Ask HN: What do you use for personal finance? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What do you use for personal finance?

15 pointsjMyles11 comments

I'm looking for an income / expense tracking tool, a budgeting / planning tool, and a tool to tie all my spending vectors (cards, paypal, google wallet, square) together.

Ideally, this stuff will all have an API that I can build on top of. Do such tools exist?

Also, is there a bank or credit union with an awesome API?

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Almost everyone I know who uses a tool for tracking their finances uses Mint. They do not have an API that I am aware of, however.

It appears Yodlee may be something you'd be interested in.

I use a couple of Google Apps spreadsheets, with some custom JavaScript functions. Not the most elegant solution, but it works for me (granted, I like to keep things simple, and that includes my finances).

What's nice about spreadsheet software is that you can do whatever you want, there's no fixed way to track expenses or plan/budget. But that can also be a downside, as I've rewritten parts of it numerous times when I found out I forgot to take certain things into account (no pun intended).

Moneydance has an API[1]. First heard about it here: http://tynan.com/hardcore-personal-finance

[1] http://www.moneydance.com/developer

Did you try mint.com. There's Yodlee (which mint uses) for API however its not free.

Check out Simple (formerly BankSimple). They have an API, but I haven't used it so I can't tell if you if it's awesome or not.

https://simple.com/api/

A spreadsheet is a great tool for this stuff. It's boring, but it works.

mint.com is fantastic

I agree. Mint is great.

My only iffy feeling "Who's going to buy them" but Intuit bought them, and so I'm already screwed if Intuit goes evil (Taxes, Quickbooks, etc).

they are not good at handling some of alerts(transaction alerts), hard to manage if u have multiple accounts and ur transferring money between those accounts.

I transfer between accounts all the time, and think it handles it well. Could you elaborate more?

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