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Ask HN: How do you record your personal finances?
This is a recurring question that pop up every couple of years, but it's always interesting to see what people use nowadays.
How do you track your personal finances? Excel sheet? Python script? Self-hosted dashboard?
Do you use open source software, did you code your own, or do you subscribe to a service?
I'm more interested in the basic spending tracking functions (auto importing from bank, auto tagging categories, etc) than having it track my investment portfolio.
- roschdal 4y agoA Google spreadsheet
- scyzoryk_xyz 4y agoI used to use YNAB, but they kept on jacking their price up, and I kept on procrastinating with keeping up a record. Having lately used Google Sheets along with AppScript for other purposes, I think I would go with that.
- mdrzn 4y agoI was looking into YNAB but $14.99 a month seems a lot
- scyzoryk_xyz 4y agoYeah that price is just insane for my needs. I was paying, as long as it was in the ballpark of $60/year, and that was already a lot. (I live in a country with lower overall income.) However, my impression is that they have gone through a pivot. From their messaging it looks like the customer they’re after is someone going through more serious financial trouble. Someone in need of a sophisticated set of tools and methods to get out. That user is probably willing to pay more and for longer than someone like me. I just wanted to know how much I’m spending on snacks and fast food.
- jpmoral 4y agoI've kept YNAB4 running. That was the last non-subscription version.
- johnthesecure 4y agoI currently use a Google sheet, but I'm looking for something better. I have many automatic payments (credit card, telephone, utilities, etc) from a transaction account. I also have a loan with redraw, and I want to have most of my funds keeping the loan balance low, but I don't want my transaction account to go negative. So I need to forecast future transactions. Future transactions may be annual, monthly, four weekly, two weekly, etc. It's a real mess. Some are easy to predict accurately, others can only be estimated. I have a column to keep track of which future transactions are predictions/estimates/allowances, and which ones have been confirmed. I also have a column to keep track of which transactions have been reconciled with the bank. (This is currently a manual cross-checking process, since my bank doesn't have API access.) My preference would be a text-based system (https://plaintextaccounting.org/ https://plaintextaccounting.org/), but haven't found one that neatly allows estimates of future transactions that can be modified once the details are known.
- Ceres1 4y agoI'm you like Google Sheets and automation, check out Tiller - it's pulls your daily spending and transactions directly into you spreadsheets. It also has auto-categorization. It is a paid service.
- viraptor 4y agoI did firefly-iii a few times when I was interested in historic trends. Wrote some custom tooling to auto import from the banks. But in a long term, annotating weekly/monthly just doesn't provide enough benefit for me to continue doing that. It's easier to do a big import every few years when I actually need the data. If I was doing it again, I'd probably go with one of the cli text ledgers so the process is easier to preserve and closer to ETL.
- flarg 4y agoI used something on my Psion for many years, then Quicken for a long time, Gnucash and now a much simpler budget driven Excel workbook. Probably looking at Sqlite and Datasette next but tbh the simpler the better.
- phil294 4y agoGerman banks support an open protocol: FinTS/HBCI with which you can automize stuff. There's a Python library for it [1] and I wrote my own little cli tool that allows you to configure your (potentially recurring) target vs. actual expenses, while setting expiration dates to get notifications about unexpected transactions. Still somewhat WIP though [1] https://github.com/raphaelm/python-fints https://github.com/raphaelm/python-fints [2] https://github.com/phil294/fints-transaction-tracker https://github.com/phil294/fints-transaction-tracker
- GravitasFailure 4y agoGnucash. Not that hard to learn and use, free, libre, and pretty solid community support. It's served me really well for several years including some changes in my financial situation and complexity.
- justusw 4y agoI switched from YNAB to Gnucash and I am very happy with it. I even wrote a couple of scripts to convert Shift JIS encoded csvs to work with Gnucash transaction import. I have an accounting routine that I run through every month and import everything from dozens of bank accounts. The community is also very nice and they were very accommodating towards my bug reports and fixed them very quickly (it had something to do with IME not working well on macOS).
- GravitasFailure 4y agoYou're also making a great point about Gnucash: We're both using it differently, but it works well for us. That kind of flexibility is golden.
- mdrzn 4y agoIs there enough integrations ready (like to autoimport from banks) or does everything need to be "coded in" whenever required?
