Ask HN: How do you plan to track your personal finances in 2020? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you plan to track your personal finances in 2020?

12 points_xnmw10 comments

I'm just about done with YNAB due to the lack of multi-currency support. Also, as a digital nomad, fixed-size budgeting just doesn't work for me.

Manual-entry solutions like spreadsheets are too tedious. I find MoneyWiz to be clunky and ugly, and I don't trust it, perhaps because I was spoiled by YNAB's super polished clearing/approval/reconciliation UI.

For 2020, I'm thinking of building myself a Plaid API integration into Airtable or Google Sheets. What about you?

p.s. I'm Canadian, so I must pass on all US-centric software.

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Personally I just export a CSV file with my monthly bank transactions that I feed to a django app I've made.

1/ It flags suspicious entries according to rules that I manually add and it automatically highlights transactions involving new parties.

2/ I've added tags to be able to classify the expenses and present them in a pie chart so I can at a glance see if I was on track or not last month and adjust things the next one.

In the end it took 2h to write, I spent now 5min / month on this reviewing, I've found the bank made an error and was charging me for something I've never signed for and I'm finally following a loose budget and building savings in a "relaxed" way.

ledger/hledger again, though I also use YNAB for my cash accounts, credit cards, and other debts. I can live with its single-currency support for that. But I use ledger/hledger for my total picture of my finances.

NB: I do everything manually. So I enter in my transactions with YNAB manually, then later enter them into my ledger file. I find that this keeps me better aware of my financial status than automatic downloads, but that's a personal preference.

Thank you for the hledger tip. Definitely going to look into that. I have been completely disillusioned with YNAB due to the community and almost fanatical mindset that comes with it.

Maybe also checkout beancount. It's a more opinionated and slightly simpler (h)ledger alternative, but it features an excellent web interface called fava.

What do you you expect from the data?

As a german: we have no good software to track from banking data so I just don't. I live modest and check if my account on average goes up or down (usually goes up, so all good).

I will calc an average to see how much to put in to retirement savings monthly soon.

I don't plan on tracking really, so let's see how that goes :)

Same way I have tracked it all my life. Text files & spreadsheet.

That doesn't say anything about how though. What so you write in these text files and how's your spreadsheet set up?

I personally use app from Play store, quite handy :)

Tillerhq.com is awesome

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