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I love the idea of keeping my finances private while still having a useful tracker/planner. And I love that this would give me some protection against a new ve

I love the idea of keeping my finances private while still having a useful tracker/planner. And I love that this would give me some protection against a new version making things worse. I also love the option to write my own plugin or to hack the source code itself (even though I probably wouldn't). But I don't think I'm willing to give up fully automated data refreshes at this point. I have too many accounts to track.

embedding-shape 11mo ago
> I love the idea of keeping my finances private I'd love that too, but I'm not sure it's even feasible or possible, at least in the EU country where I live. I, like most people (I think?) need to file taxes each year, and those include my new positions, or what positions have disappeared, including how much I have in savings. And, the only way for me to keep savings without losing money, is to keep it in a bank, so it's again not private. Feels like "private finance" been dead for a long time, unless you start using cryptocurrencies specifically for privacy, like zcash, otherwise you'll be having non-private data at least somewhere.
- ldoughty 11mo ago
  What you describe sounds more like keeping your assets a secret... and if you feel defeated because the government can know, how do you feel about hiring an accountant? Or executing stock trades? You can't keep those activities a secret from those agents working for you. You would probably expect them to keep their privileged information about you _private_ though, right? And I think that's what the parent post is talking about. Today's companies make you agree to 3 50-page documents which they can update at any time and your continued use after such silent updates constitutes consent.. and at some point they will sell your financial status/well-being to people for profit. So the more you feed them the more of your data that is being easily sold. We ultimately probably can't stop that, but we can make it more difficult. Many apps like this would take your information and sell it.. having an option that lets you track your own finances without becoming a product is nice.
  - GoatOfAplomb 11mo ago
    Right on. In this case, I used "private" to mean "the makers of this particular product don't have a ton of my financial information." I don't expect a product like this to prevent my government, or my brokerage, or my bank, or even a middleman account aggregator, from knowing about my money. But something like this can be one less thing, at least.
  - a-fadil 11mo ago
    Also it’s more about having the optionality. There are tons of cloud-based and connected SaaS trackers out there, but very few local ones. Having options to: – Install a piece of software and run it locally, no subscription, no cloud – Have to right to use a nicer app instead of a spreadsheet – not hand over your banking creds. Some banks will void your account insurance if you do – Reduce your exposure by not putting all your financial data on some startup’s servers
- purple_turtle 11mo ago
  Giving access to the same info to more people is reducing privacy. I prefer to not give to even more people. In the same way as my doctor knowns some private health info but to keep it private I would prefer to not give it to my employer.
a-fadil 11mo ago
Yeah, makes sense. I’ll probably toss in an add-on or optional integration with an account aggregator later, so folks can either opt in or just stick with a local-only setup if they prefer.
- GoatOfAplomb 11mo ago
  I'll certainly give this another look if you do. Good luck with it.
- amrawad 11mo ago
  Hey Happy to help build an integration with [Lunch Flow](https://lunchflow.app https://lunchflow.app), which aggregates multiple open banking providers for global coverage behind a single API.
  - iancarroll 11mo ago
    It’s great that you have coverage across multiple countries. I’ve noticed most budget apps cannot handle multiple currencies at all, much less automated sync across multiple countries.
    - amrawad 11mo ago
      that's indeed the idea! it started with me finding out that I'm missing on a lot of great personal finance apps because bank sync is mostly catered towards the US, and mostly use a single provider, so wanted to change that :)
throw0101c 11mo ago
> I love the idea of keeping my finances private while still having a useful tracker/planner. YNAB4 was a local client, but with YNAB5 they sadly (to me) went online and subscription. I happily paid for v4 (one-time purchase), but was/am not willing to pay for v5 because (a) I don't like renting software, and (b) I have no need for syncing (which a subscription could justify to pay for ongoing server costs).
- DarmokJalad1701 11mo ago
  ActualBudget is a pretty great YNAB alternative that is free and locally hosted.
  - Semaphor 11mo ago
    I second that. Switched from ynab4 (used some version since 2011) to Actual Budget a few month ago. Some tiny ux issues, but improvement in many more areas. Don't regret finally kicking ynab out.
  - Terr_ 11mo ago
    Odd, earlier this week I was cleaning up some ooooold VMs/docker stuff and came across something I was using to try out actualbudget, so it's an interesting coincidence hearing it mentioned again today. IIRC I was pretty impressed with it back then. It looks like there are more non-direct install options now. (Flatpack, appimage, etc.)
- polalavik 11mo ago
  sort of different but I built https://paperright.xyz https://paperright.xyz budgeting app to address some of my frustration with budgeting apps, bank connections, ease of use, privacy, etc. It doesn't connect to your bank or take any info other than your email (+stripe if you sign up for pro). I built it because i needed a budgeting app for my brain. Also research shows AI/automated financial management doesnt work you need to manually track things to really understand whats going on.
