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I am curious, what do people use for budgeting? Mint seems like the most feature rich, but not only do I not want to support their parent company because of th

I am curious, what do people use for budgeting? Mint seems like the most feature rich, but not only do I not want to support their parent company because of their Tax lobbying... but I don't trust them from a privacy standpoint (Considering its free). YNAB and Monarch both seem like really good options. But I have not looked into them much yet. I currently use Copilot (iOS only... really just iPhone, no iPad app). I have found it really nice but the lack of a web or iPad app makes doing some tasks more of a pain. I am curious if anyone has found any that work well for couples that don't have joint finances but do obviously share some expenses. My partner and me struggle with figuring this out and inevitably loose track of certain small things. Rent and standard expenses are easy. But going out, groceries, etc. those are the complicated ones. I know there is an app you can use that you can mark transactions as shared, but I don't want to use that for privacy reasons. I would love if there was an app that had some functionality like that built in without making it so we have one account that just has all of our accounts in it.

drc500free 5y ago
I used to use Mint, moved to Truebill a couple years ago. It's easier to split out and budget discretionary spending and track it over the month. They also do a good job of automatically identifying bills and other repeat charges for review.
ashirviskas 5y ago
>But going out, groceries, etc. those are the complicated ones. Which is why I don't actually track those day-to-day. I'm using revolut and it gives me a pretty decent estimate of spent per category per month, give or take 15%. Then I use a slightly modified google sheets budgeting template (it's right there) and just put all the numbers there. Quite convenient and you can see all the data + add custom formulas if you want to.
ChrisClark 5y ago
Lunchmoney.app has a collaboration feature, but the description isn't clear enough to see if it's what you're looking for.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
gunsch 5y ago
I've enjoyed YNAB a lot for budgeting and been using it for the last 3 years now. Works very well with my spreadsheet brain. It's got solid APIs if you want to do your own add-ons or integrations too. As an example, a friend of mine who's on the FIRE track has integrated his own layer on top of YNAB for tracking "paid off for life" categories, including budgeting for expected inflation, and allocated against retirement account balances.
bern4444 5y ago
I use YNAB, I tried Monarch and I found it less intuitive. I truly think YNAB is the best player in the budgeting personal finance space. I wish they did more (see my other comment about investing)
bredren 5y ago
Has anyone found a product that does a good job at consuming and unwinding transactions from an Apple Card? If I understand correctly, AC can’t be connected by Plaid, and You have to do manual export and upload of transaction data. If you use this for most of your expenses the payments from your checking account to pay off the card each month should also be recognized as such. I’ve tried managing this using Waveapps some and besides not liking that company, it didn’t handle this very well. Specific to this thread, how well does Actual handle this? It would be cool to self host this stuff.
- nerdjon 5y ago
  I think Mint announced a few weeks ago native support. Unfortunately Copilot is the same where you have to do a manual export, which means you only see it at the end of the month. Making it not super useful for tracking your budget as the month goes on. This has unfortunately lead to my Apple Card rarely being used. Which sucks. I keep hoping that there is some sort of native data sharing built into iOS so I don't have to log into apple through something like Plaid
  - bredren 5y ago
    Thanks for the reply. I searched around and found no mention of this, but then found it on Intuit's Mint product blog: https://mint.intuit.com/blog/updates/you-can-now-connect-your-apple-card-to-mint/ https://mint.intuit.com/blog/updates/you-can-now-connect-you... Presumably, there are more integrations coming but no information from Apple on this. Seems too good to be true that Apple would offer an API to customers that could be hooked up to a self-hosted Actual instance. Kind of a bummer that they only have Mint support right now, seems quite at odds with Apple's Privacy goals.
cstoner 5y ago
I've been using YNAB since March 2014. I started doing manual entry with YNAB4 and was an early adopter of YNAB5. I manage my own personal budget as well a joint budget for myself and my fiance. Here's my takeaway: * The YNAB model to budgeting is how I want all future budgeting tools I use to work. They call the framework "The Four Rules" (https://www.youneedabudget.com/the-four-rules/ https://www.youneedabudget.com/the-four-rules/) and they are a very pragmatic way to think about budgeting. * Specifically, I like to be able to have my budget cover multiple months into the future. I have fairly bursty and somewhat unpredictable income. I like to have a reserve of 6 months of expenses covered just to make sure that I can handle any ebb and flow of my income. * I have successfully convinced my partner to use YNAB and they find it valuable. It really is super useful software that is pretty straight forward to use and that makes budgeting very quick and easy. * Sharing budgets with a partner doesn't really work the way you'd want it to. You would need to share a single set of credentials, and there isn't really any fine grained access controls. * YNAB has been raising their prices lately, and I think it's reasonable to assume that they are going to be raising them again in the future. I am not convinced that I, personally, am getting value out of the things they say they are improving. While I have a lot of my financial history with them, I'm definitely investigating competitors to see if they would fit my needs. So far, none have but I'm going to keep looking because honestly I'm not sure YNAB is worth $100/yr ($200/yr between my partner and I is fucking crazy). Overall, would I recommend YNAB? Yeah, probably. I would bet that if you haven't been budgeting before and started using YNAB at the current price that you would probably make at least $100 worth of better financial decisions in the first year. But there's a huge asterisk next to the price. I remember paying $30 for YNAB4 and being happy with it. They introduced the SaaS version that would sync to import your transactions at $50/yr and I remember thinking that was kinda pricy. You could always import the transactions from your bank by downloading the Quicken files, but I understand they need a subscription model to sustain an actual business around the product. I am not convinced that the recent price hikes have been justified by an increase in the value of the product.
- nerdjon 5y ago
  The price is where I am finding myself hesitant to switch unless I find something that has a life changing feature (like features for couples). Copilot had a price hike to $9 a month (or $70 a year I believe) but grandfathered everyone who had a subscription for $3 a month "for life" (as long as you have an active subscription). I do keep hearing great things about YNAB and I don't mind paying for it, but if they are being that aggressive on raising pricing that is concerning.
kareemm 5y ago
Used YNAB4 + 5 for several years and it never really took. I use Tiller.com now - puts all your data into a Google Sheet or Cloud Excel sheet. It has a bunch of extensions that you can use for budgeting, emailing daily transactions, reporting, optimizing debt payoffs using various different methods, etc. Plus it's just a spreadsheet, so sorting/filtering etc just work. And it's as fast as having a large Google Sheet. So pretty darn fast.
- SeriousM 5y ago
  For the curious: https://www.tillerhq.com/ https://www.tillerhq.com/ is the right url
sbehere 5y ago
I use a home-grown system[1] that does not require sharing credentials with a third party, has partial/fully automated (depending on financial institution) fetching of transactions, auto-categorization learned from your previously categorized transactions, and the possibility to create pretty dashboards that can be shared with others. It's surprisingly simple (just a few lines of code) for personal use. [1]: https://sagar.se/blog/where-is-the-money/ https://sagar.se/blog/where-is-the-money/
- bprew 5y ago
  Thanks for the post Sagar, I'm the maintainer of reckon [1], a tool to help categorize transactions, which I used in ledger. There are a lot of interesting tools for doing plain text accounting [2] and I'm always interested in learning about new ones. Reckon uses TF/IDF with cosine similarity, but I would be interested to see how you use Random Forest. Please post your code somewhere, I'd love to see it and learn something new! [1] https://github.com/cantino/reckon https://github.com/cantino/reckon [2] https://plaintextaccounting.org/ https://plaintextaccounting.org/
stjohnswarts 5y ago
I just use a spreadsheet.
riza_on 5y ago
I've been a happy user of ledger-cli.org for 2 years now, simple plain text.

