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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

#111

Post by icameron »

dheera wrote: post #78
elric wrote: post #67

My 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)…

Is there any other way to deal with comcrap? I’ve been doing the annual ritual of calling them to say the bill went up by 50% give me the best rate again. Every year it’s always a short term promo. This year took a lot longer to get through to a human

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#112

Post by why-o-why »

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…

Right there with you. I've tried to leave quicken multiple times. Especially when they moved to annual subscriptions. I haven't tried to leave since 2019-ish, and all the alternatives were just clunky as hell, as if the devs completely ignored UI/UX. Also, I'm on the latest quicken for mac and it has an export feature, but I have never used it. Maybe when they start charging per transaction I'll finally leave. I'm lucky enough to be able to afford it annually, but it still stinks that there's no open source alt, even to do just the basics conveniently.

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#113

Post by why-o-why »

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…

"Quicken is a single-entry accounting system, which means that amounts can appear out of or disappear into thin air. In a double-entry accounting system you can't put amounts in an account without taking it out of another account."

This summed it up nicely, from https://github.com/mortisj/quicken2beancount

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#114

Post by dmoy »

elric wrote: post #67

My 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 do household finances in a spreadsheet. I do track every single transaction just to make sure there's no CC fraud (catch one stolen card every 3-ish years on average).

I do other people's finances with hledger. That is, if I'm responsible for someone else's money (trustee, etc), I add another layer of complexity for double entry, reconciliation, etc.

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#115

Post by loeg »

I just use Fidelity's portfolio-and-spending tracker these days. It's fine; not great. But it can automatically import from a variety of other financial institutions including Vanguard and my bank, so it's adequate for my needs. I spend a little time occasionally cleaning up the automated spending categorization.

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#116

Post by phyzix5761 »

draven wrote: post #31

I started to use PTA several times already, and I always have an issue with the granularity of transactions. For example when I go to the local supermarket, do I track food and hygiene products separately ? Some supermarkets give the subtotal for different categories, some don´t. It could be useful to see where the money goes. I'm about to start out again and I chose not to track different categories individually, kn…

I charge different category items on different receipts which means doing several transactions at the store. Thankfully, its only 1 time per week. I've gotten pretty quick at it at the self checkout.

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#117

Post by Obscurity4340 »

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.

If you're on iPhone highly recommend MoneyStats. Its pretty and easier to setup/get everyone onboard

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#118

Post by bzmrgonz »

This is a very detailed document. Thank you for that. I am currently poking my head into beancount, hledger, and the new kid on the block, DIGITS(which aims to take on quickbooks head-on. I love the PTA philosophy, but I worry about catering to the non-tech data entry personnel(bookkeeping), is there a gui for these folks to enter the day to day? Essentially I would love to have the back-end be PTA and GIT for full control, and build/use data-entry front-end, and reporting/graphing/dashboards for executives and owners. Perhaps we can even do an OCR workflow ontop of PAPERLESS-NG to stream the bookkeeping into the back-end.

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#119

Post by vikingerik »

antaviana wrote: post #106

Am 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.

I did too with Money Sunset for quite a while, but mostly gave up in the last couple years. Several of the online accounts stopped supporting exporting to QIF/OFX, and it's not worth the effort to type in everything manually or figure out another export/conversion process.

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#120

Post by [deleted] »

elric wrote: post #67

My 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…

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