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Comment by elric | Hacker News Reader

My less obsessive personal finance workflow: I have a spreadsheet. I update it by hand once a month, and have been doing so for ~20 years. Takes about 5 minutes. I only track the categories I care about. Those have varied a bit over time, but have always included staples like power, heating, water, ISP, rent/mortgage, insurance, savings, etc. I don't track things like groceries or restaurants or anything else that I consider to be part of "living life".

Two main goals: track how my expenses evolve over time, and stay on top of how much money I need to reserve for the coming year to pay those bills. Anything that's leftover is spending money. Which I dutifully spend.

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I do the same, except I track even a bit less. I track monthly all account balances, salary/income, paid taxes, transfers to investment accounts, rent/mortgage, and health insurance. This is enough to map investment performance, financial position, and necessary living costs. Mostly everything else is "a life lived" expense and I don't see a need to do any finer tracking there.

It's highly dependent on your personal situation.

If you have plenty of income, tracking grocery expenses might be a waste of time, like tracking how much air you breathe.

If your income is barely meeting your expenses (or worse), the grocery budget is one of the few places you can make meaningful decisions that will lower your costs.

And there's a tricky middle ground where it feels like you have enough income, but if you don't pay attention, you'll die by a thousand cuts to small expenses that feel insignificant by themselves.

Yes, very true. It might be useful to start with overtracking to see where the money actually goes.

I didn't track anything until about 5 years ago as my mental model was "track all purchases", and I wasn't willing to do that. Someone had to point out that higher level tracking can be quite useful too, and this is what I found to work well for me. That's why I bring this up in related topics: it's not an all-or-nothing choice.

I don't track purchases at all, I track savings. I find that much more sustainable. I have a savings rate goal (50%), and automatic withdrawals to make that goal. If I can't pay my bills without dipping into the savings then I'll have to reevaluate my spending only then. As long as my savings rate is what it needs to be I don't worry about spending money.

This sounds like a good way to do it.

I'm a freelancer with variable income so I can't do a fixed investment rate. For me it's useful to see what was the actual rate vs. what I'd like it to be, and the high level view is quite enough to track that.

I used to track every single payment, thinking I was doing excellent budgeting. But in reality it was mostly bikeshedding. The current approach works well for me, but I can totally see a use for tracking more in some cases. If I were a smoker or a heavy drinker I'd probably track those, for instance.

I am also using a spreadsheet now. I used to do things in plain text files, even did one year entirely in org-mode in emacs. But I started a spreadsheet the year I got married so my spouse and I can look at things together.

We track way fewer categories than you do. But in addition, we also track larger expenses by amount. Right now everything over $100 gets an entry. That means a fancy $100+ dinner gets tracked but a normal $30 dinner doesn’t.

I do household finances in a spreadsheet. I do track every single transaction just to make sure there's no CC fraud (catch one stolen card every 3-ish years on average).

I do other people's finances with hledger. That is, if I'm responsible for someone else's money (trustee, etc), I add another layer of complexity for double entry, reconciliation, etc.

I'm also less obsessive than some people but I don't want to use anything proprietary or have to pay for a product to track my finances ("Hey you spend a lot, we can help, how about you spend more on us?" is just ridiculous).

I do everything with CSV exports of my bank accounts and credit cards. I drop the exports once a month into a directory and Python scripts (my newer versions of which are mostly written by LLMs) take all the analysis from there, breaking things down by category and by merchant (so that I can see if I'm unintentionally spending more on a particular merchant over time or if that merchant is charging more without notice).

I also have one credit card for strictly recurring expenses ONLY and never put non-recurring expenses on it. That way it's quite easy to see on that credit card bill what changed from month to month. If Comcrap tries to charge me $10 more one month they're going to be getting nasty messages from me pretty quickly.

> I also have one credit card for strictly recurring expenses

I do the same. I have a bank account dedicated to all those recurring expenses I track. Every year I make a budget for those categories, work out the monthly average, and set up a transfer for that amount into that account. Some prices fluctuate quite a bit (like power) while my mortgage has a fixed rate, so I apply a healthy margin to make sure there are no nasty surprises.

Are you me, by any chance? I had been doing exactly this for years. Finally, my income rose enough that I stopped to care - I just pay from my current account and move on. But what astonishes me is that hardly anyone seems to do that, especially people earning less than the current me. It seems such an obvious idea!

I think that lack of sound financial education is the real problem here. Of course, it's country-dependent, but I doubt it's done really well in a lot of places. I have a slightly conspiracy-ish theory explaining why good financial education is not a part of primary school curriculum...

Is there any other way to deal with comcrap? I’ve been doing the annual ritual of calling them to say the bill went up by 50% give me the best rate again. Every year it’s always a short term promo. This year took a lot longer to get through to a human

If you want a bit more automation on your spreadsheet, check out Tiller. They provide the integrations with your banks to automatically download your transactions into a spreadsheet (support Sheets or Excel), as well as some handy templates that you can use for budgeting/dashboarding/whatever. But fundamentally, just pulling data into a spreadsheet so that you can use it however you want.

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