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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

#171

Post by rapidfl »

dfee wrote: post #164
rapidfl wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These days, I find it is doable 2-3 times a year. Its a lot of work at one shot but somehow able to catch up so as to review the main spending accounts. The zeroing is what attract me still. I get to see some patterns in my overall spending/categories. And it is side project where there is perceivable concrete progress, so still somewhat easier dopamine. Simplifying/automating the workflow is a pull. As I type this,…

Interesting! In a different comment, I took the other side: maybe it’s only worth tracking NW in hledger? Itemizing transactions is heavy duty bookkeeping effort, and I didn’t feel any directional value.

my thinking is that NW does not have to be tracked in a way that the double entries zero out. Every six months, I just open the 3-4 brokerages and banks and make an entry in a spreadsheet for cash/stock/bonds/crypto/others. Where the stocks are mostly ETFs and crypto is less than 5%.

And create a pivot table for totals and %s. And rebalance as needed. This may be too crude for some. But I am only starting to get organized, so this works, esp as you said for directional. Actually this is one of the reasons I have dropped hledger in general.

I just leave notes and comments in the spreadsheet as needed.

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#172

Post by shepherdjerred »

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…

Monarch has worked really well for me with syncing

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#173

Post by rifty »

dfee wrote: post #134

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 unders…

The question to ask when tracking to optimize reoccurring bills for home and grocery is if there is even any room you can give anyways.

You'd probably find the easy end actionable changes better by tracking the amount and which food spoiled before eating, or by testing your standard basket item costs at different stores you are willing to go to. But all of this isn't something you need to do continuously. Once you figure it out, you should be good for some period of time.

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#174

Post by mbork_pl »

elric wrote: post #103
dheera wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Are you me, by any chance? I had been doing exactly this for years. Finally, my income rose enough that I stopped to care - I just pay from my current account and move on. But what astonishes me is that hardly anyone seems to do that, especially people earning less than the current me. It seems such an obvious idea!

I think that lack of sound financial education is the real problem here. Of course, it's country-dependent, but I doubt it's done really well in a lot of places. I have a slightly conspiracy-ish theory explaining why good financial education is not a part of primary school curriculum...

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#175

Post by mbork_pl »

sxg wrote: post #56

This sounds super cool and useful to me, but how does this work with a partner who's non-technical? Managing personal finances is something that we do together and having a nice clean UI that makes sense to her is important. Is there a way to achieve that with beancount? Currently we're using YNAB, which is mostly great although sometimes unstable and limited in ways.

My wife is non-technical and doesn't know anything about bookkeeping. Every-ish day I ask her for receipts and enter them into our ledger-cli file. She mostly uses her debit card, so it's usually easy not to miss too much. (I use cash exclusively, so it's more of a conscious effort for me.) Every month I send her a monthly report via email.

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#176

Post by kaynyn »

loufe wrote: post #156

I set up tracking all my bank statements, pay slips, Costco (and other multi-category store) receipts, and other things in Fava (beancount's webui) over the last month. I spent way too much time developing a plugin to help categorizing transactions, making a full api and python scripts as well to let AI make edits for me (dry runs before clearing). I stumbled upon Maybe ( https://github.com/maybe-finance/maybe ) and…

I started writing code using LLM for this purpose and then stumbled upon ‘sure’. I did use ‘maybe’ couple of years ago and it had few issues and I never bothered.

Last couple of days, I tried and moved few of my accounts to ‘sure’, so far it is not bad. There are few UI/UX issues and the entire investments working in silo and not viable on your main page. But the good thing is, developers are actively working on fixing those issues and improving them.

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#177

Post by OJFord »

zaphirplane wrote: post #24
OJFord wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And only... what, Italians, can write books on the Romans?

That’s a bad analogy because the qualification is being born in a region not acquiring knowledge thru working. an equivalent would be only electrician can write a book on wiring.

That was exactly why I picked it as an extreme example to show the absurdity of this rule - there aren't any Legionnaires to write the books, so who's allowed to? Assuming we do want the books.

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#178

Post by fittingopposite »

dfee wrote: post #151
fittingopposite wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Also wondering about the ROI. What do you gain by this?

For transactions: you spot fraud, mischarges or subs to cancel. Really a watchdog service would be good here. High effort, low return. IMO. (And a bit of tracking around reimbursements) For savings: helps you keep an eye on where you’re at by forcing you to reconcile. It’s totally worth it for a low value of invested time. But, it’s not going to be low effort.

So sounds like the ROI is not really there?!

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#179

Post by liampulles »

I made a similar program for myself, except that the data it stores and works on is the raw CSV exports from my bank. The program interprets and projects the data.

If the program fails to interpret a transaction, it fails totally and says why. Then I fix the code until another transaction breaks. I keep doing this until it works - that's the regular process.

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#180

Post by tinodb »

bspammer wrote: post #49

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.…

How do you deal with one of transactions? How do you assign them to the right account?
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