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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

#121

Post by RatchetWerks »

Call me simple. I manually export CSV files from the finance companies. (Should automate this). Vibe coded a CSV parser that will auto categorize, sort all expenses/income. Expenses go in one sheet. Income goes in another. Pivot table renders the data.

I can track money spent and earned down to the penny.

Takes less than 20 mins a month to update/manage it. I actually enjoy having sit-down time to "do finances". Keeps me leveled, and forces me to think about how much money I spent and the value I gained from the expenses.

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#123

Post by astura »

distances wrote: post #94
stvltvs wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes, very true. It might be useful to start with overtracking to see where the money actually goes. I didn't track anything until about 5 years ago as my mental model was "track all purchases", and I wasn't willing to do that. Someone had to point out that higher level tracking can be quite useful too, and this is what I found to work well for me. That's why I bring this up in related topics: it's not an all-or-nothi…

I don't track purchases at all, I track savings. I find that much more sustainable. I have a savings rate goal (50%), and automatic withdrawals to make that goal. If I can't pay my bills without dipping into the savings then I'll have to reevaluate my spending only then. As long as my savings rate is what it needs to be I don't worry about spending money.

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#124

Post by siddhant »

mtlynch wrote: post #38

+1 to OP's book, which is the best beginner guide I've found for understanding Beancount / plaintext accounting. I was also confused about double-entry accounting for most of my life until I read the article, "Accounting for Computer Scientists"[0] by Martin Kleppman (author of Designing Data-Intensive Applications ). It explains double entry accounting in a surprisingly accessible way by putting it in terms of graph…

Thanks a lot for the shout out, Michael!

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#125

Post by 360MustangScope »

bronco21016 wrote: post #57

I was really into this idea a few years ago. Even started logging. However, I just cannot bring myself to constantly pull the transactions down manually from multiple banks. Many suggest automating. How is this working in practice? Are there providers like Plaid you can use? Build web scrapers? Build PDF statement parsers? I ended up just paying YNAB the $130/year or whatever they’re at now. High wife approval factor…

From this post, I just got mine setup this morning. I already enjoy going through my 18 accounts every 2 weeks on pay day (yes, every credit card is the highest for the category of spend). For me, it seems like it would be just one extra step for me to get the data every 2 weeks.

But for most, I understand that they aren’t enjoying what I am doing every couple of weeks. I was using YNAB before but due to how many cards I had something got messed up in the importer all the time. Sometimes my transactions would duplicate or even get triplicated and then I would decline one of them only for it to pop up again a few days later. This lead to a very messed up and not accurate tracking. For me I was just fighting this thing every single day.

This is probably user error but after wiping it 3 times and starting over and over I just gave up and went back to mentally keeping track which worked but I needed something better.

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#126

Post by catgirlinspace »

ryandrake wrote: post #100
bregma wrote: post #76

I 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…

I can't seem to ween myself off of reliance on Quicken. I really want to, and I hate that I am tied to Intuit software. I hate that every transaction I've made since 2000 is stored in a proprietary binary blob. But I can't find an alternative that has cracked the killer feature: Syncing with each of my online accounts. I like to track every expense and every transfer down to the penny, and then update from the bank's…

Quicken isn’t Intuit (as far as I know at least). You’re probably thinking of QuickBooks?

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#127

Post by stackghost »

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 the barrier to entry is high because you first need to learn double entry bookkeeping (if you haven't already)

This. Accounting seems easy if you already know accounting. Learning accounting is difficult because the literature is dense, contradictory, and it's not helped by the fact that most accountants don't even seem to understand it at a fundamental level, they've merely memorized false-but-workable ideas like "debits increase assets because debit means left", or the silly idea about viewing it from the perspective of a bank.

Even accounting profs are surprisingly bad at at this, at least in my experience.

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#128

Post by b_t_s »

fastasucan wrote: post #47

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…

same. I've settled on Empower + google sheets. Empower mostly as a free shortcut to pulling a dozen account balances in seconds. Sheets for keeping quarterly snapshots(in case empower goes away like mint did) and for turning those snapshots into a graph. Took a little setup, but then it's like 15 minutes once a quarter when I get the calendar reminder. Wish I had data going further back in time, but I'm not sure what I'd do with more detail/a full budget. The only things I've ever really cared about are approximate net worth/investment returns as a sanity check on retirement assumptions.

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#129

Post by entangledqubit »

catgirlinspace wrote: post #126
ryandrake wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't seem to ween myself off of reliance on Quicken. I really want to, and I hate that I am tied to Intuit software. I hate that every transaction I've made since 2000 is stored in a proprietary binary blob. But I can't find an alternative that has cracked the killer feature: Syncing with each of my online accounts. I like to track every expense and every transfer down to the penny, and then update from the bank's…

Quicken isn’t Intuit (as far as I know at least). You’re probably thinking of QuickBooks?

Thanks for mentioning this. I didn't realize Intuit sold it off to private equity in 2016.

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#130

Post by nightski »

binarin wrote: post #54

I'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…

Why is the parent teacher association involved in personal finances?
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