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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

Absolutely not.

It was easy to look at statements when they arrived by mail.

But with paperless billing, you've got to conscientiously log into your credit card site each month. If you have four cards, that's four logins. Who's going to do that? Not many.

The only reason I review my transactions it's because it's easy through an aggregator like Monarch (was using Mint before it shut down). And the only reason I do that is for budgeting -- reviewing transactions is just a side effect.

It still annoys me to no end that I don't have a single bank or credit card that will attach my statement as a PDF to a monthly email. As long as there's a secure email transmission connection, I don't understand why they won't do that.

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Maybe I'm unusually anal retentive about this, but I have every bank account, PayPal, Venmo, both credit cards, every brokerage, 401(k), HSA, IRA, mortgage, everything... in Quicken, which I check every single day. 1. Start Quicken, 2. Hit Update, 3. Get Coffee, 4. Review everything in boldface to make sure it's not a surprise.

I have the next month worth of bills and paychecks "below the line" as future transactions, so not only can know what's in my checking account today, but I know exactly, to the penny what will be in my checking account on 18-Feb.

I've in the past found credit card fraud/mistakes within a day of being charged, and have fixed them quickly, before even my next paper statement was printed.

Some friends I know don't have any idea how much is in any of their accounts outside of occasionally seeing a number on an ATM receipt. They might have a budget, but no idea how much all their monthly charges add up to in reality. And yea, they always seem to be forgetting about some subscription or charge. I couldn't live like that--not for me.

I used to be that way, now I rarely check anything. No time anymore, and all the software I used to use is not compatible/complicated to setup.

Someday, I keep telling myself, I'll be down to one bank account, one credit card, and that's it.

> Maybe I'm unusually anal retentive about this, but I have every bank account, PayPal, Venmo, both credit cards, every brokerage, 401(k), HSA, IRA, mortgage, everything... in Quicken

This is something I'd like to have, but I don't want to use Quicken. Partially because I pretty much exclusively use Linux at home, and I don't want to have something as important as financials reliant on a maybe-it-will-work WINE translation layer. And partially because Quicken is now owned by Intuit, which is a corporation I'm particularly disinclined to reward with my patronage.

Unfortunately, every time I've looked at ways to get statements delivered to me electronically from my various financial institutions, it seems that the available options are "don't" and "something that only works in Quicken." (There used to be some open file formats for exchanging information here, but it seems that institutions have started dropping support for them in favor of proprietary protocols, from what I can tell.) I'd be happy with something as meek as "email me a PDF statement"!

GNUcash aint pretty, but it works.

My understanding it suffers from the "everyone is abandoning OFX" problem, leading it to be unable to ingest the data it needs.

I wish there was some way to do this without handing over the credentials for my entire financial life to a 3rd party—which I refuse to do.

I don't believe you are actually "handing over the credentials" to Intuit or any other 3rd party (unless you consider your computer the third party). When you use Direct Connect, they're stored locally (for example, Keychain on Mac), and when you use Quicken Connect (aka EWC or EWC+), it's more like oauth where you authorize through the financial institution website, and they issue a token to Quicken. What you want to avoid is their "Quicken Sync" which stores credentials in their cloud (yikes!).

It is confusing as an end user, and they don't really do much to explain it. You have to do some digging to understand how it works.

Thanks, I must be thinking of Quicken Sync. I’ll look into Direct Connect.

Autopay is evil. I have nothing on autopay.

Instead, I have a monthly reminder to pay my bills every month, with a list of all the bills/sites that need to be paid. There's 11 things in the list, but not all of them have a balance every month. I do this towards the end of the month (instead of at the beginning of the month), so that I can include rent in it too, and pay _everything_. It lets me see whether my spending is creeping up and gives me an opportunity to cancel useless stuff. It doesn't take long (5-30 mins depending on how detailed I'm being).

I call it Auto-steal.

Autopay did more to improve my credit score than anything else. If left to my own devices, I'll forget to pay bills. Autopay prevents that.

It may be evil for you, but for me, it's an absolute lifesaver.

