Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash • Hacker News Board

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#161

Post by nacs » Wed, May 20, 2020, 1:24 AM UTC

6510 wrote: post #148

anitil wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know you're not asking directly for advice, but if you'd be interested, I find the following is the easiest way of keeping a budget. 0. Forget about tracking things down to the dollar, or even the tens of dollars. That level of precision is unnecessary. If a coffee here or there is going to break your budget, it's already broken and you need to go in to panic mode. 1. Have a spreadsheet with vague monthly costs lik…

Nice! I just stop spending money unless I absolutely have to. A cup of coffee and a bit of candy at the gas station every other day (2+4 euro) * (365/2) * 10 years. Thats ELEVEN THOUSAND euro I could probably be doing something more interesting with. At 7 euro/kg and 30 gr/liter 11k is 52380 liters of coffee or 314285 cups or 86 cups/day for 10 years. 2/3 was candy (we are not buying that) so we only have 28 cups lef…

Agreed, and that whole "oh just ignore purchases less than $10" is what causes people to go into debt without realizing it.

Buying $8 daily coffees, lottery tickets, in-app purchases for crates of Candy Crush tokens, and subscribing to all kinds of useless subscription-delivery services (razors, shirts, Japanese candy, etc) adds adds up even if you're on Silicon Valley salaries.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#162

Post by anitil » Wed, May 20, 2020, 1:30 AM UTC

nacs wrote: post #161

6510 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice! I just stop spending money unless I absolutely have to. A cup of coffee and a bit of candy at the gas station every other day (2+4 euro) * (365/2) * 10 years. Thats ELEVEN THOUSAND euro I could probably be doing something more interesting with. At 7 euro/kg and 30 gr/liter 11k is 52380 liters of coffee or 314285 cups or 86 cups/day for 10 years. 2/3 was candy (we are not buying that) so we only have 28 cups lef…

Agreed, and that whole "oh just ignore purchases less than $10" is what causes people to go into debt without realizing it. Buying $8 daily coffees, lottery tickets, in-app purchases for crates of Candy Crush tokens, and subscribing to all kinds of useless subscription-delivery services (razors, shirts, Japanese candy, etc) adds adds up even if you're on Silicon Valley salaries.

I think I phrased my comment poorly. I agree that a daily coffee is probably worth considering at ~$3x5x50 = $750 a year. (actually in my case I have multiple coffees throughout the day so if I were to purchase them it'd be more like $1500 or more). What I mean is the _occasional_ coffee is not worth bothering about.

I think any recurring payment is worth recording, but where you set the level is pretty personal

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#163

Post by anitil » Wed, May 20, 2020, 1:35 AM UTC

6510 wrote: post #148

anitil wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know you're not asking directly for advice, but if you'd be interested, I find the following is the easiest way of keeping a budget. 0. Forget about tracking things down to the dollar, or even the tens of dollars. That level of precision is unnecessary. If a coffee here or there is going to break your budget, it's already broken and you need to go in to panic mode. 1. Have a spreadsheet with vague monthly costs lik…

Nice! I just stop spending money unless I absolutely have to. A cup of coffee and a bit of candy at the gas station every other day (2+4 euro) * (365/2) * 10 years. Thats ELEVEN THOUSAND euro I could probably be doing something more interesting with. At 7 euro/kg and 30 gr/liter 11k is 52380 liters of coffee or 314285 cups or 86 cups/day for 10 years. 2/3 was candy (we are not buying that) so we only have 28 cups lef…

While I agree that recurring costs should be accounted for, I'm trying to get a bit of balance in my approach.

To put it in perspective, it's not out of the realm of possibility that I could switch jobs and make $11k extra this year. It's also not out of the realm of possibility that I have an injury that puts me out of work for the next 2 years. (Or, hypothetically, a global pandemic that reduces or increases my hours)

I deal with that level of uncertainty by only tracking the broad strokes.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#164

Post by jonahbenton » Wed, May 20, 2020, 1:48 AM UTC

haberman wrote: post #118

cobby wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> beancount wants everything to live in One Giant Journal file Actually, beancount supports include directive. See includes section [1] of the language syntax document [1]: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wAMVrKIA2qtRGmoVDSUBJGmY...

Thanks for the reference. But a single transaction can span multiple financial institutions. Say you pay off a credit card. One half of the transaction comes from the credit card statement, the other half comes from your bank. The two halves sum to zero. My understanding is that the whole transaction has to live in one file with Beancount. This doesn't seem amenable to having each bank statement generate a single Bea…

Conceptually this is one transaction; from a book keeping (and beancount) perspective it is, or can be, two.

Often (in the US) the dates are different- debit from the bank on day X, post to credit card on day X + 1 or X + 2. For my stuff I want the dates in beancount to reflect the dates on the respective statements, so that the balances, which are date-specific, match.

So I capture these as two transactions. I do it as- debit the bank, credit the "ether", then debit the "ether" credit the credit card.

Beancount just wants the postings within a literal transaction to sum to zero. If this conceptual transaction is split into two literal transactions, with some fictional bridge account in between, they can live in different beancount files.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#165

Post by dopeboy » Wed, May 20, 2020, 1:54 AM UTC

cosmie wrote: post #82

Firefly[1][2] is also a really useful personal finance app. It's more akin to a self-hosted version of Mint. Combined with the Plaid connector[3], I find it the easiest to use for my workflow. And despite the instructions, you don't need a paid dev account. The free Plaid account will let you access up to 100 live financial institutions. [1] https://github.com/firefly-iii/firefly-iii [2] Live demo: https://demo.firef…

Thanks for sharing this - this is exactly what I've been looking for.