- GravitasFailure 4y agoIt has a pretty thorough feature set baked in and extra scripts and coding shouldn't be needed. It can fetch balances and transactions directly from your banks, though I need to check if that's automatically run or manually triggered.
- cavemanSam 4y agoToshl. I have been using it since 2015, perfectly suits my use case.
- mdrzn 4y agoThis also looks very promising, and $5 a month for the higher plan seems very interesting since it provides auto-sync with the bank.
- pneumatic1 4y agoQuicken is one of the only subscriptions I have that I don’t consider canceling.
- closewith 4y agoI use Pocketsmith for their automated bank feeds, but I'm thinking of moving as they don't support the bank I have my mortgage with, leading to periodic statement imports.
- poidos 4y agoI used to do it by hand with a spreadsheet I built, but after finding a few bugs in my spreadsheet and getting tired of manually managing things, I switched to YNAB. The risk there is that they use Plaid on the backend.
- ensocode 4y agohttps://actualbudget.com/ https://actualbudget.com/ it is now open source and free
- mdrzn 4y agoThis looks interesting, but at the moment only in self-hosted mode: "Actual is now open-source and 100% free. New signups are currently disabled until we figure out a plan for a potential hosted option. Go to the repo to learn more. You can self-host it and modify it however you want"
- wfg 4y agoThanks for mentioning this. I've been procrastinating on finding an alternative since they hiked the price up so much (not even my grandfathered $45/year pricing is immune!). It looks a lot like YNAB from the screenshots, but I'll give it a shot to see just how similar it really is. Being self-hostable is just icing on the cake!
- workingon 4y agoI don’t at all. Sometimes living “paycheck to paycheck” has its perks. Make sure to have enough money with the last check of the month to pay the mortgage, while having the largest 401k contribution you can manage. Without active investing or any real savings there doesn’t seem to be much benefit to calculating cash in vs cash out any more than my bank app does. If there’s something out there useful for my case let me know! I’m just not sure how much optimization can be done with this lifestyle.
- justusthane 4y agoYou should still be building an emergency fund at least to cover unexpected expenses, and if you can afford to contribute extra to your 401k than it sounds like you can afford to do that. Not to shill for YNAB, but it's specifically designed to help break the paycheck-to-paycheck cycle, even for people with a decent amount of cashflow.
- workingon 4y agoI've heard this for awhile, and I never really understood it but perhaps it's just my particular situation. I can take an interest-free loan from my 401k-type plan at any time. I figure if I lose a job or have an emergency taking $5,000 out of that would be basically the same thing as taking $5,000 out of a bank, except it's been earning returns before that emergency. Do most 401k plans not allow you to take out money from your plan as long as you pay it back?
- csw-001 4y agoI think the logic here is that you don’t want to rob your future self to cover your current self’s emergency. Imagine a prolonged expensive period (car breaks, then you get sick, then you need funds to help a desperate relative, etc.) - you need extra money over a period of months but you don’t have it coming in current cash flows. When you borrow from the 401k you have to pay it back, which you won’t be able to do right away, and once you can, your disposable income goes down (because you’ve got to make those payback payments now). While you are paying back you are missing investment growth. I think of liquid emergency funds (in both personal, and business contexts) as insurance - how much you need is defined by your risk tolerance, asset mix, and long term goals, but the answer almost never “none”. Another thing to think about is increasing monthly disposable income with emergency deferment of payments - in this context stopping 401k contributions while you deal with an emergency. Depending on your debt type, debt load, and credit history you can often negotiate deferment on many monthly payments for months at a time (e.g. mortgage, student loans, some car payments, utility bills, etc.).
- misterspaceman 4y agoMoneydance, using the technique described here https://youtu.be/eIcsMHL0NJ0 https://youtu.be/eIcsMHL0NJ0 and https://youtu.be/QOtZ6Bwzlf8 https://youtu.be/QOtZ6Bwzlf8. It's a super simple way to use envelope accounting (ala Dave Ramsey), without using actual cash.
- dbrueck 4y agoI've been using a spreadsheet for about 20 years and occasionally I'll be curious enough to try something else but I always come back to the humble spreadsheet, plus a script to massage the CSV export from my bank. Though it's not fully automated, it's close enough, it provides unlimited flexibility (every other system I've tried eventually gets in my way a little too much), and the price ($0) is just right.
