deductable plan, which will be another 3-4% of $200k.
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