91–100 of 323 posts
My partner and I have been tracking all our spending for the last five years with hledger (ledger reimplemented in haskell) and some custom import and management scripts inspired by "Full-fledged hledger" [1]. More recently we added Plaid [2] for auto-importing from financial accounts. I love having a plain-text history and being able to ask complex queries. One unexpectedly-sweet benefit is that your spending is a h…
I've been using YNAB. I want to switch out because YNAB is too expensive. What I miss with open source alternatives is the mobile app. I don't like to link my bank accounts, so I enter expenses manually whenever I buy anything. The mobile app is critical for that to work.
I'd be curious if anyone has used this and also used YNAB (and can compare them). I'd put YNAB along with 1Password (and probably Fastmail) in the class of best single purpose pieces of software that I pay for.
I've looked at YNAB before, I keep wanting to try a finance tracking tool - but I can't ever decide which one is worth my time. What's so good about YNAB? It seems to be marketed at a certain segment that I'm not in. At least, based on their homepage line: > Stop living paycheck-to-paycheck, get out of debt, and save more money. As for 1Password, given your username I'm assuming you've tried Bitwarden? What is better…
Previously I had been using Mint to keep track of my spending, but I never felt in control, it was only useful as a reporting tool of what had already happened.
YNAB is all about giving every dollar a job and setting priorities for your life. It's the envelope system in digital form if you are familiar with that. With Mint and similar systems, I'd just be looking at my pile of cash in my account and thinking "yeah I can easily afford a new gaming PC!".
But I wouldn't be taking into account my 6 month auto insurance bill coming up in 2 months that would require a bunch of cash. YNAB let's me see that easily - it was painful in the beginning as I was "catching up" in all these categories, but now I feel so much more comfortable with my money and how it can be put to good use.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've looked at YNAB before, I keep wanting to try a finance tracking tool - but I can't ever decide which one is worth my time. What's so good about YNAB? It seems to be marketed at a certain segment that I'm not in. At least, based on their homepage line: > Stop living paycheck-to-paycheck, get out of debt, and save more money. As for 1Password, given your username I'm assuming you've tried Bitwarden? What is better…
I've been using YNAB for about 6 months now. I was not living paycheck to paycheck when I started - but I have made significant improvements to my financial well being since I started using it. Previously I had been using Mint to keep track of my spending, but I never felt in control, it was only useful as a reporting tool of what had already happened. YNAB is all about giving every dollar a job and setting prioritie…
I used it first too and I think it may actually be worse than nothing.
It's both infested with a ton of ads and makes you think you understand where your money is going without really understanding it.
"Simple" is not an adjective I'd associate with GnuCash. Maybe it is if you're coming from a background in accounting or have a penchant for numbers. It's pretty complicated, and I wouldn't recommend it to someone who just wanted to keep an eye on their budget. A simple spreadsheet will suffice. Or any number of more user friendly tools. That being said, GnuCash is a powerful double entry book keeping system which ca…
Probably the biggest hurdle IMO is the single user nature. Even the SQL backend requires a global lock.
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…
I use this too. Maybe I like the beancount more, but having my finances available on the web to share with my so is valuable. Too many told are meant for one pers,on and don't support modern ideas like tagging.
It's also nifty that it exposes pretty much all of the functionality via a REST API, complete with the ability to manage OAuth clients/tokens. Not something I expected to really leverage, but have been surprised how frequently it's come in handy.
Hold up. Did Gnucash get better reporting or did he make his own? Last time I used Gnucash, which admittedly was 10 years ago, but for a business, I found reporting and the lack of budgeting lacking. The latter could be solved by envelopes (but I find hacky), but the former only by learning Guile, something I was and am not up to. Alternatives like Money dance have a more complete solution, certainly for personal use…
I've used GnuCash for years before switching to beancount ( https://bitbucket.org/blais/beancount/ with smart_importer: https://github.com/beancount/smart_importer ) and fava ( https://github.com/beancount/fava/ ). Much easier to work on your journals (ledger, trades, prices...) since they are just text files. Really great if you're using the beancount package for Sublime: https://packagecontrol.io/packages/Beancount…
Wow, your setup sounds very similar to what I've converged on. Except I wrote a fairly substantial pipeline that preprocesses the data before giving it to beancount and Fava. Maybe I missed something, but it seemed like beancount wants everything to live in One Giant Journal file. I really wanted a pipeline where each bank statement PDF would output one file with a corresponding list of transactions (this stage can r…
Actually, beancount supports include directive. See includes section [1] of the language syntax document
[1]: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wAMVrKIA2qtRGmoVDSUBJGmY...
> We don’t care about how much money we’ve spent at Amazon That's like, your opinion man. While I'm sure that's one perfectly valid approach, I find a lot of value in knowing where my money has gone beyond categories. To make it more concrete, how much I spend at Amazon my Rewards Visa determines whether the 2% bump in rewards is worth the cost of Prime. (I know - most people find enough value in the videos or not th…
Last time I looked they seem to have a pretty decent python API so splitting down transactions by retailer shouldn't take too much python-fu methinks.
I think you can do it via vendors but the small business feature set is somewhat cumbersome.