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Comment by jplr8922 | Hacker News Reader

I have an MSC in quant finance, and i'm seriously considering learning Django (in top of my backend skills) to build an complete app for personal finance management.

Key features ; - Budget (aka cashflow management, what am I doing with my paycheck next month?) - Project planning (aka balance sheet, what is the purpose of my inflows and outflows over time?) - End of year results(aka do my projected budget match my projects, and if you want to travel so much why are you spending X amount on alchool?) - Taxes (how do I pay less of them) - Insurance (how do I mitigate common risks, and when should I purchase insurance to protect my projects)

I myself need one app for financial transaction, another for rebalancing my portfolio of ETF, one for doing my taxes, a spreadsheet for my budget, etc. My bank credit card and debit card are managed by two different units which refuse to talk to each other and share information. This is ridiculous.

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For a non-startup personal open source project, you can consolidate all that data in the desktop program https://gnucash.org/ .

Offhand, I suspect you could layer all those features you mention, using a mix of GnuCash customizable existing reports, and their (poorly documented) extension in Guile.

The UX might not be what you want with just reports and scripting, but you can definitely analyze data and generate arbitrary noninteractive HTML reports, and there's some limited facility for dialogs that way. (For example, the features to help keep an ITOT & AGG ETF portfolio balanced for risk tolerance seems trivial, and it could even have a sense of calendar schedule for periodic rebalancing. But instead of it doing the rebalancing for you, the UX would probably just be a generated report that shows the balance, and tells you the exact two transactions to rebalance.)

Or, alternatively, get into the code of GnuCash itself, and do whatever interactive GUI and maybe even (if very brave/foolish) making your code talk to your brokerage, etc.

There is a dire need for a good personal finance app. Mint is just out there to grab data, YNAB is ok but super limited. And then pretty much every bank site is lacking in any meaningful tools and API access.

If you dislike Mint's business model and find YNAB limited, you might like Buxfer (https://www.buxfer.com)

We have built Buxfer to cater to power users, so it has lots of powerful functionality - budgeting, forecasting, automated rules, investment tracking and so on.

GP's feature set sounds like its for "superpower users" :) We don't (and will likely never) get too much into things like taxes. But Buxfer is still one of the rare products that has a simple straightforward pricing and caters to a niche that expects powerful features from their financial software.

Disclaimer: I'm the founder.

Decent price and looks reasonably featureful. Good job!

Question: Who are you using for Bank sync?

Yodlee? Plaid? Something else?

I'm a mint ->> Personal Capital convert who both use Yodlee, and I'm curious who you use.

ah, found it here for others who might be interested:

https://www.buxfer.com/help/security

Yodlee and SaltEdge

Yes that’s right. Most of US bank coverage is through Yodlee. We got started with them and have stuck with them so far. Tinkered with Plaid a little but Yodlee’s per-user pricing works better for us than Plaid’s per-account pricing (power users tend to have lots of accounts). Haven’t revisited this in a while so things might have changed but it’s a pain to switch data providers so the benefit has to be very tangible.

For some reason, many of our users find our bank sync to be more reliable even though everyone uses the same providers underneath. I routinely conduct user interviews and this is a common piece of feedback. I like to think it’s a side effect of us building bank sync in-house in the past (which is a royal PITA to build and maintain). But that somehow let us build a more robust system on top of the same (unreliable) bank data aggregators.

Anyhow feels like I’m rambling so I’ll stop now :)

I have been using Lunch Money[0] after it was mentioned here and am pretty happy with it. It took a while for the API[1] to launch but it's in beta at the moment and they're pretty responsive to user feedback.

[0] https://lunchmoney.app [1] https://lunchmoney.dev

This is well thought of in that sphere:

https://www.firefly-iii.org/

Send me an email if you're looking for work :)

I want to do the same, but I don't have the math knowledge. I have the programming knowledge though. Do you want to collaborate? Feel free to send a DM if you do.

> when should I purchase insurance to protect my projects

Basically always?

Disagree. I take the view that you should only insure against risks that would be significant hardships if they occurred. (Maybe a secondary exception if insurance buys you significant peace of mind.)

At this point, I don’t carry collision insurance on our cars (I have liability, of course, but not insurance to pay if we wreck and fault is ours or undetermined.) Why not? Because buying a replacement car wouldn’t be a significant hardship that would be alleviated by the insurance coverage. (Our cars are 2005 and 2015.)

Wouldn’t that mean that the premium on that insurance is also practically zero?

If something you have insurance for wouldn’t be a hardship if it occurred, then the premium should be a rounding error.

To be fair, I guess it could be more annoying to go through the whole insurance process, so I guess I sort of understand what you mean.

Why do you want to pay less taxes?

I'd guess to keep more money to use for things that are important to them.

Do people actively look for ways to pay more taxes?

It isn't illegal or even immoral to reduce your taxes to as low as you can legally. You shouldn't pay more taxes than you need to even if you believe in socialism.

If you are American and not reporting the right number of allowances on your W-4, you are giving the gov't a free loan.

It is not somehow patriotic to pay more taxes than one legally owes.

Overpaying taxes (what a lot of people unintentionally do that don't have resources to navigate every nook and cranny of the labyrinthian tax code) accomplishes nothing but make the individual more poor than they already were. Minimizing overpayment is the best possible thing an individual can do.

There are governments that I happily overpay to because they’re actually a net good to the people.

Others, not so much.

I very much try to follow thr spirit of the law though, not the letter, both in laws I ignore and adhere to.

Unless your extra generous contributions are in the 10's of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions of dollars per year (depending on which government you're referring to - local, state, fed), I can assure you, whatever money you send to whatever government is not significant enough to make any difference. You're far better off sending that money directly to vetted non-profits that do the things you think your area needs more of.

Not to mention, governments like the US fed will just poof new money out of thin air if they can't afford something anyway.

And... when it comes to tax law, you had better follow the letter not the spirit, otherwise you risk an unpleasant visit from your local tax auditor. Your interpretation of the spirit of the law won't get you out of their crosshairs.

Its not that I want to completely avoid them. Its that tax laws of many countries are poorly written (or applied) and not doing optimization is financial suicide.

Consider tax sheltered accounts (TFSA-RRSP in Canada, 401k in the US). Many people do not understand how they work or even what they are ; a lot of stranger tell me they ''purchased RRSP at their bank last month''.

Also consider the case of freelance consultant. If you are your own business, you must understand what is tax deductible, and what is not.

Finally, different countries have different fiscal law regarding property. A lot of people in Canada invest in real estate because they do not have an easy access to financial markets. Here, capital gains of non primary residence is not tax deductible... oops.

You get the point. The is not financial planning without tax planning. From a dev point of view, consider the fiscal laws of a country like COBOL legacy code. Do not assume it will work as intended.

I'm generally pro tax if that's a thing, but it is worth noting that many countries use tax policy to shape incentives. If everyone ignored that incentive structure and just paid the tax, then there'd be more cigarette smokers and less EV drivers.

So you could in many ways reframe "avoiding taxes" as "doing what the government tells you to do".

> capital gains of non primary residence is not tax deductible.

I think you’ve stated this oddly at a minimum. Why would capital gains on anything be deductible anywhere? Did you mean losses? Or that there’s an exemption amount that you miss for non-primary?

Paying less in taxes doesn't have to be nefarious.

When you put money into a 401K you're shielding income from taxation. A 401K is an explicit tradeoff the government has created; individuals saving more today will hopefully translate into less reliance on the safety net in the future.

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