- adastra22 11mo ago
  Have you tried financier? https://financier.io/ https://financier.io/
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
Klonoar 11mo ago
This is one where I don't quite get the angle of hosting locally to preserve privacy. By nature of the economic system, you must interact with 3rd parties, unless you somehow live a life where you can manage to be all crypto or (increasingly harder) cash based. At that point, there is no real benefit to privacy outside of ensuring that whatever institution(s) you work with aren't doing anything odd. I'm open to missing something here.
- a-fadil 11mo ago
  It’s more about having the optionality to not be tied to a SaaS provider and trusting them with all your financial data and bank credentials. Having options to: 1– Install a piece of software and run it locally, no subscription, no cloud 2– Have to right to use a nicer app instead of a spreadsheet 3– not hand over your banking creds. Some banks will void your account insurance if you do 4– Reduce your exposure by not putting all your financial data on some startup’s servers.
  - dmoy 11mo ago
    It's also maybe more useful in the US where we're behind the times w.r.t. better APIs for accessing banking & investment data
    - nirvdrum 11mo ago
      Actual Budget uses SimpleFIN [1] in the US. The integration is pretty good. The big alternative is Plaid and I don't trust them at all. It's a shame we don't have a standard for electronic banking yet. [1] -- https://beta-bridge.simplefin.org/ https://beta-bridge.simplefin.org/
      - mrbombastic 11mo ago
        There is also teller.io i tried them for a side project and were pretty good, but I didn’t go to far
- cortesoft 11mo ago
whyleyc 11mo ago
Have you considered https://tiller.com/ https://tiller.com/ ? They can pull feeds in and refresh automatically but have a big privacy play so that only you get to see your finances (and display and manage it in Excel or Google Sheets).
- grvdrm 11mo ago
  Do you use it? Curious for your thoughts. Right now I have CoPilot. Apps are ok, not great. https://copilot.money/ https://copilot.money/
- GoatOfAplomb 11mo ago
  Thanks for the tip. I'll definitely look into it.
- doctorhandshake 11mo ago
  Big +1 for Tiller after trying several other options including YNAB. Your data in a spreadsheet - go nuts, use our templates, make your own, etc.
conradev 11mo ago
I manage all of my finances with Beancount (https://github.com/beancount/beancount https://github.com/beancount/beancount). It has a native document store and I primarily use it to archive all of my statements to share with my accountants via Fava (https://github.com/beancount/fava https://github.com/beancount/fava). It’s not pretty, but it’s all in one (local) git repo. Language models are great at turning those statements into Beancount postings and fixing errors, but the local ones not so much yet.
- bob_theslob646 11mo ago
  >A double-entry bookkeeping computer language that lets you define financial transaction records in a text file, read them in memory, generate a variety of reports from them, and provides a web interface. Why would someone need this? How do you use this?
  - zephyreon 11mo ago
    It’s actually pretty great if you’re type a about keeping your finances in check. Check out https://plaintextaccounting.org/ https://plaintextaccounting.org/
  - NoboruWataya 11mo ago
    It's just a way of keeping track of your finances. If you just have a single bank account and nothing else, then it probably doesn't give you much. But if your assets and liabilities are spread across multiple bank accounts, brokerage accounts, credit cards, loans, P2P/angel investing platforms, etc, then it can be a good way to get a holistic overview of your finances in one place and can help with things like tax returns. (I don't use beancount but I use GnuCash which is a very similar concept.)
  - conradev 11mo ago
    I use it primarily to categorize spending to know things like “how much money did I spend on electronics doodads in the last year”. The double-entry part is a fanciness for checking that all money in (paychecks) equals all money out (spending, taxes). You can selectively disable it by “padding” balances. I have it on for my checking account and it catches duplicate postings for transfers between my Venmo and my checking account. I can also put the initial/final balances from the bank statements as “guards” to verify that it all adds up. This sort of structure is really helpful for a human or language model. You can break the translation work down into subunits with fast correctness checks.
aaliyamarrey 11mo ago
[flagged]
abustamam 11mo ago
I went through this rabbit hole. I liked Mint (I know it wasn't private, but I liked it), I tried Personal Capital / Empower because I had a retirement account with them, I tried Monarch. But none of them had the one killer feature I needed — my wife and I both have individual accounts and we also have a joint account for household expenses. I want to track all of those separately. The I found Tiller[0]. I've been really happy with it so far. It basically syncs your transactions to a Google sheet you own. It comes with some basic things like budget and auto categorization based on fuzzy string matching, but because it's Google sheets you can play with it and do whatever you want with it. But the nice thing is that you can dictate which accounts go into which sheet. So I have two sheets — one for household accounts and one for personal. And I don't need a separate subscription, which would have been required if I used any other service I had looked at. I can't remember exactly how much the subscription was, but I don't remember it being unfair. [0] https://tiller.com/ https://tiller.com/
ekhaliul 11mo ago
self hosted ActualBudget and SimpleFin for fetching data automatically works great for me so far. You can also setup multiple instances and tune them separately if you like.
- GoatOfAplomb 10mo ago
  Looks promising. Thank you.

