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Comment by joshgachnang | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone have a suggestion for a finance/budgeting app that's easy to use for splitting costs? My girlfriend and I don't have joined finances, but we do generally split everything down the middle. So most things are "I pay with my card, tally it up, then you Venmo me your half at the end of the month." I'm currently using YNAB and then split each relevant transaction, but it's very very tedious.

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Splitwise might work for you. I've used it for parties that multiple people contribute to. Everyone just adds what they've spent and at the end you click a button to "settle up".

It's not really a budgeting app, though.

Maybe have one shared credit card with two copies that you both use for all that stuff? Saves you from having to tally it up at least if it's all on there.

That's what my girlfriend and I have done for the last seven years. You have to agree on what's a "joint" expense, but provided you work that out, it's a very simple way of handling shared finances.

It may not be much easier than your setup, but my fiancée and I have a shared Simple account that we both deposit $x to each month and then withdraw shared transactions. They make moving between shared and individual Simple accounts pretty easy and allow bucketing money into categories, which we use for various budgets (travel, restaurants, groceries).

For us, we like that the budget is tangible. There is only so much money we can withdraw from it, which helps us avoid blowing through our budgets. It also works well with the way we split costs. I make more money, so I put more into the pool every month, but other than that we don't need to think about it.

Splitwise would work, but another way would be to tag everything that needs to be split, and then to compare the sums at the end of the month. Basically make the "tally it up" part automatic.

The nice thing about manual entry, and using Splitwise, would be that you could pull out your phone and say "your turn to pay" and treat it like a balancing act instead of transferring money. Whoever is behind, pays today.

I searched for something similar a while back and found: https://grouptabs.net/

Used it on a couple of trips and thought it was fantastic. No sign up required, free to use, and open source. Worked well for my use cases (trips, not month to month reconcilliation) so YMMV

If your bank supports it, Quickpay with Zelle is 10x easier than Venmo in my experience. And you don't have to leave your banking app

Splitwise!

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