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Don't know why people are downvoting you, your comment was grey when I read it. I see nothing that makes your comment invalid and I think it contributes to the conversation.

Perhaps it's not the popular opinion, but in a lot of cases I agree with you. Watching over every penny meticulously can become a much too consuming habit that produces little net positive result. It's easy (at least for me) to get caught up in trying to never waste money, and it's really not worth it.

I guess people are downvoting him because of his assurance that instead of managing finances one simply has to earn more.

For most people earning more is not feasible, at least not while having some personal live, family matters and depends also on their education, upbringing and people they know.

Some people work a fuckton of hours for a measly pay, and so they can't get to earn more, because they have no time to improve themselves or even to go to interviews.

For these kind of people, that is the majority, some time of personal accounting will be easy and will bear lots of fruits, while they wouldn't be able to improve their jobs in the near future.

I didn't read it as "one simply has to earn more".

He's saying it's better to work on things that will lead to one earning more money, rather spending time monitoring how much one is spending. The first leads to an improved state, the second is just for ensuring one's state does not worsen. With one your increasing your 'cap', with the other you're just maximizing given a 'cap' (cap meaning the amount of money you can work with).

Its not an either or proposition though. It's frankly ridiculous to propose that I could give up actively managing my finances and use that extra time (an hour a week maybe) to significantly increase my income.

The post in question currently stands at 31 points. One quick downvote and all up from there. You are right that for most people earning more isn't feasible. But I wasn't speaking for everybody. Specifically for the upwardly mobile. If you aren't in the position to increase your income then you by definition aren't upwardly mobile.

It's a mix of different issues going on in that comment:

- Some kind of perfectionistic NIH accounting system is probably not what people have in mind when they talk about this personal finance accounting being useful

- The project details seemed to overcome the initial scope

- Rather than addressing the need for a more elegant framework for personal accounting, OP decided to just make more money, and for all we know has discarded personal financial accounting

- We know not what kind of blind spots this may have created (for real: You are absolutely discarding a level of granularity and the freedom to find a way to make use of it)

- While we can trust that OP will probably be fine, we are left to wonder if it's really so great to tell people not to do this kind of accounting when you kind of turned it into a hyperbolic mess when you implemented it yourself.

The project wasn't perfectionistic, I specifically designed it to be as easy to add and look at what I was spending as possible. Instead of putting spending into accounts, I used simple categories. I had a dashboard view that gave me exactly the window into my finances I was looking for.

It was good enough for my purposes. But I kept running into situations that called for extended customization. Sure I could have extended the app to account for temporary changes in how I wanted to do things. But it just kinda stopped making sense after awhile. It made me look into how I managed my finances before I ever did accounting more closely.

What I found was that I never really got into the sort of mindless spending habits that kill most people. Accounting was, in essence, a unnecessary addition to an app that was already working just fine. It didn't buy me much when I was doing it, and I didn't miss it when it went away. My life just isn't that complicated.

Similarly, I've never needed productivity software other than, on very rare occasions when I'm super busy, a pad of paper and a pen. And I was a GTD zealot 8 years ago.

My advice in my original comment was tailored towards people who plan on being upwardly mobile. If that's what you want to do, then personal finance is a waste of time. Ramit Sethi's advice is the best, chase big wins, automate your finances, and don't stress out over small repeated expenses.

If you've hit a career plateau and don't see yourself making more money anytime soon, then by all means make the most of what you have. But c'mon, this is Hacker News. We can all be upwardly mobile here if we want to be.

The foundation isn't the issue. You can write an intuitive interface around a double-entry accounting system, but you must keep to the fundamentals of money flowing through the system.

I just save (401K, HSA, etc.) a set amount from every paycheck, and view the rest as "spendable" and don't worry about accounting for it beyond that.

This is a form of personal budgeting, even if you don't view it like that.

Yes it's a simple budgeting technique but it's not accounting (particularly accounting as in the context of the article which we are debating).

I haven't downvoted him, but I can't see how he gets a better idea of his finances from a non-balancing financial system.

Then don't work on an app for budgeting, just budget.

You seem to think keeping a budget is some onerous, never ending task. In reality, probably spending about half an hour per paycheck is fine, once you have a system in place.

And it certainly does not require a ton of technology, either. People budgeted just fine long before personal computers (lookup "envelope budgeting").

You are conflating two unrelated things. Spending a lot of time writing a budget app may have been a mistake. But you don't have to write your own app in order to budget.

