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Ask HN: What are you using for personal financial planning/tracking?

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Ask HN: What are you using for personal financial planning/tracking?

#1

Post by max-si-m »

I used to try a bunch of different apps for tracking personal finances(YNAB, Mint etc.). But they didn't fit my "model". There are a few options that I would like to have:

- Transaction fees, I want to see how much I lose on transactions

- Smart budgeting

- Family sharing

- Recurrent savings (e.g >10% from each income)

- Multi currencies

- The planing of big purchases (e.g >5% from each income with deadlines)

- Maybe available money per day (total income - recurrent transactions(e.g savings/subscriptions) - purchases planing / days in month) something like that.

Google Sheet doesn't fit my expectation, because I fill in transactions from the iPhone. I already started working on the app for myself but feel that there is a loooot of similar stuff. So no need for one more.

Please, share your experience of tracking the personal budget. What are you using for that? What have you tried to use? Maybe you already made something that will be suitable for me?

Re: Ask HN: What are you using for personal financial planning/tracking?

#3

Post by max-si-m »

pwg wrote: post #2

Ledger-CLI: https://www.ledger-cli.org/

I don't think that fill transactions from CLI will work for me. There are a few cons that I found in features:

- don't have family sharing

- didn't find a mobile app

- budgeting

Did I miss something?

Re: Ask HN: What are you using for personal financial planning/tracking?

#4

Post by pwg »

max-si-m wrote: post #3
pwg wrote: post #2

Ledger-CLI: https://www.ledger-cli.org/

I don't think that fill transactions from CLI will work for me. There are a few cons that I found in features: - don't have family sharing - didn't find a mobile app - budgeting Did I miss something?

Family sharing could be handled by a file sync app (i.e., dropbox or otherwise). Do note that this means dropbox also knows your finances unless you also encrypt somehow.

Budgeting is covered within the documentation. There's an example inside of budgeting.

There's a few mobile apps that have some 'support' for ledger (search "ledger" on the F-Droid [1] store to find two of them). There are also a couple web interfaces (general internet search) that could substitute for "mobile app" in some ways.

But as the data file is just text, any mobile text file editor would support "use" of the system for data entry.

One very nice part about the data file being just a text file is that it is also trivial to automate updates so that for recurring bills/income that are equal in value, you can automate the addition of those transactions with any form of job scheduler (i.e. cron on a Linux system).

[1] https://f-droid.org/

Re: Ask HN: What are you using for personal financial planning/tracking?

#7

Post by max-si-m »

rayhendricks wrote: post #5

I’m using google sheets, updated in the 1st of each month. It Calculates total net worth which is all in really inverted in. It could be adapted to handle multiple currencies though.

Can you share it or made some simplified version?

Re: Ask HN: What are you using for personal financial planning/tracking?

#8

Post by max-si-m »

stakkur wrote: post #6

Libre Office spreadsheets. I also have a few Python scripts I wrote to consume downloaded CSV files of my bank account transactions, summarize them a bit, and drop them into a spreadsheet.

Why do you choose this way? It seems to be a bit complicated, doesn't it?

Re: Ask HN: What are you using for personal financial planning/tracking?

#9

Post by stakkur »

max-si-m wrote: post #8
stakkur wrote: post #6

Libre Office spreadsheets. I also have a few Python scripts I wrote to consume downloaded CSV files of my bank account transactions, summarize them a bit, and drop them into a spreadsheet.

Why do you choose this way? It seems to be a bit complicated, doesn't it?

One spreadsheet with two worksheets and two python scripts seems fairly simple to me. No third party, no feeds, no sharing data, nothing. And it just works.
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