How are their tagging/categorization abilities?

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#166

Post by monksy » Wed, May 20, 2020, 1:55 AM UTC

6510 wrote: post #148

anitil wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know you're not asking directly for advice, but if you'd be interested, I find the following is the easiest way of keeping a budget. 0. Forget about tracking things down to the dollar, or even the tens of dollars. That level of precision is unnecessary. If a coffee here or there is going to break your budget, it's already broken and you need to go in to panic mode. 1. Have a spreadsheet with vague monthly costs lik…

Nice! I just stop spending money unless I absolutely have to. A cup of coffee and a bit of candy at the gas station every other day (2+4 euro) * (365/2) * 10 years. Thats ELEVEN THOUSAND euro I could probably be doing something more interesting with. At 7 euro/kg and 30 gr/liter 11k is 52380 liters of coffee or 314285 cups or 86 cups/day for 10 years. 2/3 was candy (we are not buying that) so we only have 28 cups lef…

I agree with the "I will teach you to be rich" (it's a book) approach a bit more than "i can't buy a $5e coffee daily".

Their approach is more like a performance engineer. You look at the biggest costs first and reduce it down. I.e. Ask for a raise, refinance your place, find a cheaper place to rent, etc.

When you get down to the coffee you would be faced with: is it cheaper to make good quality coffee, or am I paying for the experience?

Personally I tend to view these re-occurring costs and I try to look at a way I can amortize them over a longer period of time. It's easier to justify the cost of a 200+$ espresso maker if I'm really that big of a fan and already have a defined habbit.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#167

Post by safog » Wed, May 20, 2020, 2:00 AM UTC

6510 wrote: post #141

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #125

Aaaaaaaaarrrrrrrgggggggghhhhh! I just want a bank account and to have that bank record my spending and let me download it, securely, and automatically. I mean the European Union has taken years to force, yes force banks to do this, and it is basically still broken. I don't want to spend this much effort on something so obviously solvable. It just offends me. Yes that is the right word. And, finally, none of this matt…

Imagine simple government software that acts as a middle man and sends out automatic fines if the api is not up to spec. I would like to see a complete log of every purchase made like my bank keeps only with much more detail, each bill broken down to well described products with pictures, serial numbers and manuals. As that involves sensitive data we would have to think of some way to wrap it. I also want tax office…

> Then do salaries and taxes by the second and split off tax payments right where the transaction happens.

ACH literally takes O(days) to move a few bytes of data from one bank account to another and the system simply stops working evenings and weekends, so this is a bit much :)

If / when BTC and LN become ubiquitous, you can probably achieve this without much effort.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#168

Post by jnfr » Wed, May 20, 2020, 2:13 AM UTC

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #125

Aaaaaaaaarrrrrrrgggggggghhhhh! I just want a bank account and to have that bank record my spending and let me download it, securely, and automatically. I mean the European Union has taken years to force, yes force banks to do this, and it is basically still broken. I don't want to spend this much effort on something so obviously solvable. It just offends me. Yes that is the right word. And, finally, none of this matt…

What personal finance apps have you tried with budgeting? There are a few on the market, the most popular being YNAB and Mint. My personal opinion is that Mint tries to do too much while YNAB forces you into a rigid philosophy.

I made Lunch Money (https://lunchmoney.app) as a potential happy medium between the two. If you end up trying it out, feel free to let me know what you think!

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#169

Post by 6510 » Wed, May 20, 2020, 2:19 AM UTC

nacs wrote: post #161

6510 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice! I just stop spending money unless I absolutely have to. A cup of coffee and a bit of candy at the gas station every other day (2+4 euro) * (365/2) * 10 years. Thats ELEVEN THOUSAND euro I could probably be doing something more interesting with. At 7 euro/kg and 30 gr/liter 11k is 52380 liters of coffee or 314285 cups or 86 cups/day for 10 years. 2/3 was candy (we are not buying that) so we only have 28 cups lef…

Agreed, and that whole "oh just ignore purchases less than $10" is what causes people to go into debt without realizing it. Buying $8 daily coffees, lottery tickets, in-app purchases for crates of Candy Crush tokens, and subscribing to all kinds of useless subscription-delivery services (razors, shirts, Japanese candy, etc) adds adds up even if you're on Silicon Valley salaries.

You are pretty much buying shots of endorphins. You get those anyway. You can get more of it for a short while but then sensitivity is dialed down and you have to buy candy crush crates forever. I really enjoy turning down the offers.

Re: Simple Personal Finance Tracking with GnuCash

#170

Post by 6510 » Wed, May 20, 2020, 2:25 AM UTC

safog wrote: post #167

6510 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine simple government software that acts as a middle man and sends out automatic fines if the api is not up to spec. I would like to see a complete log of every purchase made like my bank keeps only with much more detail, each bill broken down to well described products with pictures, serial numbers and manuals. As that involves sensitive data we would have to think of some way to wrap it. I also want tax office…

> Then do salaries and taxes by the second and split off tax payments right where the transaction happens. ACH literally takes O(days) to move a few bytes of data from one bank account to another and the system simply stops working evenings and weekends, so this is a bit much :) If / when BTC and LN become ubiquitous, you can probably achieve this without much effort.

Slow banks would still be a thing, they just cant (be allowed to) process these transactions.

Also, the bytes don't really have to flow from A to B. The payload is much to predicable. For 8 hours money flows into the account and flows out of the other account at a fixed rate. A daily or weekly validation would be enough. (with automatic fines for not updating the work schedule)