embedding-shape 11mo ago

> I love the idea of keeping my finances private I'd love that too, but I'm not sure it's even feasible or possible, at least in the EU country where I live. I, like most people (I think?) need to file taxes each year, and those include my new positions, or what positions have disappeared, including how much I have in savings. And, the only way for me to keep savings without losing money, is to keep it in a bank, so it's again not private. Feels like "private finance" been dead for a long time, unless you start using cryptocurrencies specifically for privacy, like zcash, otherwise you'll be having non-private data at least somewhere.

ldoughty 11mo ago
What you describe sounds more like keeping your assets a secret... and if you feel defeated because the government can know, how do you feel about hiring an accountant? Or executing stock trades? You can't keep those activities a secret from those agents working for you. You would probably expect them to keep their privileged information about you _private_ though, right? And I think that's what the parent post is talking about. Today's companies make you agree to 3 50-page documents which they can update at any time and your continued use after such silent updates constitutes consent.. and at some point they will sell your financial status/well-being to people for profit. So the more you feed them the more of your data that is being easily sold. We ultimately probably can't stop that, but we can make it more difficult. Many apps like this would take your information and sell it.. having an option that lets you track your own finances without becoming a product is nice.
- GoatOfAplomb 11mo ago
  Right on. In this case, I used "private" to mean "the makers of this particular product don't have a ton of my financial information." I don't expect a product like this to prevent my government, or my brokerage, or my bank, or even a middleman account aggregator, from knowing about my money. But something like this can be one less thing, at least.
- a-fadil 11mo ago
  Also it’s more about having the optionality. There are tons of cloud-based and connected SaaS trackers out there, but very few local ones. Having options to: – Install a piece of software and run it locally, no subscription, no cloud – Have to right to use a nicer app instead of a spreadsheet – not hand over your banking creds. Some banks will void your account insurance if you do – Reduce your exposure by not putting all your financial data on some startup’s servers
purple_turtle 11mo ago
Giving access to the same info to more people is reducing privacy. I prefer to not give to even more people. In the same way as my doctor knowns some private health info but to keep it private I would prefer to not give it to my employer.

a-fadil 11mo ago

Yeah, makes sense. I’ll probably toss in an add-on or optional integration with an account aggregator later, so folks can either opt in or just stick with a local-only setup if they prefer.