drc500free 5y ago

I used to use Mint, moved to Truebill a couple years ago. It's easier to split out and budget discretionary spending and track it over the month. They also do a good job of automatically identifying bills and other repeat charges for review.

ashirviskas 5y ago

>But going out, groceries, etc. those are the complicated ones. Which is why I don't actually track those day-to-day. I'm using revolut and it gives me a pretty decent estimate of spent per category per month, give or take 15%. Then I use a slightly modified google sheets budgeting template (it's right there) and just put all the numbers there. Quite convenient and you can see all the data + add custom formulas if you want to.

ChrisClark 5y ago

Lunchmoney.app has a collaboration feature, but the description isn't clear enough to see if it's what you're looking for.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

gunsch 5y ago

I've enjoyed YNAB a lot for budgeting and been using it for the last 3 years now. Works very well with my spreadsheet brain. It's got solid APIs if you want to do your own add-ons or integrations too. As an example, a friend of mine who's on the FIRE track has integrated his own layer on top of YNAB for tracking "paid off for life" categories, including budgeting for expected inflation, and allocated against retirement account balances.

bern4444 5y ago

I use YNAB, I tried Monarch and I found it less intuitive. I truly think YNAB is the best player in the budgeting personal finance space. I wish they did more (see my other comment about investing)

bredren 5y ago

Has anyone found a product that does a good job at consuming and unwinding transactions from an Apple Card? If I understand correctly, AC can’t be connected by Plaid, and You have to do manual export and upload of transaction data. If you use this for most of your expenses the payments from your checking account to pay off the card each month should also be recognized as such. I’ve tried managing this using Waveapps some and besides not liking that company, it didn’t handle this very well. Specific to this thread, how well does Actual handle this? It would be cool to self host this stuff.

