One Number I Trust: Plain-Text Accounting for a Multi-Currency Household • Hacker News Board

Re: One Number I Trust: Plain-Text Accounting for a Multi-Currency Household

#81

Post by kassner » Sat, Jan 03, 2026, 10:17 PM UTC

callumprentice wrote: post #60

I agree with an earlier post that asserted "net worth = assets - liabilities" but I'd like to do better at understanding what that really means. Some are easy like the size of your bank balance. Others are much harder. For example, one asset we have is our home and there are many websites out there that tell you how much it's worth but they each vary an awful lot and change dramatically - so much so sometimes that an…

> asset we have is our home and there are many websites out there that tell you how much it's worth but they each vary an awful lot and change dramatically - so much so sometimes that any savings you've made in the same period are eclipsed

I honestly completely ignore my purchased home value. It is not a regular asset because you have to make use of it, you can’t really liquidate it without a substantial change in your life (renting, marrying, going homeless, etc). If you trade it, you’d have to use that money to get some other housing. My strategy in my personal finances is to threat the house as if I’m renting. The money is gone from the balance, the equity isn’t tracked anywhere.

Re: One Number I Trust: Plain-Text Accounting for a Multi-Currency Household

#82

Post by zaphirplane » Sat, Jan 03, 2026, 11:03 PM UTC

huhkerrf wrote: post #3

I get that people on here don't like subscriptions, and I understand why, but I've been using You Need a Budget for well over a decade, and it is probably the last subscription I'd ever give up. The automatic import of expenses is so valuable for my family and keeping track of how much we've spent and how much we have left for the month. We used the fixed-cost version for years beyond when it was officially supported…

What does Ynab do that I would get for free with gnu cash? Just downloading bank statements which I’m not ok with and against my banks t&c.

Other wise all non envelope budget systems are horrible for me because I want the budget to be self adjusting so if I spend more on household items 1 month it needs to ensure I have less to spend over the next set of periods till I’ve gone back into positive . Rollover basically

Re: One Number I Trust: Plain-Text Accounting for a Multi-Currency Household

#83

Post by rmunn » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 3:09 AM UTC

BoiledCabbage wrote: post #70

rmunn wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not an accountant, so if I get it wrong someone please correct me. But index fund shares are an asset: something you own. So is your car, your house (if you own it), and your computer. When you buy an asset, you paid a certain price for it. When you sell it, you pay a different price. Until you sell it, though, you don't actually have the money, so it hardly matters what its value is until you sell it . If you buy $1…

> (This is one of the reasons why only the economically illiterate would propose a tax on "unrealized capital gains": that means taxing people for income they have not actually received, but merely could theoretically receive. Which is both immoral and stupid.) But your statement misses the important point of situations where people use the unrealized gains as collateral for a loan which they then use (for example to…

If it's a loan, it must be repaid. At that point, the debtor is going to either sell some stocks, thereby actually acquiring real income (and paying capital gains taxes), or use some other source of cash and not touching the stocks. In the former case, he will pay tax on that income at the time when he actually sells the stocks. In the latter case, he paid taxes on that cash at the time when he received it as income, so it's already been taxed and shouldn't be taxed twice. (Which is why inheritance taxes are immoral — they're double-taxation — but that's a totally separate subject).

As for retirement accounts, same principle applies. Collateral is collateral, it's a contingency. It might or might not ever be touched. If it's touched, then there will be real income involved. If it isn't touched, then there was no income.

But as for the idea of paying taxes on things used as collateral for a loan, that only makes sense if you consider money received as a loan as income. And if you do, you're going to get yourself in serious trouble. LOANS ARE NOT INCOME. They have to be repaid, and they actually cost you money in the long term because you also have to pay interest. If you treat loans as if they were income, you'll quickly find yourself neck-deep in credit card debt and in serious financial trouble. On the other side of the equation, if the IRS were to treat loans as if they were income and tax them (or the collateral used to secure the loan), they would do immense damage to the economy.

Re: One Number I Trust: Plain-Text Accounting for a Multi-Currency Household

#84

Post by twodave » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 3:52 AM UTC

I didn’t think negative amounts were a real thing in double-entry accounting? Instead some things are debits and others are credits, and whether each of those reduces or increases an account balance depends on the type of account it’s against. Like, you could pay an expense out of a debt account, which would increase the debt, or out of a cash account, which would decrease the cash. Debits and credits should still be equal, though.

Re: One Number I Trust: Plain-Text Accounting for a Multi-Currency Household

#85

Post by BeetleB » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 8:08 AM UTC

StopDisinfo910 wrote: post #76

BeetleB wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And then you get married and have kids and wonder why you have trouble paying the bills despite having a household income in the top 5%. Then you discover that you really do need to know how much you are spending on sandwiches. I went through this a bunch of times. Always hoping for an obvious smoking gun expense I could just cut. It always was many little things adding up.

If your income is in the top 5% and you struggle paying bills, it's nearly always an issue with to much of your money stuck in mandatory expense: you are over mortgaged, or have to many car loans, or pay too much for the kids schools. Budgeting can make that manageable by significantly lowering your living standard but small expenses are rarely the root cause.

It's not that your wrong (you are), but that budgeting will give you a fuller picture and help you align your spending with your values.

Paying too much for school? If cutting on those sandwiches means you can suddenly afford the school, would you choose to cut the school just because it's a clear, known large expense?

