In 2025 I started managing my small business finances using hledger (started with beancount, but got confused with missing packages in the new version). I use Claude Code to help me enter transactions eg from pdf receipts and to ensure the books are balanced. It's quite a pleasant experience I must say, as I find accounting tedious / not my cup of tea
10 years of personal finances in plain text files
101–110 of 199 posts
Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do the same, except I track even a bit less. I track monthly all account balances, salary/income, paid taxes, transfers to investment accounts, rent/mortgage, and health insurance. This is enough to map investment performance, financial position, and necessary living costs. Mostly everything else is "a life lived" expense and I don't see a need to do any finer tracking there.
It's highly dependent on your personal situation. If you have plenty of income, tracking grocery expenses might be a waste of time, like tracking how much air you breathe. If your income is barely meeting your expenses (or worse), the grocery budget is one of the few places you can make meaningful decisions that will lower your costs. And there's a tricky middle ground where it feels like you have enough income, but…
I used to track every single payment, thinking I was doing excellent budgeting. But in reality it was mostly bikeshedding. The current approach works well for me, but I can totally see a use for tracking more in some cases. If I were a smoker or a heavy drinker I'd probably track those, for instance.
Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files
#103My less obsessive personal finance workflow: I have a spreadsheet. I update it by hand once a month, and have been doing so for ~20 years. Takes about 5 minutes. I only track the categories I care about. Those have varied a bit over time, but have always included staples like power, heating, water, ISP, rent/mortgage, insurance, savings, etc. I don't track things like groceries or restaurants or anything else that I…
I'm also less obsessive than some people but I don't want to use anything proprietary or have to pay for a product to track my finances ("Hey you spend a lot, we can help, how about you spend more on us?" is just ridiculous). I do everything with CSV exports of my bank accounts and credit cards. I drop the exports once a month into a directory and Python scripts (my newer versions of which are mostly written by LLMs)…
> I also have one credit card for strictly recurring expenses
I do the same. I have a bank account dedicated to all those recurring expenses I track. Every year I make a budget for those categories, work out the monthly average, and set up a transfer for that amount into that account. Some prices fluctuate quite a bit (like power) while my mortgage has a fixed rate, so I apply a healthy margin to make sure there are no nasty surprises.
Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files
#104Anyone here using LLMs to do personal accounting?
I'd hope not. The math is simple and the concepts are simple. Even if you could trust the LLM to give the right advice or calculations, which you can't, there's the opportunity cost of developing those skills yourself. Would you rather have those primary and fundamental skills for the rest of your life or the more secondary skills that are proprietary to the moment and contemporary tools and models? There's an important difference between self sufficience and dependence.
Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
FYI, Mint shutdown as a service in early 2024. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/07/budgeting-app-mint-is-shutti...
Mint's value to me was destroyed long before 2024; its originally-reliable backend was swapped out for a third-party one (plaid?) and half my accounts couldn't sync -- making it useless. YMMV, but IME Monarch seems like the current best option in this space...
I work at Plaid, so this got me curious about who their provider was -- per Wikipedia, Mint used Intuit's internal account aggregation tools from ~2010-2024. It's possible that Mint swapped out to some other third party provider and Wikipedia doesn't know about it, but based on both internal and external records, I'm pretty sure it wasn't Plaid. (Intuit's Credit Karma, which was marketed to Mint customers as a replacement after Mint shut down, does use Plaid.)
Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files
#106Am I the only one using Microsoft Money Sunset Edition? Granted I cannot connect to banks and get live quotes, but I think it is well done and has a lot of features.
Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files
#107I've tried to track personal finances several times, but it only started to work when I've discovered the idea (from https://github.com/adept/full-fledged-hledger ) that you need to treat the whole PTA story more like a project compilation: - Everything is managed by build system that is able to track dependencies - Inputs from financial institutions are kept in the repo as is - Those inputs are converted by your scr…
The mortgage payments always confused me and that link has a good explanation of how it works. Have you used that code base in your own system or just the principles? I don’t know Haskell so not sure how much I can/need to modify.
Do you want to share what's confusing about mortgage payments?
You have a balance that accrues a monthly interest. Separately, you're told that you're owed a monthly payment. If monthly payment > interest, then the difference is subtracted from the balance. No need for haskell.
Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files
#108I'll see your decade old text file and raise you one more: my current quicken file goes back to 1992! Lemme tell you about gas and grocery prices back then... (hint $1.09/gallon in Oneida, NY and $15/bag at Price Chopper)
Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files
#109I started decades ago using Quicken. Then had to re-enter all my data when a new version came out and support for the old version was EOLed. So I switched to GNU Cash and re-entered everything again. Then there were migration issues with GNU Cash. Finally I discovered PTA. I chose hledger (because of possible performance issues with beancount). I learned double-entry bookkeeping (it's pretty simple, honestly). I writ…
What do you mean re-enter? I've been using every new version of Quicken since 1992 and never had to re-enter all my data, and I switched from PC to MAC around 2005.
Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files
#110Anyone here using LLMs to do personal accounting?
I'd hope not. The math is simple and the concepts are simple. Even if you could trust the LLM to give the right advice or calculations, which you can't, there's the opportunity cost of developing those skills yourself. Would you rather have those primary and fundamental skills for the rest of your life or the more secondary skills that are proprietary to the moment and contemporary tools and models? There's an import…
I'm thinking more of the work to enter all the data, read receipts, check and classify bank transactions, etc.