- adamlangsner 4y agoI built this purely frontend tool to plan out my budget. It looks like crap but it works great. I built it in 2012 and havent touched the code since. It lives on an S3 bucket and stores the data in local storage. http://www.mindlessflash.com/budget http://www.mindlessflash.com/budget
- XorNot 4y agoI eyeball the outgoings and incomings of my bank account a few times a month, nod at the results and move on with life. The only things I track are stuff which has tax implications - in which case things like that go in my FY<year> folder until tax time.
- plucas 4y agoBeancount (https://beancount.github.io/ https://beancount.github.io/) plus a script for formatting bank statement CSVs.
- aumayr 4y agoGive Fava (https://beancount.github.io/fava/ https://beancount.github.io/fava/) a try: It's a web frontend for Beancount (Disclosure: I'm a former maintainer)
- LocalPCGuy 4y agoI use a Google sheet, and look at my finances twice a month. Each time, I duplicate the sheet from a month back (so 2 new sheets each month). Each sheet has the bills to go look at and handle. Either to ensure they were paid (autobill) or to set up a payment. It's in need of an update to stop duplicating sheets and just either add columns, that way I could easier do things like compare over time or create charts, etc. But I often have extra notes or other things in each sheet as needed, so I'd need a way to still incorporate those. And it's been working well; mostly ensuring I don't forget any of the individual bills. The harder thing for me is when I get a paper bill, ensuring it gets scheduled to be looked at and paid if I don't do it right away.
- rbone80 4y agoI use this same method and have been for over a decade. It helps to never miss a bill (which is much easier now that most bills are eft/ach) and to better predict how bills will effect each paycheck.
- shever73 4y agoI use a shared spreadsheet with my wife. We’ve tried various apps and different methods, but we’ve found the spreadsheet works best.
- unixhero 4y agoExcel
- SMAAART 4y agomint.com to track everything + a google spreadsheet for forecasting. It's OK, not perfect but OK.
- mdrzn 4y agoAnyone using Homechart?
- candiddevmike 4y agoHomechart dev here, Homechart is extremely similar to YNAB4 when it comes to finances [1]. One thing it has that YNAB4 does not is the idea of "Budget Goals"--you can set a budget amount for a certain date and Homechart will calculate backwards what you need to save for it. My family uses this for saving for vacations and property taxes, among other things. While Homechart supports importing from CSVs and QFX files, I'm not sure when/if it will support automatic bank importing due to the costs/privacy/security associated with it. Homechart is meant to be a "whole home data management" solution. Budgeting is a small part of its functionality and will expand in the futurel. 1 - https://homechart.app/budgeting/ https://homechart.app/budgeting/
- mdrzn 4y agoThanks for replying! I'm soon gonna move by myself into an apartment and I'll have to keep budget of expenses and stuff, so I've been looking into Homechart which seems to fulfill all my needs. I'll give it a try before trying the other paid services that only do budgeting.
- sph 4y agoI've been using YNAB (You Need A Budget) for more than a decade now. Big fan, not affiliated. https://www.youneedabudget.com/ https://www.youneedabudget.com/
- mdrzn 4y agoIs it still worth the $14.99? Especially for "simpler" needs like someone living in EU, only one bank account, no investments, etc..
- cosgrove 4y agoDo you have goals bigger than $100/year? If so, are you hitting those goals? If you aren't achieving your goals, YNAB can help. I knew I wasn't achieving the goals I had with my DIY spreadsheet and mint.com, and once I started using YNAB everything came together very nicely.
- fox918 4y ago> I knew I wasn't achieving the goals I had with my DIY spreadsheet and mint.com, and once I started using YNAB everything came together very nicely. That is exactly what I hope to express in my sibling comment. Increasing the friction (be it UX or multi-device usage) might make my hesitation to manage my financial situation bigger and I might cease to manage it. This would be quite a bad scenario (well, at least for my savings ;) )
- fox918 4y agoIn my opinion, YNAB allows me to plan for the money I have in my accounts. As I have more plans than I have accounts, I find YNAB inherently useful. It has changed my inner hesitation to deal with exact financial situation and where my money goes to a good understanding on how much money I have planned for which purpose and priorize where my money goes (or shouldn't). This gives me peace of mind. For this, I am willing to spend money. I think 15$/month is worth it. (Even without Bank-Syncing). Of course I could achieve this by other (cheaper) means, but then again I like how frictionless it makes managing my situation. And economically the return of invest in my first year of using YNAB payed for it for quite some years ;) As someone dealing with two currencies, I can recommend RMillan's Plugins for YNAB [0]. [0] https://ynab.rmillan.com/ https://ynab.rmillan.com/ Edit: Not affiliated with YNAB, just a simple user somewhere in switzerland
- Seriomino 4y agoI only have one excel showed which contains all our bank accounts including brokering. I don't live over my means so I stoped trying to record everything but because I'm saving for a house, I need to know roughly how much I have across different accounts. And for everyone curious about why I have more accounts: I have my account, we have a shared account, my wife has one, 1 company brokering account, private brokering account and most critical an banc account for reserved funds/emergency/maintenance. I assume that when we buy a house that we will throw everything together to get the best quote. My mane bank account actually has this analysis feature but I disabled it again because it did not add any value. I always wire money every month out of my account. Everything I have in there is money I can just spend if I wanted to.