Earlier in my career I always wondered why people earning a lot more than me would not get lunch from outside or the cafeteria but would spend a lot of effort cooking and prepping the food for their work. Now I fully understand where they're coming from.

The little things do add up.

The point of my comment was that I too believed as you did. Always easy to believe things until you track your spending and see the actual numbers.

It's also how I know getting an 8 year old car without too many miles is the way to go.

Re: One Number I Trust: Plain-Text Accounting for a Multi-Currency Household

#86

Post by StopDisinfo910 » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 8:08 AM UTC

jaapz wrote: post #78

StopDisinfo910 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your income is in the top 5% and you struggle paying bills, it's nearly always an issue with to much of your money stuck in mandatory expense: you are over mortgaged, or have to many car loans, or pay too much for the kids schools. Budgeting can make that manageable by significantly lowering your living standard but small expenses are rarely the root cause.

I think you underestimate the amounts some people spend on things like clothing, coffee, going out to eat and other stuff you wouldn't even think about

Top 5% earner, we are talking at least 350000$ a year. That's a lot of coffee.

Re: One Number I Trust: Plain-Text Accounting for a Multi-Currency Household

#87

Post by fragmede » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 9:20 AM UTC

ajb wrote: post #64

miroljub wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's another enlightenment for you: Tracking expenses doesn't take more than 5-10 minutes per day, if you do it daily. With the correct workflow, it shouldn't take more than 30 minutes per month. There are even apps that would do that for you without any effort, though not so perfectly as fine tuned apps. And now, the enlightenment part: how is expense tracking preventing you from making more money than visiting he…

This begs the question though, of why individuals still need to do this like a 17th century clerk, when it costs their counterparties fractions of a man-second. Imagine if their was a law which said, every business that takes a credit card has to supply the consumer with the data in standard, machine-processable format (ie not pdf) via their credit account (IE, not making obtaining their email address a condition).

Or you could parse PDFs and give them an email address. If you want to live like a 17th century clerk because of rules you've made up in your own head that you must follow like an equally outdated religion where the Sun rotates around the Earth, I'm sorry, but that really seems like it's on you. Personally I'd rather join the modern era and not do that, but to each their own.

Re: One Number I Trust: Plain-Text Accounting for a Multi-Currency Household

#88

Post by skwee357 » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 9:46 AM UTC

netsharc wrote: post #36

skwee357 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dont mind paying for a personal finance tool, but I feel like most of them are made for an average consumer who spends in one currency and needs budgeting. I operate in at least 3 currencies, don’t care about budgeting, and need support for tracking stocks and automatic currency conversions. The only tools that were able to provide that were GnuCash and PTAs like beancount. My point is, there is a big segment of pe…

Are the currency conversions automatic, do they fetch the rate of whatever service you're using? E.g. converting USD to EUR on Wise on 28 Dec 2025 surely gets you a different amount compared to doing it on Revolut, or paying EUR with your card (which is USD-denominated), and on Jan 2 2026 the rates are also different.. I was travelling in the Nordics (they had 4 currencies back then, and they still do!) and wanted to…

The currency conversion can be whatever you want. I have a python script to bring conversion rates for European Central Bank because I need to report my business earning according to ECB rates, but you can specify any rate you want both during transaction entry (for example `100 USD @@ 95 EUR`), and as a global rate.

Re: One Number I Trust: Plain-Text Accounting for a Multi-Currency Household

#89

Post by mpyne » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 4:11 PM UTC

vladvasiliu wrote: post #69

mpyne wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, before we picked up YNAB more than a decade ago we never had issues with $3k of candles disappearing in the budget, but we still struggled to save money. When we started using YNAB and entering our spending into it, it was like a hockey-stick diagram on our household net worth. And this isn't even double-entry accounting (which I've adopted for my own personal spending). One thing I'll say is that the way we us…

I used to use YNAB and I think this was its whole point: you allocate money in different envelopes (budgets) and as the month goes by, you enter your transactions and see how your envelopes deplete. I didn't actually do this that much, I was much more interested in where my money was going over longer periods (say a year). It was nice enough, but I dropped it a few years ago when they had big price increase and becam…

Yeah, I'll probably switch to Actual at some point in the next couple of years as a result of the price change. The YNAB team at least continues to strive to make improvements to the core app so they seem to be actually putting the money to use, but the improvements are not in directions I need. And the improvement I do need, to make their web site faster for 10 years of budget, seems perenially on the back burner.

Re: One Number I Trust: Plain-Text Accounting for a Multi-Currency Household

#90

Post by BeetleB » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 5:17 PM UTC

StopDisinfo910 wrote: post #86

jaapz wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you underestimate the amounts some people spend on things like clothing, coffee, going out to eat and other stuff you wouldn't even think about

Top 5% earner, we are talking at least 350000$ a year. That's a lot of coffee.

No one in this thread is saying coffee is the reason. They're saying the little things add up. Coffee alone isn't a lot. Eating out alone isn't a lot. A cozy warm temperature in the house in a cold climate isn't a lot.

Adding all of it together is too much. So you set the thermostat lower by 3 degrees. Pack lunches two to three days a week and cut down the coffee a certain percentage etc.

Cutting any one thing out altogether will significantly reduce quality of life and won't get you there financially. Cutting back a bunch on each category will.

As I said, back of the envelope calculations will get you whatever outcome you desire. Real actual spending data will tell you the real story. There isn't a substitute.

350K in Missouri will give you a vastly different lifestyle than 350K in Denver.

If you have everything you want, no need to track!