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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

#81

Post by kccqzy »

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 am also using a spreadsheet now. I used to do things in plain text files, even did one year entirely in org-mode in emacs. But I started a spreadsheet the year I got married so my spouse and I can look at things together.

We track way fewer categories than you do. But in addition, we also track larger expenses by amount. Right now everything over $100 gets an entry. That means a fancy $100+ dinner gets tracked but a normal $30 dinner doesn’t.

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#82

Post by coliveira »

fastasucan wrote: post #47

I found that doing anything too detailed was too big of a chore for what I got out, and that I didnt get much from doing budgeting. I ended up just logging my total holding of cash and stocks spread over my different bank accounts and my investment portfolio. Doing it every few months helped me make sure that my overall holdings went up. As long as I pay off my bills and then save enough to see my holdings rise I am…

That's good enough for most people, but I also track my fixed costs over time, so I have a picture of how much money I need every month, and what could be eliminated if needed.

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#83

Post by RankingMember »

kayo_20211030 wrote: post #69

I don't want to cause a scene, but if you're not running your own business, why would you do this? There are commercial services out there that take next to no time every month. Anathema? Yes, I know the data live in a data-center/cloud. But, don't the content of all those statements, payments and bills live there too. Yes, I know the service might go away tomorrow. But, couldn't one find the new-new service and impo…

> Tastes differ, but 30-45 minutes a month to hand-key data (or write the scripts that avoid that) isn't my taste.

I'd wager it isn't most peoples' taste, which is why the off-the-shelf cloud-based options are as popular as they are. I see people in here doing things like writing PDF statement parsers and then dealing with the maintenance that this strategy entails whenever formatting changes and, well, I appreciate the people to whom this appeals, but I am not one of those people. :)

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#84

Post by tekchip »

the_arun wrote: post #75
ekjhgkejhgk wrote: post #70

A lot of people in this thread comingling "plain text" with "double entry". Beancount is both, but you can do either one or the other or both. In particular, you DONT need to learn double entry to do plain text accounting. Of course, you SHOULD learn double entry accounting because it's a great tool for organizing knowledge. Whether plain text is beneficial for accounting is less clear cut in my mind. I think plain t…

I think Accounting needs automation. Because manual tasks are error prone & Accuracy is a P0 requirement for finance.

This! It blows my mind every bank doesn't have a sort of scripting language of some sort that let's me automate whatever I want to happen. I've seen a few services that supposedly enable this but their prone to breakage, don't support one bank or another, or are simply way too expensive.

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#85

Post by [deleted] »

bronco21016 wrote: post #57

I was really into this idea a few years ago. Even started logging. However, I just cannot bring myself to constantly pull the transactions down manually from multiple banks. Many suggest automating. How is this working in practice? Are there providers like Plaid you can use? Build web scrapers? Build PDF statement parsers? I ended up just paying YNAB the $130/year or whatever they’re at now. High wife approval factor…

[deleted]

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#86

Post by mbork_pl »

the_arun wrote: post #75
ekjhgkejhgk wrote: post #70

A lot of people in this thread comingling "plain text" with "double entry". Beancount is both, but you can do either one or the other or both. In particular, you DONT need to learn double entry to do plain text accounting. Of course, you SHOULD learn double entry accounting because it's a great tool for organizing knowledge. Whether plain text is beneficial for accounting is less clear cut in my mind. I think plain t…

I think Accounting needs automation. Because manual tasks are error prone & Accuracy is a P0 requirement for finance.

I suppose one problem with this is that accounting needs legal responsibility in case of mistakes. Software usually (if not always) does not guarantee anything (in the legal sense) and its seller/producer does not assume any responsibility whatsoever.

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#88

Post by stvltvs »

distances wrote: post #79
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 the same, except I track even a bit less. I track monthly all account balances, salary/income, paid taxes, transfers to investment accounts, rent/mortgage, and health insurance. This is enough to map investment performance, financial position, and necessary living costs. Mostly everything else is "a life lived" expense and I don't see a need to do any finer tracking there.

It's highly dependent on your personal situation.

If you have plenty of income, tracking grocery expenses might be a waste of time, like tracking how much air you breathe.

If your income is barely meeting your expenses (or worse), the grocery budget is one of the few places you can make meaningful decisions that will lower your costs.

And there's a tricky middle ground where it feels like you have enough income, but if you don't pay attention, you'll die by a thousand cuts to small expenses that feel insignificant by themselves.

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#89

Post by robcohen »

I just made the jump to PTA and it is really, incredibly slick. Finally escaped the financial system's grip on my data. Look into SimpleFIN to get data feeds, but I also used LLMs and browsermcp to download all my statements from all of my banks.

Really awesome to have control finally. I am very interested in extending PTA to be more like blockchain ledgers, with signing for every transaction and decentralizing the ledger. still mulling through how this would work, but it would essentially be KERI based.

Re: 10 years of personal finances in plain text files

#90

Post by stvltvs »

ekjhgkejhgk wrote: post #70

A lot of people in this thread comingling "plain text" with "double entry". Beancount is both, but you can do either one or the other or both. In particular, you DONT need to learn double entry to do plain text accounting. Of course, you SHOULD learn double entry accounting because it's a great tool for organizing knowledge. Whether plain text is beneficial for accounting is less clear cut in my mind. I think plain t…

I love/hate GnuCash.

I've been using it for years, and it helps a lot. I would pay good money for someone to improve the UI, maybe even separate the accounting engine into a library that could be used by different UIs.

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