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Comment by aklemm | Hacker News Reader

I'm right on the verge of going with the new YNAB (first serious attempt to organize finances and budget outside my wife's use of Mint), but maybe I'll give Ledger a shot first.

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The power of ynab isn't the tool, but the philosophy. The UI works well because it changes how you think of your budget. I'm a little disappointed the author didn't comment on how ledger compares with the budgeting side, as tracking expenses is only half (or less) of the battle. I'd recommend ynab because it forces you to plan instead of react. I think as far as software goes, that's the fundamental advantage- you think differently. It's kind of like how editing in vim you start to think in terms of verb-object.

I'm stuck on ynab4 for as long as possible, but you can try out the nYNAB (the SaaS offering) for free for a little more than a month. If you get it, be sure to watch the instructional videos.

ledger can do budgeting: http://www.ledger-cli.org/3.0/doc/ledger3.html#Budgeting

That help section on budgeting only talks about periodic transactions. Is there also some notion of "estimated future, one-off, transaction"? I suppose you could implement that using ordinary transactions.

It's just that after fighting with gnucash, I got the impressions that budgeting and accounting are very different things and that I should not try to use the same tool for both jobs.

I think you could just use a "yearly" period for that. When I used ledger, I started a new file every year.

Yea, I thought that was a pretty incomplete part of the documentation when I looked through it recently. I haven't done any budgeting in ledger, but the section on virtual accounts seemed like it presented a better way to do a budget: http://ledger-cli.org/3.0/doc/ledger3.html#Introduction-to-L....

+1 philosophy, that's been the biggest change for me compared to trying (and failing) to use other systems.

I don't see why YNAB4 would stop working -- certainly I intend to keep using it as long as I can.

I also noticed that you can still buy a license on Steam, at least in the UK, and having run the application once through Steam you apparently get a license key that works standalone.

And v4 runs well on Linux using wine :).

I have a few friends who try and champion both YNAB and Ledger but Mint works super well for me by keeping my thinking Macro level. If you are someone who just needs a broad budget, Mint can be great. But if you think you need super fine grained control to the point that it will re-enforce changing your spending happens Ledger/YNAB will for sure help with that. I just find that I stop using them, and that was worse.

Just be aware that they solve very different problems. I'm actually very confused about how the author of the article jumped from a budgeting tool to a double entry bookkeeping application and they somehow solved the same problem. I guess if you just need some method of recording all of your income and expenditures, they overlap in that area.

YNAB was/is a great tool and would have continued to use them if not prompted to change. I was not using the budgeting part however.

If you don't use the budgeting part then there are many better solutions out there.

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