Besides an excel spreadsheet, do you use any software for calculating your household budget? I find it hard to trust any cloud solution that is allowed access to my bank account info (e.g., Mint), but it's hard to deny the convenience and reporting capability.
Ask HN: Do you use budgeting software?
1–10 of 76 posts
Re: Ask HN: Do you use budgeting software?
#2I use Mint to track my spending. I don't budget.
Re: Ask HN: Do you use budgeting software?
#3Gnucash, but I haven't gotten the hang of it's budget features yet.
Most budgeting is done in a spreadsheet. Cash in --> Cash out, line by line.
Re: Ask HN: Do you use budgeting software?
#4I use Mint to track my spending. I don't budget.
Same, except with Personal Capital (I prefer the interface).
I believe the security tradeoff of granting access to my accounts is worth the financial visibility; without it, it would be a lot harder to review my spending, find any unusual transactions and think about future goals.
Re: Ask HN: Do you use budgeting software?
#5YNAB is pretty great. I allow it sync transactions from my bank accounts, but its budgeting system works fine if you're willing to enter transactions in manually.
It is a refined form of envelope budgeting, and allowed me to go from an engineer that made a lot of money, but spent willy-nilly to an engineer that knows what's up, and with a rising net worth.
I like that it encourages you to look at the money you actually have and allocate it to what it needs to do ("Rent", "Savings for christmas gifts", "Car replacement", "Efund"...), as opposed to forward looking budgets that are just guesses about what you want to spend going forward.
Re: Ask HN: Do you use budgeting software?
#6YNAB is pretty good, i bought a year's license, but I didn't stick with it because it started to chug running in my browser :/
Re: Ask HN: Do you use budgeting software?
#7I use Personal Capital and really think it's a great piece of software. If you're worried about a cloud solution that has access to your financials, you might as well use a spreadsheet.
I'm pretty sure YNAB (You Need a Budget) does not require cloud storage of personal information.
Re: Ask HN: Do you use budgeting software?
#8Built an ad-hoc system using flask, Google Spreadsheets, and Twilio (where I work) that my wife and I have been using for 18 months now -- far longer than any other system has stuck.
- budget tab: tracks category + allocated budget for the month
- expenses tab: tracks date, amount, category, description
- when we spend money, my wife and I text, eg, "13.31 restaurants lunch at chipotle" to a Twilio number. A flask app splits the body of the SMS expecting "X.XX category description", and uses the Google spreadsheets API to add the row to the expenses tab. (Yes, we manually enter every expense, either via SMS or via the spreadsheet. This was a habit we picked up the old YNAB. We could automate this to some extent, but the discipline of having to do something when we spend money has been beneficial).
- I get a confirmation text. My wife gets a text saying "Greg spent $13 on Chipotle. We have $132 left in the lunch category this month."
- Texting "report" to the number kicks back a text with each category and the amount remaining this month.
It's an imperfect system. Some small dollar stuff gets missed. But it's super flexible for reporting since its just a spreadsheet. Because I built it, I actually use it. The confirmation texts have instilled a bit of accountability between the two of us and also serve as a nice reminder during the day of what the other person is doing. ("Hey! Thanks for logging your lunch. How was it?")
Been meaning to write a blog post about it for a while. Will do so if there's interest.
Re: Ask HN: Do you use budgeting software?
#9I would feel better with a paid solution.
Re: Ask HN: Do you use budgeting software?
#10Built an ad-hoc system using flask, Google Spreadsheets, and Twilio (where I work) that my wife and I have been using for 18 months now -- far longer than any other system has stuck. - budget tab: tracks category + allocated budget for the month - expenses tab: tracks date, amount, category, description - when we spend money, my wife and I text, eg, "13.31 restaurants lunch at chipotle" to a Twilio number. A flask ap…
Wow. I've used Twilio API before... had no idea you could do something like this. How do you log categories?