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10 years of personal finances in plain text files

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Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#41

Post by rambambram »

avdwio wrote: post #21
djhworld wrote: post #14

I've been beancount'ing for years now As we've crossed into the new year I've switched to a similar directory setup as the OP with 1 file per year. Previously I just had one file that was from 2022 which ended up being like 2 million lines of text, which was starting to bog down the emacs plugin. What I appreciate the most about this approach to personal finances is it just tracks everything. Investments, pensions, R…

I'm curious about this as I've thought about building personal software to manage my data (such as finances) via LLM, however I'm apprehensive about actually supplying that data to the LLM to help build the tool. Is this what you're doing? Now that I think about it, I could probably 'anonymise' the data with a local model...

Just go for it in your favorite programming language, it's a nice exercise and in the meantime you can learn about (double entry) bookkeeping.

I did that for myself and it took me at most three months of parttime working on it, resulting in a bespoke solution. No need to keep paying some SaaS or fiddling around in Excel. One still needs to learn the bookkeeping system though, but that's true for all options. A SaaS is not magically make that go away.

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#42

Post by lloydatkinson »

skwee357 wrote: post #5

I have 14 years of personal (and 2 years of sole proprietorship) finance data in beancount. I tried all the available personal finance apps there are, from cloud/online offerings to offline apps. Eventually, I settled on beancount because it is the most versatile file format. In addition to tracking finances, I can track stocks, unvested RSU grants, vacation hours, and even personal training I have paid for but yet t…

How US centric is the software? I've found that a lot of these accounting/finance type programs have very prescriptive ideas and expected usage of it that doesn't really seem to even remotely match the type of exported data I get from my UK bank account.

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#43

Post by dueyfinster »

I'm a big fan of plain text accounting also. Like the author - I started 10 years ago (mine from 2015). I use hledger mainly and also wrote converters for bank I use (xlsx to csv).

It's crazy to see just how much money I've paid Netflix since 2015 (and I'm a sub since 2011). Or Starbucks (which I rarely go to). But it's very powerful. One thing I've long wanted is better visualizations.

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#44

Post by lalitmaganti »

lloydatkinson wrote: post #42
skwee357 wrote: post #5

I have 14 years of personal (and 2 years of sole proprietorship) finance data in beancount. I tried all the available personal finance apps there are, from cloud/online offerings to offline apps. Eventually, I settled on beancount because it is the most versatile file format. In addition to tracking finances, I can track stocks, unvested RSU grants, vacation hours, and even personal training I have paid for but yet t…

How US centric is the software? I've found that a lot of these accounting/finance type programs have very prescriptive ideas and expected usage of it that doesn't really seem to even remotely match the type of exported data I get from my UK bank account.

The core software itself is completely agnostic to currency or country. Otoh the importer ecosystem is somewhat US focused but a) you can easily write importers yourself b) I just published importers for a bunch of UK institutions (e.g. HSBC, Barclays, AJ Bell) - see the other post hanging around the HN frontpage :)

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#45

Post by idahoduncan »

Looks like it's four years for me with beancount.

    $ git log --oneline --reverse | head -n1
    5f72575 Initial commit: January 2022
My importers take care of reconciling the common transactions, like train fares and groceries, which means my monthly session takes under an hour. The slow bits are exporting CSV statements from my banks, and reconciling transactions from amazon and the local pet supply store (is it useful in practice to track litter and treats separately? probably not).

I'm also yet to migrate to beancount v3.

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#46

Post by teeray »

JulianWasTaken wrote: post #17
djhworld wrote: post #14

I've been beancount'ing for years now As we've crossed into the new year I've switched to a similar directory setup as the OP with 1 file per year. Previously I just had one file that was from 2022 which ended up being like 2 million lines of text, which was starting to bog down the emacs plugin. What I appreciate the most about this approach to personal finances is it just tracks everything. Investments, pensions, R…

I have my electricity bills tracking into a KWH commodity. It has been... effectively useless :D.

I track my propane in an LPG commodity at a fixed price per season. It saved me about $100 once when a transaction wouldn’t balance. I was accidentally partially charged for a short load delivery on one of my tanks at almost double the rate. Even if it seems silly to track at this fidelity in the moment, I wouldn’t have caught this tracking USD alone. Billing mistakes happen and can be costly!

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#47

Post by fastasucan »

I found that doing anything too detailed was too big of a chore for what I got out, and that I didnt get much from doing budgeting.

I ended up just logging my total holding of cash and stocks spread over my different bank accounts and my investment portfolio. Doing it every few months helped me make sure that my overall holdings went up. As long as I pay off my bills and then save enough to see my holdings rise I am happy. However I can see that having a more detailed overview over your spending might help you cut down even more.

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#48

Post by cyberlurker »

djhworld wrote: post #29
thomascountz wrote: post #18

I began with PTA recently. I think the barrier to entry is high because you first need to learn double entry bookkeeping (if you haven't already) and then you need to decide between ledger-cli, hledger, or beancount, with the differentiators being on the margins and with some promise of being able to switch later. The choice really comes down to which tool has the documentation/community that makes the most sense to…

I think there's definitely something in it around there's a huge learning curve. Double entry book keeping isn't that difficult but that's easy to say once you've been doing it a while I've been doing PTA since around 2018 and there's definitely lessons I've learned along the way along with plenty of mistakes. I think the main benefit for me is just the system gives you a complete picture of your finances. The commer…

FYI, Mint shutdown as a service in early 2024.

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/07/budgeting-app-mint-is-shutti...

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#49

Post by bspammer »

I go a step further than this, which is to make the beancount files 100% generated by a program - no manual edits allowed at all. I have a version-controlled directory with the raw data (csvs, pdfs, weird text formats) from a bunch of different sources (bank accounts, payslips, pension funds, mortgage statements, and stock market price data). The process is then just an ETL pipeline to an intermediate data structure. That data structure can be serialized to beancount format, hledger format, whatever. I've even had it output prometheus metrics so I can create nice dashboards in grafana.

I dump more raw data in every month, handle the 1-2 new edge cases in code, and voila: a complete, accurate, queryable, debuggable, visualizable, and fully reproducible history of my finances.

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#50

Post by nelup20 »

For anyone else wondering which PTA solution to try/choose, I found this summary: https://plaintextaccounting.org/FAQ#which-pta-app-should-i-c...

I think I'll finally give PTA and beancount a go this year. I'm tired of changing and re-learning tools due to enshittifcation, so I heavily prefer those that use open formats / plaintext. I use Obsidian for my notes, specifically because it's just Markdown files. Since I realized that I don't even really use most of Obsidian's features, I might just switch to a regular editor + a markdown viewer.

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