GoatOfAplomb 11mo ago
I'll certainly give this another look if you do. Good luck with it.
amrawad 11mo ago
Hey Happy to help build an integration with [Lunch Flow](https://lunchflow.app https://lunchflow.app), which aggregates multiple open banking providers for global coverage behind a single API.
- iancarroll 11mo ago
  It’s great that you have coverage across multiple countries. I’ve noticed most budget apps cannot handle multiple currencies at all, much less automated sync across multiple countries.
  - amrawad 11mo ago
    that's indeed the idea! it started with me finding out that I'm missing on a lot of great personal finance apps because bank sync is mostly catered towards the US, and mostly use a single provider, so wanted to change that :)

throw0101c 11mo ago

> I love the idea of keeping my finances private while still having a useful tracker/planner. YNAB4 was a local client, but with YNAB5 they sadly (to me) went online and subscription. I happily paid for v4 (one-time purchase), but was/am not willing to pay for v5 because (a) I don't like renting software, and (b) I have no need for syncing (which a subscription could justify to pay for ongoing server costs).

DarmokJalad1701 11mo ago
ActualBudget is a pretty great YNAB alternative that is free and locally hosted.
- Semaphor 11mo ago
  I second that. Switched from ynab4 (used some version since 2011) to Actual Budget a few month ago. Some tiny ux issues, but improvement in many more areas. Don't regret finally kicking ynab out.
- Terr_ 11mo ago
  Odd, earlier this week I was cleaning up some ooooold VMs/docker stuff and came across something I was using to try out actualbudget, so it's an interesting coincidence hearing it mentioned again today. IIRC I was pretty impressed with it back then. It looks like there are more non-direct install options now. (Flatpack, appimage, etc.)
polalavik 11mo ago
sort of different but I built https://paperright.xyz https://paperright.xyz budgeting app to address some of my frustration with budgeting apps, bank connections, ease of use, privacy, etc. It doesn't connect to your bank or take any info other than your email (+stripe if you sign up for pro). I built it because i needed a budgeting app for my brain. Also research shows AI/automated financial management doesnt work you need to manually track things to really understand whats going on.
adastra22 11mo ago
Have you tried financier? https://financier.io/ https://financier.io/

deleted 11mo ago

[deleted]

Klonoar 11mo ago

This is one where I don't quite get the angle of hosting locally to preserve privacy. By nature of the economic system, you must interact with 3rd parties, unless you somehow live a life where you can manage to be all crypto or (increasingly harder) cash based. At that point, there is no real benefit to privacy outside of ensuring that whatever institution(s) you work with aren't doing anything odd. I'm open to missing something here.

a-fadil 11mo ago
It’s more about having the optionality to not be tied to a SaaS provider and trusting them with all your financial data and bank credentials. Having options to: 1– Install a piece of software and run it locally, no subscription, no cloud 2– Have to right to use a nicer app instead of a spreadsheet 3– not hand over your banking creds. Some banks will void your account insurance if you do 4– Reduce your exposure by not putting all your financial data on some startup’s servers.
- dmoy 11mo ago
  It's also maybe more useful in the US where we're behind the times w.r.t. better APIs for accessing banking & investment data
  - nirvdrum 11mo ago
    Actual Budget uses SimpleFIN [1] in the US. The integration is pretty good. The big alternative is Plaid and I don't trust them at all. It's a shame we don't have a standard for electronic banking yet. [1] -- https://beta-bridge.simplefin.org/ https://beta-bridge.simplefin.org/
    - mrbombastic 11mo ago
      There is also teller.io i tried them for a side project and were pretty good, but I didn’t go to far
cortesoft 11mo ago

whyleyc 11mo ago

Have you considered https://tiller.com/ https://tiller.com/ ? They can pull feeds in and refresh automatically but have a big privacy play so that only you get to see your finances (and display and manage it in Excel or Google Sheets).

