Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How you can track your personal finances using Python

sgoel.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 60 posts

Re: How you can track your personal finances using Python

#41

Post by emrah »

names_are_hard wrote: post #39
emrah wrote: post #9

I'm thinking about a PF app concept where you enter your own transactions manually, but you don't have to keep track of everything down to the cent. At the end of every month, banks send out statements so importing all transactions aren't necessary to keep track of one's overall financial standing. Banks do make mistakes but extremely rarely that it's not worth wanting to import all transactions in the off chance tha…

This is the philosophy behind the FOSS app I developed for my own system. The way it works is that I track the big stuff and ignore the little stuff. Periodically (typically every month but it doesn't have to be) I enter the current balances of my bank accounts. I have a report that does how much money I spent per period that is unaccounted for, that's money that got spend on "miscellaneous". As long as that number i…

Awesome! Could you provide a link for it?

Re: How you can track your personal finances using Python

#42

Post by lotsofpulp »

Arainach wrote: post #31
Waterluvian wrote: post #16

There’s so many ways to do personal finances but I found most of them to either be too tedious or require doing stupid things like letting third parties log into your bank account. For me I simply had a spreadsheet with rows for each month and columns for each account: chequing, mortgage, RRSP, RESP, etc. I’d spend 10 mins a month logging in and typing out each balance. I’d chart the over-time trend and that’s all I…

I agree that this works at the income level of most of the HN audience. If you're living paycheck to paycheck, you may have more need to closely track exactly what your money is going to (of course, you'll also likely have the least spare time to spend on such tracking). At the income level of most tech workers/the HN audience, however, I agree with your system. My spreadsheet is similar to what you describe - saving…

>So long as its trending significantly positive, I don't care about the details.

I find that once I normalize against the price movements of my goals, the significantly positive trend becomes much less significant. Since I am relatively young with likely a couple decades or more work left in me, I like to benchmark against a low cost broad market equity index ETF.

Re: How you can track your personal finances using Python

#43

Post by zargon »

xupybd wrote: post #13

I used HLedger for years it was great. I thought I could do better with a paid solution. YNAB was awful and slow. So I switched to Lunch Money. It's amazing fast and intuitive. Only it's not a good fit for me. I'm trying to shoe horn my budgeting style into and it's not working. I use the envelope style. Every dollar is assigned a bucket when it comes in. All spending is done from a bucket and balances always persist…

I'm currently on a trial of Actual Budget (https://actualbudget.com/). It's very similar to the old desktop version of YNAB. It has desktop and mobile apps (web app in beta), and does syncing. I haven't used the mobile app yet, but the desktop app is fast and entering transactions is fast. Only costs $4/month.

Re: How you can track your personal finances using Python

#44

Post by xupybd »

zargon wrote: post #43
xupybd wrote: post #13

I used HLedger for years it was great. I thought I could do better with a paid solution. YNAB was awful and slow. So I switched to Lunch Money. It's amazing fast and intuitive. Only it's not a good fit for me. I'm trying to shoe horn my budgeting style into and it's not working. I use the envelope style. Every dollar is assigned a bucket when it comes in. All spending is done from a bucket and balances always persist…

I'm currently on a trial of Actual Budget ( https://actualbudget.com/ ). It's very similar to the old desktop version of YNAB. It has desktop and mobile apps (web app in beta), and does syncing. I haven't used the mobile app yet, but the desktop app is fast and entering transactions is fast. Only costs $4/month.

Thanks I'll have a look. I found something similar in the past https://www.budgetwithbuckets.com/en/index.html

Re: How you can track your personal finances using Python

#45

Post by zargon »

xupybd wrote: post #44
zargon wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm currently on a trial of Actual Budget ( https://actualbudget.com/ ). It's very similar to the old desktop version of YNAB. It has desktop and mobile apps (web app in beta), and does syncing. I haven't used the mobile app yet, but the desktop app is fast and entering transactions is fast. Only costs $4/month.

Thanks I'll have a look. I found something similar in the past https://www.budgetwithbuckets.com/en/index.html

I thought I had seen every envelope budget software. Haha! Why aren't you using this one?

Re: How you can track your personal finances using Python

#46

Post by webmobdev »

Waterluvian wrote: post #16

There’s so many ways to do personal finances but I found most of them to either be too tedious or require doing stupid things like letting third parties log into your bank account. For me I simply had a spreadsheet with rows for each month and columns for each account: chequing, mortgage, RRSP, RESP, etc. I’d spend 10 mins a month logging in and typing out each balance. I’d chart the over-time trend and that’s all I…

Try GNU Cash - https://gnucash.org/

Re: How you can track your personal finances using Python

#47

Post by xupybd »

zargon wrote: post #45
xupybd wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks I'll have a look. I found something similar in the past https://www.budgetwithbuckets.com/en/index.html

I thought I had seen every envelope budget software. Haha! Why aren't you using this one?

I haven't tried it yet. I'm still trying to make Lunch Money work. They just implemented roll over budgeting. I want to see if I can get that going. TBH the main problem is a lack of time dedicated to figuring it all out.

Re: How you can track your personal finances using Python

#49

Post by siddhant »

aquark wrote: post #6
remram wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You didn't have to write any Python to import transactions from your bank?

I have some custom code to convert CSV files downloaded from my bank to beancounts text format, but it is all dotNet code since that is what I know the text format is easy to work with

That's actually a good point.

You only need to write Python code if you're using the Beancount importers framework and intend to use bean-identify and/or bean-extract.

Re: How you can track your personal finances using Python

#50

Post by siddhant »

sockfish wrote: post #34

I struggled with the accounting concepts until I stumbled on this blogpost from Martin Kleppmann: https://martin.kleppmann.com/2011/03/07/accounting-for-compu... . After that I finally 'got' the accounting graph, and I don't care too much about the medium or the software anymore (its a google sheet in my case).

Martin's blog post is awesome! It helped clear up a bunch of stuff for me too.

And on a somewhat unrelated note: his book on building data-intensive applications is another goldmine (on a different topic).

Post reply on HN