Best App for Budgeting? | Hacker News Reader

Best App for Budgeting?

16 pointsbotolo12 comments

With the imminent demise of Mint.com, one of the biggest budgeting app/website is going to disappear. What's a good alternative?

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A simple spreadsheet. No use making the process any more complicated and stressful than it needs to be.

Here's a not-bad article on getting started:

https://opensource.com/article/17/8/budget-libreoffice-calc

And one that describes something a bit more complex:

https://opensource.com/article/20/3/libreoffice-open-source-...

I don't "budget" in the traditional sense of the word. Tried using these apps for a long time and they are either too complex or don't give me what I want.

I look at income and spend post-facto by once-a-month pulling in statements from my bank, card, and any other spend accounts (like venmo). I wrote a simple app to analyze this on a month-to-month basis.

Google Sheets. I stopped using random apps for budgeting, too unreliable.

One thing I didn't realize before signing up for these apps is that it voids the fraud protection offered by your bank. Since then I've switched back to a spreadsheet and couldn't be happier. There's plenty of great templates to start from on reddit personal finance subreddits.

> voids the fraud protection offered by your bank

I am guessing this depends on how you connect your bank to the app? If you just hand over plaintext username/password, maybe you don't get protections. But most apps use a service like Plaid which should limit permissions to read-only.

Can...you elaborate on this?

Mint and others used to (still do? I haven't used any of these things in over a decade) take your username/password and sometimes even security questions and then use screen scraping to get transactions and balances and such. This was (is?) because many banks and CC companies didn't have proper APIs or access tokens that could offer limited access. The result was that Mint and others could, in theory, initiate transactions as you.

Naturally, banks and others said, "Don't do that, and if you do you're going to lose some of your protections because you're willfully giving away your credentials."

Oh wow, no idea. But that's definitely a big red flag.

Same, I was shocked when I found out, I only registered for mint recently and there was no warning in the sign up process.

Happy YNAB user here.

I've been using Copilot (not to be confused for GitHub Copilot) for past 6/7 months. I really like the Mac and iPhone apps. I'm still trying it out so I'm paying $13/month right now, but I'll most likely pay for the yearly subscription.

I use and like rocket money

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