grvdrm 11mo ago
Do you use it? Curious for your thoughts. Right now I have CoPilot. Apps are ok, not great. https://copilot.money/ https://copilot.money/
GoatOfAplomb 11mo ago
Thanks for the tip. I'll definitely look into it.
doctorhandshake 11mo ago
Big +1 for Tiller after trying several other options including YNAB. Your data in a spreadsheet - go nuts, use our templates, make your own, etc.

conradev 11mo ago

I manage all of my finances with Beancount (https://github.com/beancount/beancount https://github.com/beancount/beancount). It has a native document store and I primarily use it to archive all of my statements to share with my accountants via Fava (https://github.com/beancount/fava https://github.com/beancount/fava). It’s not pretty, but it’s all in one (local) git repo. Language models are great at turning those statements into Beancount postings and fixing errors, but the local ones not so much yet.

bob_theslob646 11mo ago
>A double-entry bookkeeping computer language that lets you define financial transaction records in a text file, read them in memory, generate a variety of reports from them, and provides a web interface. Why would someone need this? How do you use this?
- zephyreon 11mo ago
  It’s actually pretty great if you’re type a about keeping your finances in check. Check out https://plaintextaccounting.org/ https://plaintextaccounting.org/
- NoboruWataya 11mo ago
  It's just a way of keeping track of your finances. If you just have a single bank account and nothing else, then it probably doesn't give you much. But if your assets and liabilities are spread across multiple bank accounts, brokerage accounts, credit cards, loans, P2P/angel investing platforms, etc, then it can be a good way to get a holistic overview of your finances in one place and can help with things like tax returns. (I don't use beancount but I use GnuCash which is a very similar concept.)
- conradev 11mo ago
  I use it primarily to categorize spending to know things like “how much money did I spend on electronics doodads in the last year”. The double-entry part is a fanciness for checking that all money in (paychecks) equals all money out (spending, taxes). You can selectively disable it by “padding” balances. I have it on for my checking account and it catches duplicate postings for transfers between my Venmo and my checking account. I can also put the initial/final balances from the bank statements as “guards” to verify that it all adds up. This sort of structure is really helpful for a human or language model. You can break the translation work down into subunits with fast correctness checks.

aaliyamarrey 11mo ago

[flagged]

abustamam 11mo ago

I went through this rabbit hole. I liked Mint (I know it wasn't private, but I liked it), I tried Personal Capital / Empower because I had a retirement account with them, I tried Monarch. But none of them had the one killer feature I needed — my wife and I both have individual accounts and we also have a joint account for household expenses. I want to track all of those separately. The I found Tiller[0]. I've been really happy with it so far. It basically syncs your transactions to a Google sheet you own. It comes with some basic things like budget and auto categorization based on fuzzy string matching, but because it's Google sheets you can play with it and do whatever you want with it. But the nice thing is that you can dictate which accounts go into which sheet. So I have two sheets — one for household accounts and one for personal. And I don't need a separate subscription, which would have been required if I used any other service I had looked at. I can't remember exactly how much the subscription was, but I don't remember it being unfair. [0] https://tiller.com/ https://tiller.com/

ekhaliul 11mo ago

self hosted ActualBudget and SimpleFin for fetching data automatically works great for me so far. You can also setup multiple instances and tune them separately if you like.

GoatOfAplomb 10mo ago
Looks promising. Thank you.