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Comment by Temporary_31337 | Hacker News Reader

I know that US finance is a bit behind but in Europe you can get a bank account with a nice app and even separate that into different pots or accounts free of charge.

My bank automatically classifies expenses and you can of course export to csv for further analysis. I have two virtual debit cards one for personal and one for business stuff so all of the stuff ledger does is fully automatic.

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The problem happens when you get more accounts of different types. Currently, I have around 40 accounts in ledger for me and my family. Multiple bank accounts, multiple brokerages, loans, tax optimization accounts, pension, etc. Some institutions have a good tools and some not regardless of country. I recall using european NyKredit was pain as much as bank of America. Ledger (or hledger in my case) helps to build structured “meta view” while still keeping my data private (from one vendor).

I used to have so many accounts, as I get older I get closer and closer to one account of each type.

I try to keep a smallest possible amount of accounts and consolidate similar accounts. However, in reality there are many types of accounts and you can’t merge them.

Sometimes accounts of same type in same country can’t be merged. I have a very stupid example: I’m unable to close Robinhood account because I own a few YNDX shares that I can’t sell or transfer. So I have it just hanging there (but excluded from my ledger)

> all of the stuff ledger does is fully automatic.

Does your track all your loan liabilities to the penny, or how much interest accrued on your mortgage? Does it know when the rent is due and provide you a forecasted minimum balance in your checking account? Since you mentioned "business stuff": does it know the difference between an expense and an asset?

There's a time in life where simple works, but as your net worth grows "my bank handles all that" will become less and less true.

Yeah, there's also a time of "which of my 5 bank-like-entities you mean?" Things really stop being simple.

Fine if you have a couple of cash accounts with one bank. What if you have other assets like stocks/shares, property etc.? What if you want to track shared expenses with friends/family and settle up at the end of each month? You can do this kind of thing with ledger.

> What if you want to track shared expenses with friends/family and settle up at the end of each month?

I agree with your overall sentiment, but for that specific use-case, there are tons of apps where everyone in the group can see, add, and edit the transactions live, and then square up later.

When I lived in a shared house at university, we used Splid [1], which is very easy to use yet supports advanced features like multiple currencies. If you ever find yourself needing to split expenses, I can highly recommend it.

[1] https://splid.app/english/

Ok but how do you track what those expenses were? From the point of view of your bank account you were just paying "shared expense". I want to know what it was, groceries, energy etc.

You track it in your shared expenses app (e.g. Splid). When you enter an expense, you enter the amount, a description, and the persons in the group who are splitting that expense.

For example, let’s say Anna, Bill and Josh start a group. Anna buys groceries, so she enters the following transaction: 30 EUR, groceries, paid by Anna, applies to {Anna, Bill, Josh}.

Then, Anna, Bill and Josh can all see (on their own phone) that transaction in the transaction log, and they can also all see that Anna’s balance is 20 EUR, and Bill and Josh both have a balance of -10 EUR.

Then, let’s say Bill and Josh go for coffee, Bill enters: 10 EUR, coffee, paid by Bill, applies to {Bill, Josh}. Then the balances become: Anna 20 EUR, Bill -5 EUR, Josh -15 EUR.

So the nice part is that because everything is synced, everyone in the group can easily add transactions and see the transaction log and balances, all from their own phone.

Don't know about how it is in the US but what I enjoy about banks here is that basically all of them offer FinTS/HBCI/PSD2 or some other API to interact with the account so you can have a nice desktop app that automatically pulls info from all your accounts without ever having to interact with each banks online banking interface.

For Mac for example, this one is very nice: https://apps.apple.com/de/app/moneymoney/id872698314?l=en

But you can’t use PSD2 APIs as an individual (at most banks), so if you want to use it, you necessarily have to entrust your financial data to a third party.

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