Yeah, when I hear "spend the time you spend on your budget to make more money instead", I can't imagine how I would meaningfully translate my one or two hours a month of relaxing low-energy financial planning into making more money, or why I would want to try.

Having spent a bunch of time with GnuCash, YNAB, and budgetsimple, I've given up trying to have a formal budget. Instead, my wife and I just spend 20 minutes every 2 weeks looking at our accounts and talking about any big expenses that we have coming up.

I don't know that you're asking for it, but I'll share my approach. I use GNUCash for transaction recording, and I have two levels of budgeting:

Level 1: next 30 days. I have a couple dozen recurring transactions, generated 90 days out. If, based on the current balance plus expenses 30 days out, my checking account is projected to go negative, I do something about it. Otherwise, I think about shifting some money into higher interest savings, since I don't need it in checking. And if savings exceeds my emergency fund definition, additional Roth IRA contributions may be in order. The end result is that reducing float in checking can end up with a pretty high return. Frequency: Once a month.

Level 2: Annual Budget. At a high level, I use a simple spreadsheet to budget all income for the year into savings and expenses. It's complexity has grown over the past six years to calculate things like income taxes, so I can compare job offers in other locations and states. I also use it to verify my very high retirement savings rates are viable. Because more savings contributions -> less taxes -> more contributions etc., a spreadsheet lets me "solve" for maximal savings. It also lets me target expensive areas, like rent, or dropping cable, phone plans, etc. Frequency: Once a year.

I can see being more lackadaisical about personal accounting on 30k/year, but when you make 15k/yr you need a budget and you need to track your expenses to survive. I think this is just something that varies from person to person, but it's nice to know that you spent X amount on groceries per week versus Y amount on gas so you can pinpoint what is hitting you most during times of dire financial stress to optimize.

When I made that much, I didn't bother with a budget or accounting either, I knew to the nearest $5 how much I had in my pocket and my bank account at all times. Writing down that which I already carefully tracked in my head wouldn't have accomplished anything.

What you're missing is that at that level, what you can get through spending money is going to be vastly dwarfed by what you can get through ingenuity. My response to a bigger electric bill in the winter wasn't to save money on food, it was to shut my heat off, build an enclosure around my desk and heat it with a small space heater.

It's awesome that worked for you. I'm not that smart so for me, budgeting and tracking my expenses by category helped me become comfortable enough to spend more time on freelancing and job seeking. I won't say your way doesn't work, because you are a testament that it does, but I don't think I could have taken this approach and gotten to where I am now.

You were effectively budgeting in your head. Good for you. Can everyone match your skill? Who knows. I guess no. I cannot budget this well. It is not that I do not know my level of cash, it is just that I cannot accurately estimate my spending rate and I almost always spend too much for the month.

Best of luck.

So because you are smart enough to do this in your head you think people who do the exact same thing as you just writing it down instead of doing it in their head are wasting their time? That's pretty silly.

This makes sense if you can move upward. Obviously not everyone can. For these people, this advice is toxic and life destroying.

The vast majority of people can improve their prospective in life. At the very least they can be more efficient so they can spend more time with their kids; That way the kids have a better life than their parents.

Though, to be fair, I think they should do both. Budgeting/finance is an incredibly important skill for all but the richest levels of society.

Quality of life seems to increase monotonically in the states. The relative social status does not, on average. Considering happiness seems more based on the latter, this seems to be intractable.

Happiness is based on how well you are off compared to others? I mean, this is incredibly sad. But it's true, for some, I guess.

This is why those who are making 15$/hour don't want the minimum wage to go to 15$/hour - even if they think they'll get a small bump to compensate.

You're comparing life as a bootstrapper to a paid job more than life with accounting support of some sort to without.

Further, there's no reason you can't do both. I don't account for my personal finances in any way, but I don't spend a lot on silly things. I do however use an app (http://streaksapp.com) to push me. Without that, I'd be more inclined to take the easier or lazier options. We can account for our time and progress even if we don't do it for finances.

I take the mechanistic approach to my personal finances, and treat them like business finances basically. It's a resource to be used, not a status symbol to be hoarded. Life has been wonderful as a result!

I do keep a budget and keep track of things.

You may have noticed that the article suggests using a tool, `hledger`, rather than creating your own accountancy software. Infact, based on your comment that you found the standard system isn't suited for the task, it's possible that your disdain for personal accounting comes from a lack of understanding of how to do it correctly.