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.
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.
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).
- 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.
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.