nerdjon 5y ago
I think Mint announced a few weeks ago native support. Unfortunately Copilot is the same where you have to do a manual export, which means you only see it at the end of the month. Making it not super useful for tracking your budget as the month goes on. This has unfortunately lead to my Apple Card rarely being used. Which sucks. I keep hoping that there is some sort of native data sharing built into iOS so I don't have to log into apple through something like Plaid
- bredren 5y ago
  Thanks for the reply. I searched around and found no mention of this, but then found it on Intuit's Mint product blog: https://mint.intuit.com/blog/updates/you-can-now-connect-your-apple-card-to-mint/ https://mint.intuit.com/blog/updates/you-can-now-connect-you... Presumably, there are more integrations coming but no information from Apple on this. Seems too good to be true that Apple would offer an API to customers that could be hooked up to a self-hosted Actual instance. Kind of a bummer that they only have Mint support right now, seems quite at odds with Apple's Privacy goals.

cstoner 5y ago

I've been using YNAB since March 2014. I started doing manual entry with YNAB4 and was an early adopter of YNAB5. I manage my own personal budget as well a joint budget for myself and my fiance. Here's my takeaway: * The YNAB model to budgeting is how I want all future budgeting tools I use to work. They call the framework "The Four Rules" (https://www.youneedabudget.com/the-four-rules/ https://www.youneedabudget.com/the-four-rules/) and they are a very pragmatic way to think about budgeting. * Specifically, I like to be able to have my budget cover multiple months into the future. I have fairly bursty and somewhat unpredictable income. I like to have a reserve of 6 months of expenses covered just to make sure that I can handle any ebb and flow of my income. * I have successfully convinced my partner to use YNAB and they find it valuable. It really is super useful software that is pretty straight forward to use and that makes budgeting very quick and easy. * Sharing budgets with a partner doesn't really work the way you'd want it to. You would need to share a single set of credentials, and there isn't really any fine grained access controls. * YNAB has been raising their prices lately, and I think it's reasonable to assume that they are going to be raising them again in the future. I am not convinced that I, personally, am getting value out of the things they say they are improving. While I have a lot of my financial history with them, I'm definitely investigating competitors to see if they would fit my needs. So far, none have but I'm going to keep looking because honestly I'm not sure YNAB is worth $100/yr ($200/yr between my partner and I is fucking crazy). Overall, would I recommend YNAB? Yeah, probably. I would bet that if you haven't been budgeting before and started using YNAB at the current price that you would probably make at least $100 worth of better financial decisions in the first year. But there's a huge asterisk next to the price. I remember paying $30 for YNAB4 and being happy with it. They introduced the SaaS version that would sync to import your transactions at $50/yr and I remember thinking that was kinda pricy. You could always import the transactions from your bank by downloading the Quicken files, but I understand they need a subscription model to sustain an actual business around the product. I am not convinced that the recent price hikes have been justified by an increase in the value of the product.

nerdjon 5y ago
The price is where I am finding myself hesitant to switch unless I find something that has a life changing feature (like features for couples). Copilot had a price hike to $9 a month (or $70 a year I believe) but grandfathered everyone who had a subscription for $3 a month "for life" (as long as you have an active subscription). I do keep hearing great things about YNAB and I don't mind paying for it, but if they are being that aggressive on raising pricing that is concerning.

kareemm 5y ago

Used YNAB4 + 5 for several years and it never really took. I use Tiller.com now - puts all your data into a Google Sheet or Cloud Excel sheet. It has a bunch of extensions that you can use for budgeting, emailing daily transactions, reporting, optimizing debt payoffs using various different methods, etc. Plus it's just a spreadsheet, so sorting/filtering etc just work. And it's as fast as having a large Google Sheet. So pretty darn fast.

SeriousM 5y ago
For the curious: https://www.tillerhq.com/ https://www.tillerhq.com/ is the right url

sbehere 5y ago

I use a home-grown system[1] that does not require sharing credentials with a third party, has partial/fully automated (depending on financial institution) fetching of transactions, auto-categorization learned from your previously categorized transactions, and the possibility to create pretty dashboards that can be shared with others. It's surprisingly simple (just a few lines of code) for personal use. [1]: https://sagar.se/blog/where-is-the-money/ https://sagar.se/blog/where-is-the-money/

bprew 5y ago
Thanks for the post Sagar, I'm the maintainer of reckon [1], a tool to help categorize transactions, which I used in ledger. There are a lot of interesting tools for doing plain text accounting [2] and I'm always interested in learning about new ones. Reckon uses TF/IDF with cosine similarity, but I would be interested to see how you use Random Forest. Please post your code somewhere, I'd love to see it and learn something new! [1] https://github.com/cantino/reckon https://github.com/cantino/reckon [2] https://plaintextaccounting.org/ https://plaintextaccounting.org/

stjohnswarts 5y ago

I just use a spreadsheet.

riza_on 5y ago

I've been a happy user of ledger-cli.org for 2 years now, simple plain text.