10 years of personal finances in plain text files

I've been using MoneyMoney for over 12 years now (started Nov. 2013) on Mac and have never regretted it. I am automatically importing from all my bank accounts, including all statements and even track my portfolio with it. It can automatically categorize every transaction (basically string matching with OR clauses) and doing this consistently for years gave me pretty good insights on my spending behavior over time. It's a pity that they don't have a iOS app though.

I never found efficiency. For five months I imported and categorized my transactions - from payroll through food. I definitely had reports being generated (using hledger) but the amount of time I invested and the ROI wasn’t there.

Had it been 5m a week, maybe I could’ve done it. But it was 3h/wk - finding transactions, transcoding them with scripts I was maintaining, and breaking down the costs with my wife to understand if Costco purchases were “groceries” or “home”.

I nailed the micro and failed the macro. With two kids, and no desire to invest 150h a year into this, there’s no way I can get this to work.

I imagine AI would be great at:

1. Maintaining scripts to extract and normalize various financial artifacts (PDFs, CSVs, XLSXs) into text files

2. Helping draw insights

But manual effort of:

1. Collecting from various banks, paystubs and investment accounts

2. Ensuring flows net to zero and make sense

Is Too Much Work.

> IME Monarch seems like the current best option in this space...

Monarch is just horribly overpriced. I'm not opposed to paying for a SaaS or anything, but Monarch is much too expensive for what it is. Empower (used to be called Personal Capital) is free and what I use instead of Mint. In fairness, the only thing that I really ever used Mint for was to see my net worth and account balances.

Accounts don't have to be physically "real" with your Bank. That's one of the insights of the "envelope system" that isn't always obvious.

One of the benefits to specifically using a double-entry system (including most of the PTA space) is that it makes it easier to build your "envelopes" as hierarchical sub-accounts. Instead of having just Assets:Checking you could have Assets:Checking:Grocery and Assets:Checking:General and Assets:Checking:Entertainment and so forth. The Assets:Checking sum of all of Assets:Checking:* will still reflect your total checking balance for situations when you need to know that information, but the sub-accounts in your double-entry system become your "envelopes" to check on your budget spending and to transfer between.

Automating your budgets can be just a matter of when you get your Income:Salary transaction you split it appropriately between the various Assets:Checking:* sub-accounts you want. You could automate other transfers between them as necessary as well.

You can also automate things like verifying your Expenses:Grocery account always takes funds from Assets:Checking:Grocery rather than any other "envelope" account when paid for by your debit card. (With Credit Cards potentially needing a different level of automation, and maybe a bunch more Liabilities:* sub-accounts.)

Your bank won't have any idea of those sub-accounts and nothing will physically prevent you from overspending those sub-accounts, of course, but also you can automate warnings for that and you would have visibility of that in your sub-accounts "going negative" when you spend too much from the same envelope.

I’m fairly certain it’s Percutaneous Transluminal Angioplasty