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Comment by tra3 | Hacker News Reader

YNAB (https://www.youneedabudget.com) for budgeting and tracking spending. It forces you to pre-allocate your funds which ensures that you don't overspend unconsciously via credit cards. I've been very successful with it.

> Anything that follows the "don't make me think" philosophy?

I don't think that exists. YNAB requires pretty diligent tracking, but the payout (heh) is huge.

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I second YNAB, but as you said, it requires diligent tracking especially for those of us living outside the US and can't hook their bank account into it.

I happen to love the diligent tracking, though, and it's just part of my daily routine. Every time my wife or I charge a card or the money from the ATM, we log it in YNAB. Then every day I open my banking app and reconcile the charges with what we've input into YNAB. Sometimes we forget to log something, or mis-log something, or there are surprise charges to be dealt with.

Now that I'm in the habit, it takes a total of 10 minutes a day.

I'm hoping the arrival of PSD2 in Europe early this year will finally mean we get apps that will be able to auto report as opposed to manual accounting like it has to be done today

There are some fintechs already paving the way and abstracting psd2 away. I just tried to log into my bank using tink (no affiliation) and it worked great.

I'll have a look! Being a French guy in the Netherlands and with money spread over 4 different banks in several countries, bookkeeping really is a pain. I looked a few times in the past but support is notoriously lacking in NL.

There are already plenty of providers (at least in the UK) that offer the APIs YNAB need - yet for some reason they've opted to use two obscure North America only aggregators. Salt Edge and Yodlee are two very heavily used providers that work internationally.

I just wish they offered a one-time payment as they used to on Steam. I hate having to budget for another subscription.

I think thats ironic.

I loved ynab4 and actually build a smallish webservice to duplicate it's functionality after it went SaaS.

It sadly stopped working with the PSD2 regulation this fall.

I'd definitely pay for it, if I could connect my bank account for automated imports.

It's seriously silly that they still haven't come around to that. There are several platforms which let you access basically all banks in Europe. And these have been around for years.

Which platforms? Do they also work if you have an American bank AND a German bank?

> Do they also work if you have an American bank AND a German bank?

why would that even matter? its not rocket science to add more integrations. especially in an asynchronous process like fetching bank transfers. you got all the time in the world.

heck, why would you even want that? if you have a singular provider which gives you access to all banking logic, you're entirely at their mercy. they can just put whatever price they want on their service and you'd have to shell it out.

> Which platforms?

plaid to point out the most obvious. there are a lot since PSD2 came into effect though. that regulation isn't german btw. your comment makes it sounds like it is. and before PSD2, there were other providers that supported all banks in europe for example, and again: there is no reason not to add several integrations.

Yodlee works internationally. There's also Salt Edge that works across Europe, not sure about elsewhere.

The only time I’ve been able to unconsciously spend with credit cards is via automatic billing that manages to batch when I am asleep.

And there we added another expense to the list of here-money-goes-out-every-month :)

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