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I don't. I tried YNAB for a long time, but it just got too stressful. I have been thinking, if I were to create a budget tracker, my hot take would be to make

I don't. I tried YNAB for a long time, but it just got too stressful. I have been thinking, if I were to create a budget tracker, my hot take would be to make an imperfect one, aimed at people who don't need to budget "to survive" and so can make a mistake, overspend and then reign it in next month. This software would just track the major source of discretionary spend: your credit card, and auto allocate to buckets using AI mostly, and maybe email you an alert if overspending (like the battery alerts from Ring!). Any non credit-card account tends to be used for essentials like bills, mortgage and so on. Since I am not going to not pay those, it doesn't matter. The idea is to say "can spend $10,000/m on credit card" or whatever, and go from there. MVP: download credit card CSV, run some local python code to auto allocate and fire off email if there is an issue (there was an API to email thing posted on HN a while back).

enos_feedler 3y ago
i like this idea. I would use something like this but it would need to present me with a way to sort into two buckets: personal spend and LLC spend. I would instantly stop paying quickbooks the $15/mo for that app. I feel there are many use cases for an app that can just regularly pull financial transactions, perform a function on them and spit out an email on a regular basis or on some kind of a trigger. I wrote a SaaS tool for letting me know when a stock sale would trigger a wash sale event for tax purposes. I host it at https://washsaleadvisor.com https://washsaleadvisor.com. It uses plaid to pull the trade transactions from most bank APIs and sends me a daily email with useful info. The last feature I added was refactoring the wash sale functionality into WASM functions and then put a code editor in the dashboard. Anyone who signs up could theoretically turn "wash sale advisor" into basically any operation that iterates through transactions and renders an email and sends via sendgrid.

enos_feedler 3y ago

i like this idea. I would use something like this but it would need to present me with a way to sort into two buckets: personal spend and LLC spend. I would instantly stop paying quickbooks the $15/mo for that app. I feel there are many use cases for an app that can just regularly pull financial transactions, perform a function on them and spit out an email on a regular basis or on some kind of a trigger. I wrote a SaaS tool for letting me know when a stock sale would trigger a wash sale event for tax purposes. I host it at https://washsaleadvisor.com https://washsaleadvisor.com. It uses plaid to pull the trade transactions from most bank APIs and sends me a daily email with useful info. The last feature I added was refactoring the wash sale functionality into WASM functions and then put a code editor in the dashboard. Anyone who signs up could theoretically turn "wash sale advisor" into basically any operation that iterates through transactions and renders an email and sends via sendgrid.