Hacker News Reader

Comment by spodek | Hacker News Reader

I tracked my finances for a while with GnuCash and found myself in the category he describes here:

> If you’re happy with just knowing that your credit card balance is less than a certain amount each month, that’s great! You don’t need GnuCash.

I'm curious what fraction of people track personal finances versus those who don't. I don't know if I'm in a big majority, small majority, big minority, small minority, or what.

Do you track your personal finances? If so, in how much detail? Maybe it would make an interesting Ask HN.

View on HN

I'll bite here... I used to track my finances and balance my checkbook. But, it took hours of my time. The best thing I ever did was create a separate account for my disposable income. My bills account gets the exact amount it needs and everything is payed automatically. The rest of my income goes into my fun account and I rest easy knowing I can spend until it's gone and my bills still get payed.

After that worked well for me, I now put small amounts into various savings accounts, like "tires", "vacation", or "emergency". I use an Ally account with "buckets".

I don't balance anymore, and haven't for 20 years. Just a quick glance at recent transactions to make sure I recognize everything.

It's also amazing how quickly some of those savings accounts add up when I'm not thinking about them much.

My wife and I do something similar.

We have our "Expenses" account that salaries go into. We have our "Offset" account that has our emergency fund in it and offsets the interest for our mortgage. And finally we have a "Goals" account that we use to save up for big ticket items like a new car, holiday, or something.

We take 10% of our respective incomes each into a personal, "off the books" account and we do whatever we like with that.

Simple.

I use ledger to document my personal finances, and I've been using it for about a year.

I do it less for budgeting, and more for a method of centralizing information. I have 4 credit cards that I use regularly, from 3 banks, I'm a w-2 employee with a 401k and benefits, and I file my own taxes. It's hard to keep track of everything, when the relevant data is behind login walls, in occasionally proprietary formats.

I wrote a bunch of scrapers and parsers for obtaining this data, and translating it into a ledger transaction format. Once it's there, I can do all the reporting and whatnot to my heart's content. Writing all of the infrastructure has been a labor of love, with a non-trivial emphasis on labor. I balance out about once a month, but since automating the various transformers, I pretty much never have to debug balances any more, which is a godsend.

It tracks down to a pretty excruciating level of detail, enough that I compute (for example) how much it costs my employer to employ me, my average monthly spread in my checking accounts (between when cc bills, rent are due and when income comes in), average costs of travel-vacation-days, and how that's changed over seasons.

At this point, it mostly "just works", and it's easy to append to my records. The next fun part will be getting useful and actionable insights out of it, and applying them to my life and decisions.

It's very nice to feel "in control" about these things; I don't really worry about money any more.

I’ve been tracking my finances on and off for a few years, but finally made the habit stick around Christmas last year. I do it not so much to know what I’ve spent already, more to know how much I can spend in any given category.

I’m using YNAB, which has honestly changed the way I think about money. Historically I’ve always taken the approach that there’s no point having money and not spending it, impulse buying things, and then being screwed when an unexpected bill comes in. Or the need to eat just before payday.

YNAB pushes you into allocating money at the point it comes in, anything from rent and groceries to a pot for renewing my Amazon Prime subscription when it comes up. Somehow the act of allocating the money seems to trigger the same mental reaction as actually spending it used to, and I’ll now often find myself with more money left over to go into savings at the end of the month because I actually didn’t need to spend most of what was allocated to my generic “fun money” bucket.

I've tracked my finances for as long as I can remember. It's become even more important since getting married.

We track every penny. About once a month we sit down and categorize every purchase we made the last month. We only keep receipts if the purchase was for a non-obvious category (e.g. buying both diapers and groceries at Target) so that we can split each transaction between categories.

For some banks, we manually download transaction data in whatever nice format they provide. For others, we use a syncing service that works with the app.

It's been so great throughout our marriage to know that we're both in charge of the money and make decisions together.

That said, I've talked with many people who don't like that level of detail. At first, it was baffling to me that people didn't know the details of their finances, but as I've grown, I've realized that there's plenty more than one good way to manage your money.

Full disclosure: I actively work on and sell budgeting software.

The only level of detail you need to track your finances to is subtracting your expenses from your income each month. As long as you spend less than you earn, you don't need to worry more than that.

If you'd like be saving more money than you currently are, then you can drill down into each side to look for things to improve.

I've been tracking my finances, with varying levels of details, since 1997.

I started with Microsoft Money, and tracked everything including cash and credit cards charges, for 10 years. It took a while to enter the info and I wasn't really using the info at that detail, so I changed up and also migrated to Moneydance, since Microsoft Money sunset in 2009.

