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Ask HN: How do you keep track of your personal expenses?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of your personal expenses?

#2
I whole-heartidly recommend YNAB (You Need Another Budget). http://www.youneedabudget.com

You have to enter all your income/expenses in manual, but that's part of it's value - it really makes you accountable for what you spend.

Since tracking all expenses for maybe 5 months, I have probably saved thousands of dollars simply by making cheaper choices and being mindful of excess.

Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of your personal expenses?

#3
I use mint.com, which is free and pretty amazing. It makes automatically tracks all of your credit card and bank account activity, creates useful and informative graphs, lets you set up budgets and notifications, and all around is fun to use. highly recommend.

Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of your personal expenses?

#6

I whole-heartidly recommend YNAB (You Need Another Budget). http://www.youneedabudget.com You have to enter all your income/expenses in manual, but that's part of it's value - it really makes you accountable for what you spend. Since tracking all expenses for maybe 5 months, I have probably saved thousands of dollars simply by making cheaper choices and being mindful of excess.

whole-heartildy agreed. very different way of thinking compared to the post-mortem options like Mint. See http://www.youneedabudget.com/method

bonus: here's Jesse Mecham's MicroConf 2014 talk http://www.microconf.com/videos-2014.html

Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of your personal expenses?

#8
post #7

Excel. Learn and practice double-entry accounting including how to manage many accounts: payable accounts, receivable accounts. For a personal solution, it can't be beat (IMHO).

Ledger [0] (or any of its clones; hledger, beancount, etc.) beat Excel for this, as you don't have to implement the logic for double-entry accounting (or accounting for different commodities/currencies) yourself.

[0] http://www.ledger-cli.org/

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