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Comment by Dobbs | Hacker News Reader

Not terribly surprising. The time in my life that I was most on top of my finances was when I was using the old YNAB which required manually entering all purchases and manually reconciling your account. The effort put in to keep on top of it made me hyper aware of what I was spending and where. It was great, but it takes too much effort.

I don't know if better tooling could help, pointing out subscriptions and things like that so you can easily check if you are still using it and cancelling. How do we fix this without requiring everyone to manually keep a checkbook.

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> when I was using the old YNAB which required manually entering all purchases and manually reconciling your account.

I still use YNAB4 after their online YNAB solution's monthly cost got too high. I didn't do it at the time, but now I just import bank statements. It's not too bad, not quite as slick as the new (relatively, anyway) online YNAB. I still prefer to have this level of insight on my finances and spending though.

> I don't know if better tooling could help, pointing out subscriptions and things like that

I don't use it, but Rocket Money advertises this as one of their main features.

Too much effort? Takes me maybe 30 mins a week. Seems like very little effort in exchange for being on top of your finances.

30 minutes a week seems like a lot. (Admittedly the alternative of scanning your credit card bills and bank transactions is not zero but it's a lot less.)

And this is how they get you - not even paying attention 30 minutes a week gives tons of room for folks to start skimming/shrinkflating/double charging you.

Do what works for you.

Having ADHD and Autism even something as simple as 30 mins a week can be a lot of effort when it isn't the thing I'm hyperfixating on.

I've only started using YNAB the past few years, any bank that has a Plaid connection can be automatically imported into YNAB. They still recommend period manual reconciliation to catch any import errors (which I have seen, but rarely).

Yea that is sorta what I'm talking about. The previous version didn't use Plaid and required you to manually enter everything. This forced me to be on top of it. The new Plaid version was a lot more automatic and required far less manual work, but also meant I was less involved and therefore less on top of things.

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