Ask HN: How do you track your finances? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you track your finances?

15 pointshugohamelcom19 comments

Recently attended a workshop, and I'm curious to know how you track your finances. Personally, I've built a custom spreadsheet, and I'm happy with that, but I'd love to see how other people are doing it.

1. Do you use a spreadsheet? Did you build it yourself? Did you buy one that was already done for you?

2. Do you use an accounting software (Quickbooks, Xero, Zoho, etc.)?

3. How do you like your current solution? Is it too complicated? Is it too overkill in terms of features for your needs?

4. What would make it better for you?

In the workshop, they recommended also using tracking tools like Mint to follow all your expenses, not just business, but also, personal.

I'd be curious to know how many other people track it all to the penny like this.

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> 1. Do you use a spreadsheet? Did you build it yourself? Did you buy one that was already done for you?

I use YNAB for budgeting. I like the ability to choose between the mobile app or website depending on what I need to do.

I've been using a spreadsheet for tracking my net worth over time. I copied the template from someone else and just update it on the 1st of every month.

> 2. Do you use an accounting software (Quickbooks, Xero, Zoho, etc.)?

The only software I use is Quicken. I have it download all of my balances for all of my accounts to simplify updating my net worth sheet.

> 3. How do you like your current solution? Is it too complicated? Is it too overkill in terms of features for your needs?

It feels great right now. When I first started creating a budget, I overcomplicated it. It took a while to figure out how to make it simple, but it feels natural and easy to use now.

> 4. What would make it better for you?

I wish there was another piece of software that helped with downloading balances and transactions. Quicken is pretty slow and bloated and pricey. I've tried Personal Capital, but I wasn't comfortable with having my balances stored there. Quicken seemed secure, trusted, and offline-ish enough for me.

I forgot to add. I have another spreadsheet to help with portfolio rebalancing. I'm sticking with three funds plus cash, and divide up the percentages so it's roughly 50% us stocks, 30% intl. stocks, and 15% bonds, and 5% cash. The spreadsheet helps me figure out the dollar amounts for each of those.

Interesting, what made you switch from spreadsheet to Quicken?

I have tried several things, and have given up on a lot as they seemed more work than they were worth. Although it has been about 8 years since I looked into it, maybe I should again.

Spreadsheets 1) Current accounts - Charge Cards, Rent due, utilities, bank accounts. I update every 2 weeks when I get paid. This has worked out well as it forces me to look at our primary accounts and I catch things before they become problems. My significant other, knows this and has caused a change of spending habits, all for the good. In my balances, I have a baseline adjustment so every year the first paycheck all my current accounts balance to zero, this way as the year goes on I can see where I am. It also keeps me from considering as a total how much I have saved over several years and then feel like I can spend it.

2) Yearly - sometimes more often, I do a spreadsheet of investments and retirement money. I also add in large assets like the value of my cars, although they are not worth much. I also re-balance my investments then, or at least start to decide what to change.

That's really similar to what I do, but I believe that you might be tracking a bit more than I am, on a more granualar level, which is good. I might do some changed based on my process based on what you are doing.

I've been using beancount [1] and beancount-import [2] for a while now and I'm liking it quite a bit. Every month I download CSVs of transaction data from my various accounts (checking, savings, credit card, etc.) and run beancount-import to categorize and reconcile transactions (I've written a few custom importers for this) into the ledger. I can then use bean-query (part of beancount) to perform SQL queries over the ledger data (i.e. expenses in the past month grouped by category). I feel like I'm just scratching the surface so far of what's possible with these tools but it has definitely helped me be more organized with my personal finances.

[1] https://github.com/beancount/beancount/

[2] https://github.com/jbms/beancount-import

Awesome, thank you for sharing, truly appreciate it :)

I've had this conversation with a number of financial-savvy friends. It seems that we all have different methods depending on what you're after.

For myself - I hate spreadsheets and updating and categorising data. I have also tried a number of tools that will "attempt" to automagically present useful reports. But I've found that in 90% of cases - I'm well aware of what I spend on and how much I spend.

The data that really interests me personally is - savings, pensions, asset wroth tracking and scenario simulation. I find that looking at growth over the past 3,6,12 months motivates me to do even better or look for more efficient ways of organising my finances.

At the moment here's what I do:

- Following a guide like (UK Personal Investing Flowchart)[https://ukpersonal.finance/flowchart/] to judge where I am at and what my short/long term goals are.

- I have automated transfers at salary date (T+3 days to account for variations) to investments and savings.

- I do a monthly scan through of current and credit accounts to make sure nothing unusual occurs as well as monthly credit-rating check.

- For crypto investments I use (Delta)[https://delta.app/en]

- For Stocks and Shares I track current positions via Yahoo Finance.

- Lastly - every now and then I check-in to see how my Pension accounts are doing. So far I've gone through 4 different pension providers and tools - but none of them see to have good forecasting, scenario tools.

As a side topic recently got shown (Casual)[https://causal.app/] by a friend - I've been contemplating giving it a try.

Thank you so much for sharing all these links, they are so useful!

YNAB. I've used it for a few years (since YNAB 4). The automated import and categorization of transactions, combined with envelope budgeting is all I need. About as frictionless as it can realistically get, for my use case.

I wanted to give a try to YNAB, but I realized that it wouldn't work for me since I deal with both Canadian and European back accounts.

I have a txt file with manually copy-pasted and filled lists for every month or so, 16 rows each. Three sections: cash at hand and in the bank, assets (excluding the house) and house & mortgage. This is kind of just for personal curiosity, checking the trends and having a historical reference. I don't really track my expenses, I used to buy beer only with cash (no debit card) but that changed due to COVID.

Interesting, is there a reasokn why you picked the txt format more than another format?

I have not succeeded in tracking all my expenses - the only spreadsheet I have is one with a row for each "bill" I have to pay X months on the X axis.

This lets me at least compare values for each month easily. But of course my variable expenses are all under a CC card bill...

If you'd like to keep using a spreadsheet, let me know, I've built something for myself that I sell. Just message me, I'll show you :)

Otherwise, if you don't want to invest in anything pre-built, here's the free version of it, that is still useful in my opinion: https://gumroad.hugohamel.com/l/sheeld-profitloss

(Hopefully that won't be considered as self-promotion, but if it does. Admin/Moderator: just message me so I can change the message, so it's not considered as self-promotion.)

I use Qube Money (app-controlled debit card with virtual budget envelopes).

I just have a monthly number for all expenses excluding rent and try to stick to it. It doesn't always work, but I kind of stay in the ballpark.

If you want something a bit more complete, have a look at my comment above. Here's the direct link to it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30948979

Thanks, but I've tried lots of more detailed ways of tracking before and decided this is just the one I prefer. My main concern is that I'm not overspending too badly and saving a good percentage for investments, and for that all I really need is a target spending number.

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