- RhysU 4y agoA checkbook register, mostly, along with reading the credit card bill.
- bwooceli 4y agoOne Excel spreadsheet, four bank accounts (only one of which is "actively managed"): Protected Checking, Protected Savings, Discretionary Checking, Discretionary Savings All income and all "regular bills" are aimed at Protected Checking. Every Friday, a fixed (but mutable) amount of weekly "discretionary" money transfers to Discretionary Checking, and a fixed amount goes to Protected Savings. Discretionary Checking is ALL food, groceries, gas, dining out, random crap. If the I swipe my card, it is discretionary. Protected Checking is ALL bills, utilities, mortgage, etc. To manage Protected Savings, I use a spreadsheet with 7 columns: Date, Payee / Source, Category, Sub Category, Amount (all income is positive, all outflow is negative), Balance (=one cell up + amount on this row), Cleared (blank if in the future, "X" for when I reconcile) I took a few hours about 7 years ago and added ALL expected paychecks (excluding bonus), bills/expenses, and transfers to Discretionary and Protected Savings for the next 5 years to it. So I only spend time reconciling the Protected Checking account - once a month or so I copy the ledger from my bank website and go down the list, checking them off and updating the amounts as needed. Other than a quick glance for anything unexpected, I don't reconcile/audit the discretionary account.
- ragebol 4y agoI almost exclusively via debit or credit card, so those expenses are tracked there. If I need a log, I can download a .csv file. Income is only once a month and pretty predictable, more than we spend with a margin that goes to savings, so in short: I don't keep track really.
- howeyc 4y agoI wrote my own[1] version of ledger-cli[2] that was a lot simpler in the format it accepts, but has features outside of the format, in the program, to do what I need/want. I have an import feature for csv files, a web interface for reports and portfolio tracking, and the usual cli features from the original. I've got about 15+ years of transactions in a single file, and I have every intention of continuing forever. I've been so impressed by how well plain text works for this, I always try to use plain text for as many other things as possible. Future proof. I got burned by MS Money going away, no proprietary formats again if I can help it. [1]: https://howeyc.github.io/ledger/ https://howeyc.github.io/ledger/ [2]: https://www.ledger-cli.org https://www.ledger-cli.org
- marttt 4y agoLong time ledger-cli user here. I recently discovered PTA [1, 2, 3], a Perl script by OpenBSD developer Ingo Schwarze. I'm in Europe, so the account numbering he uses is much preferred in my country as compared to Ledger's system. I seem to be in the same boat like Schwarze: ledger-cli is really nice, but has too many features for my modest needs. I also really like the terse single-line syntax in the journal [4] as compared to ledger-cli's multi-line entries. A port of Schwarze's PTA to awk would be lovely, though (as compared to awk, Perl is huge! :); maybe I'll try to hack something together some day. Is anybody aware of other plain text double-entry accounting utilities that would use the numbered chart of accounts? 1: https://mandoc.bsd.lv/pta/ https://mandoc.bsd.lv/pta/ 2: Great discussion on the implementation involving the author: https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20200928123430 https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20200928123430 3: The Design Goals section in the readme is also interesting: https://mandoc.bsd.lv/pta/README https://mandoc.bsd.lv/pta/README 4: https://cvsweb.bsd.lv/~checkout~/pta/journal.example.en?rev=1.2&content-type=text/plain https://cvsweb.bsd.lv/~checkout~/pta/journal.example.en?rev=...
- mosiuerbarso 4y agoYNAB. But the old version, not the new subscription based service. I've been using it for years now. It's budgeting system really helped to turn my money management skills around. I was crap with cash before I started using it.