I started over with Moneydance, and instead of recording cash to such detail, I just recorded it as a transfer from checking to "Wallet - Cash" and then balanced that every month by assuming all my cash went to restaurants. Not 100% accurate but mostly correct and way faster.

After a 2-3 years of Moneydance I decided to migrate again to GnuCash, for the various benefits of open source software. This time I also lightened up my recording to condense credit cards purchases down to one monthly entry. Which again saves a lot of time. I glance over my monthly bill to make sure the charges are correct but don't split out by category anymore.

So that's where I am now. Been using GnuCash for the last ~10 years, only record large categories of expenses and basically check credit cards bills for accuracy and keep my checking/savings accounts up to date. I only update retirement/investment accounts once a year, at the end of the year.

I am fortunate to be able to live below my means so I don't have to stress over balancing various accounts to the dollar. I just need a general idea of my position.

I was a ledger user for years, then some things happened, it got out of date, and I haven't gone back. But I tracked it in great detail. Every transaction, updated prices on stocks every month. It was really nice, and I had a tmux configuration that automatically loaded an emacs buffer with an org file holding all my ledger entries, and other panes containing various reports (uncleared balance, balance in cash/credit card accounts, total balance, monthly reports, etc.).

I will do it again, but haven't. I'm presently using YNAB because it's easier for my wife and I to share. I use it to a similar level of detail, but don't track my stocks and retirement accounts with it. IT's been very helpful for us to know how much money we have and where it's all going. Last year was very expensive and we ended up in some debt, so this is also helping us get things back on track. It's hard to get out of debt (especially if it's become a habit to rely on credit) without knowing this kind of information.

I do. I started because I would find myself surprised by the occasional credit card bill that was larger than I expected. It made life easier later when I started seriously putting money in investments, and then much easier when my mother died---she had put my name on all of my parents' accounts so I inherited two more, different bank accounts, two retirement accounts and some honest-to-gosh stock certificates. By the time I got everything cleaned up, I had a love affair with GnuCash and a checking account number that starts with seven zeros.

I track transactions in and out of accounts that I get statements for, with a "cash" expense for withdrawals (I know someone who would track his pocket change in spreadsheets.), and broadish categories for income and expenses (my Books expense account is ... large).

I wish I had created some kind of asset account when we bought a house; instead I just treat the mortgage like rent and have this great big windfall followed by an equal expense when we moved. :-)

I tracked every single expenditure in GnuCash for a year, mostly out of curiosity. But in general I don't worry too much about budgeting because I'm naturally a bit frugal. However, I do a yearly summary of assets in order to track long-term/retirement trajectory. I can also use that to get a single number showing me how much I spend each year.

I track All non-cash transactions and any large cash transactions.

I did it from when I first started working full-time so I could get some idea of savings/spending &c.

It was "meh" usefulness, but pretty easy since I could auto-import the transactions and it takes me maybe 1hr per month to categorize everything.

Now that I'm married its incredibly useful. "Can we afford X?" "How much are we spending on Y?" "I feel like I've been overspending on Z, how bad is it?" are the sorts of questions that can be answered very quickly.

Neither my wife nor I are in "charge" of spending, but I keep the books (because I had been before getting married). These money discussions could very easily become divisive if we didn't have easy-to-access data.

I've sporadically tracked my finances for the past 14 years (started using commercial software on OS X before getting fed up of some of the software and writing my own open source finance app to learn Objective C / Cocoa back in 2009 to do it which I still use), and over the past 6 years have been tracking it rather meticulously, which I find helpful for two reasons:

1. I'm a contractor now, so need to do tax filings, and having detailed finances helps with that.

2. I find it quite interesting (but not always that useful!, although it sometimes is) what my expenditures are each month, i.e. how much I spend on electronics/gear vs holiday vs other, compared to potential savings.

Before I started using GnuCash I had no clue how much I spent monthly. I was fine with the fact that the my savings account seemed to grow over time.

Then one day I got mad at a random fee from my bank after realizing how much they charged me over the years. I closed my account at this bank, decided that I will be more careful with my spendings and started tracking everything with GnuCash.

I do, each bill or bank transaction being its own entry. I'm sure I belong in minority of people who do this. It's all manual labour too without any imports from banks etc. (never tried).

I do it for two reasons. Occasionally I found a problem with double-billing that I would otherwise miss, but mostly it is to be able to check where my money went and plan realistically.

I did for a couple of years - actually wrote my own small CLI app to take care of my very basic student needs :D

At some point I dropped the habit, more out of laziness than anything else. I still have a budget spreadsheet with a rough plan for my monthly finances, I just don‘t track the actual expenses anymore. Reading this makes me think I ought to start again...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com