Yeah, even when I was living paycheck-to-paycheck, I used auto-pay.

I'd just had a post-it note stuck to my monitor of the dates and usual amounts for the auto-pays, so I was never caught off guard or surprised amount money moving.

Autopay is amazing if you're careful with it.

I have a bank account that all incoming money goes into and another that's just for autopay. I transfer the sum of the costs of my recurring expenses into the autopay account from the incoming account, and that's it. Literally set it and forget it. This combined with using Privacy disposable cards for 90% of these transactions and setting hard spend limits on them has allowed me to never look at a bill.

I _used to_ have autopay deduct from a single account. Yeah, that's scary as hell and has caused heaps of problems. Not doing that again.

My strategy here is disable all auto pays and make it a manual ritual to pay my bills at the start of each calendar month.

Doing it once a month is easy enough to remember (or put a calendar invite, if you're not able to) and forces me to do a quick validation. In my 20 years of working and being independent, I've never accidentally paid for a subscription longer than one month.

Things I don’t have on autopay frequently get shut off when I forget (or delay) paying for them.

Yeah, I'm not around or just forget to pay something. For its potential downsides, the fact that I basically don't have to think about a bunch of my ongoing billing (including essential stuff like electricity) is an admittedly first world but nonetheless big improvement over weekly write checks/mail envelopes ritual as I did for years. (Certainly there are incremental levels but I carefully evaluate new subscriptions and don't really have an issue with automatic billing.)

Yup, I've learned that lesson as well.

You go on vacation and bill pay day was in the middle of it. Or you're just busy and forget to move the calendar reminder to tomorrow. Or you get through half of them and get interrupted and forget you didn't finish.

I trust autopay far more than I trust myself!

I sort of have a compromise solution for this. I use my banks autopay whenever possible which is a push instead of a pull. That way I can just shut it off instead of finding some weird website I haven't used in a million years or call and wait on hold for 20 minutes. I started using it mostly so I didn't have to buy checks but I saw it had some advantages beyond that.

It doesn't work well with variable bills though because I can't schedule an amount I don't know yet to be paid. I'm stuck using a pull for my power bill for instance.

Yes and then you log in and see:

Apple $4.99

Apple $1.99

Apple $14.99

Apple $4.99

Apple $2.99

Apple $9.99

good luck!

Ha! I was literally dealing with that exact issue last week as I was doing my Mint to Monarch migration.

And thinking I'd to categorize my transactions as AppleCare+ vs software vs gaming vs cloud storage vs streaming, for budgeting purposes.

And then just kind of gave up. Apple seriously needs to put more detail in their transaction line, although I guess they can't always when they combine things in a single charge. But even just different merchants would help between iCloud, Apple Store, App Store, and Apple Services. Or something.

I used to filter these by different cards, but now they're all on the Apple Card. :(

> Mint before it shut down

This was the best, and only feature I used on Mint. Quick glance a couple times a month was an easy way to find unusual charges etc. I haven't found a replacement.

Supposedly this is a selling point of https://copilot.money/ but I do it with YNAB which I prefer overall

I'll be another vote for ynab. It takes some getting used to, but it makes it very easy to see where things are, save for specific targets, verify bills are getting paid, etc.

$100/year, but they don't sell your information or push you to buy other products, and it has dramatically helped communication about money with my wife. I have a handful of friends who also use it and swear by it.

Actual Budget is similar to old ynab but is free and self-hosted.

https://github.com/actualbudget/actual

I used YNAB 4, but gave them up for ethical reasons when they started charging yearly for their web app that was worse than the stand alone app (and the stand alone app was a cheaper one time payment). I just didn't want to see a company succeed by purposely switching to a worse but more expensive offering.

Yeah, I wound up on Monarch since it was founded by the former product manager at Mint and has a similar modern consumer look.

It's whitespace heavy though -- for people who like something that looks more like an enterprise software dashboard, there's Simplifi.

It seems like Monarch and Simplifi are where the most Mint users have wound up, judging from various forum posts. And they have an extremely similar feature set and interface. But they are both paid.

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