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Ask HN: How do you plan to track your personal finances in 2020?
I'm just about done with YNAB due to the lack of multi-currency support. Also, as a digital nomad, fixed-size budgeting just doesn't work for me.
Manual-entry solutions like spreadsheets are too tedious. I find MoneyWiz to be clunky and ugly, and I don't trust it, perhaps because I was spoiled by YNAB's super polished clearing/approval/reconciliation UI.
For 2020, I'm thinking of building myself a Plaid API integration into Airtable or Google Sheets. What about you?
p.s. I'm Canadian, so I must pass on all US-centric software.
- anotheryou 7y agoWhat do you you expect from the data? As a german: we have no good software to track from banking data so I just don't. I live modest and check if my account on average goes up or down (usually goes up, so all good). I will calc an average to see how much to put in to retirement savings monthly soon.
- Jtsummers 7y agoledger/hledger again, though I also use YNAB for my cash accounts, credit cards, and other debts. I can live with its single-currency support for that. But I use ledger/hledger for my total picture of my finances. NB: I do everything manually. So I enter in my transactions with YNAB manually, then later enter them into my ledger file. I find that this keeps me better aware of my financial status than automatic downloads, but that's a personal preference.
- tarname 7y agoThank you for the hledger tip. Definitely going to look into that. I have been completely disillusioned with YNAB due to the community and almost fanatical mindset that comes with it.
- mxab 7y agoMaybe also checkout beancount. It's a more opinionated and slightly simpler (h)ledger alternative, but it features an excellent web interface called fava.
- tudelo 7y agoI don't plan on tracking really, so let's see how that goes :)
- KohgnaK 7y agoPersonally I just export a CSV file with my monthly bank transactions that I feed to a django app I've made. 1/ It flags suspicious entries according to rules that I manually add and it automatically highlights transactions involving new parties. 2/ I've added tags to be able to classify the expenses and present them in a pie chart so I can at a glance see if I was on track or not last month and adjust things the next one. In the end it took 2h to write, I spent now 5min / month on this reviewing, I've found the bank made an error and was charging me for something I've never signed for and I'm finally following a loose budget and building savings in a "relaxed" way.
- segmondy 7y agoSame way I have tracked it all my life. Text files & spreadsheet.
- apersom 7y agoThat doesn't say anything about how though. What so you write in these text files and how's your spreadsheet set up?
- bwb 7y agoTillerhq.com is awesome
- sohodlers 7y agoI personally use app from Play store, quite handy :)