- bradfa 4y agoA paper checkbook for regular spending things, keeping the old ones filed away in order, and tracking of other accounts and balances on sheets of paper (one per month) in a folder.
- eddyg 4y agoI switched from Mint to https://copilot.money/ https://copilot.money/ a year or so ago and haven't looked back. Vastly better experience. Automatic categorization of downloaded transactions that you "review" day-by-day (to make any category adjustments) is great. It also has automatic budget calculation and tracking (and allows you to set some categories as "carryover", so you have more to spend later when you spend less.)
- DantesKite 4y agoOh wow this one looks very promising.
- turrican 4y agoYou got me to try it out. Wow, it is a LOT more functional than Mint. Thank you!
- silicon2401 4y agoPen and paper. I don't like the idea of giving yet another private company access to my private info, and I find that the manual aspect of tracking finances by hand makes it feel more real and impactful to me.
- woldemariam 4y agopersonal capital https://www.personalcapital.com/ https://www.personalcapital.com/
- Yaser_Amiri 4y agoI use these as a stack: hledger + dab-dab + Surfingkeys Basically all I need to do is: login in to the bank's web app and press Ctrl+Alt+P I wrote a script which can take transactions from my banks webapp, gave it to dab-dab (https://github.com/Yaser-Amiri/dab-dab https://github.com/Yaser-Amiri/dab-dab), added a key binding to Surfingkeys to extract the token and other related stuff from the cookies, send it to dab-dab to run the script, the script adds the transactions to the ledger files. By the way I have some extra sugers in the script for resolving the destination/source of money to hledger's accounts and descriptions.
- wooque 4y agoJust a simple Excel (LibreOffice Calc to be exact) sheet
- drakonka 4y agoI don't anymore. I have a monthly overall budget (a single number) I try to stick to. It encompasses all expenses except for rent. So this one number includes groceries as well as discretionary spending. If I go a little over it's no big deal, but I try to stick to it. I pay myself a pretty low salary. The rest stays in my company, some as a buffer and some gets invested. I find this solution works best for me. I'm constantly working on suppressing my impulse buying habits, but YNAB or other systems didn't really eradicate them and having this single number to aim for each month is just less stressful. I have no debt and OK savings, so I guess it's working.
- lostdog 4y agoJust an excel sheet that I put balances into monthly. As long as the numbers go up, everything's fine. The hardest part is separating investment "earnings" from real earnings. I'd like to know whether I'm saving money from my direct compensation, or whether I'm leaching off stock market gains, but I'm not sure of the right way to track the difference.
- khyryk 4y agoI save the annual account statement PDFs in a folder and add up the amounts across accounts manually in a simple spreadsheet. There's no need for me to go crazy tracking every dollar in and out because I spend well below my cash flow.
- jeegsy 4y agoDowload csv from bank once a month. Use python to automate categories. Add to database, explore with datasette
- binaryjason 4y agoI have been trying out Lunch Money. It's pretty much a YNAB clone but seems to be more developer focused (uses mono space fonts and has API). It uses Plaid just like YNAB, but somehow auto import seems to more reliable on some banks. Here is my referral link: https://lunchmoney.app/?refer=goipolll https://lunchmoney.app/?refer=goipolll
- manifoldgeo 4y agoI use a homegrown web app that uses GnuCash behind the scenes via a Python Flask app. Works just well enough that I don't have to open GnuCash anymore. You can try it here if interested: https://demo.checkyour.finance https://demo.checkyour.finance Source code: https://github.com/bxbrenden/GnuCash-Helper https://github.com/bxbrenden/GnuCash-Helper
- antisthenes 4y agoI don't. I know that my mortgage/utilities/insurance/food bill is roughly X% of my take-home earnings. My savings are Y% of my earnings. X% + Y% is roughly ~90%. The other 10% is an everything fund that goes to my liquid checking account in the bank. So that bank account is growing very slightly. So the only thing required from me is to look at the bank account once a quarter or so, and make sure it's still roughly at the same level and there were no outlier expenses.
- sbehere 4y agoI use a home grown set of scripts to automatically pull transactions from banks/credit cards where possible, auto categorize them, and create shareable dashboards. All without sharing credentials with any third party. The method is described in this blog post: https://sagar.se/blog/where-is-the-money/ https://sagar.se/blog/where-is-the-money/