Ask HN: How do you manage your finances? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you manage your finances?

4 pointscantlin10 comments

As a youngish guy with no significant assets financial management or planning has never been something I've invested in mentally. Increasingly though lack of visibility around where my money is coming from and going is becoming pretty frustrating.

What strategies have smart people adopted to accomplish some of the following:

    * Monitor, graph and predict money I/O.
    * Identify major cost areas.
    * Track and improve credit ratings.
    * Quantify potential for lending.

I bank with HSBC in the UK, but I have no problem changing that. Having just had to resort to Javascript[0] to get a CSV output of my previous transactions this seems appealing. Is anyone doing modern UX design in online banking? Or are their other services out there to fill the gap?

[0] https://gist.github.com/cantlin/5798166

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RBS in the UK provide an industry-standard XML dump for each of your accounts. There are several online service that will take that file and categorise your transactions and forecast your cashflow for you. https://www.mint.com is one such example.

I evaluated several a while back, but found them all to be lacking, especially with respect to accurate cashflow[1] and budgeting[2]. I also wasn't very keen for a company to have access to my financial data. I now have a homemade app that uses the XML file to get the info I want out of the transactions and display it how I want.

[1] Cashflow was generally not fine-grained enough for me, my account would show as being fine over the month but there would in reality be days where it would be overdrawn.

[2] Budgeting was very naive. Budget £200 for groceries, it would budget you £200/days_in_month every day. Not very useful if you do a weekly shop.

Keep a budget. For 2 or 3 months be fanatical about writing down everything you buy and then analyze it. Ask yourself, 'what could I have saved on?' for example, made lunch more often, buy 1-2 cd not 10, etc. etc. Then set a budget from what you learned and monitor that.

Raise your credit score most effectively by buying something like a car or home and paying it off RELIGOUSLY. Try VERY hard to not be late. Set up direct payments thru your bank, etc.

Get One credit card (not just a debit card for your checking act.) and NEVER be late with that either. By one thing a month to keep it active and pay it off right away.

Shop around for stuff you want. Look all around compare and don't make those impulse buys.

As much as I hate the credit spiral we all are in, you have to game it to your advantage.

In addition to oaxacamatt's excellent advice, you can use Excel or create a Google spreadsheet to track your expenses over the course of a month, or even a week; make budget categories, write everything down, and then start by using a week's or month's (or whatever period's) worth of data to formulate a target budget.

Then create a budget-vs-actuals version of your spreadsheet. When you have a periods worth of data, see if you need to adjust your budget (hopefully downwards, but you don't want to be shooting for some unrealistic numbers, so do adjust categories upwards if you need to do so to be realistic), and then continue to compare periods of actuals-vs-budget.

I also find it motivating to keep a list of "Yay!" and "Boo!" items, completely informally/separately from my spreadsheet. It's just a thing where I can write down things like, "Yay! Brought my own coffee to work instead of buying out" or other such little victories. The Yays can be more motivating to me than the Boos, but it might help to track both to see where you think you're breaking your own budget.

And this can all be adapted very easily to a work budget, startup or even an established business.

Gnucash is a delightful piece of software, comparable to Intuit's Quicken ... but, naturally, Gnucash is free.

Keeping an eye on your budget and watching the graphs is indispensable in terms of helping you manage your money. After all, you can't make tweaks if you don't know what's going on. Obviously you want to live below your means if you want to be successful, and you want to trim categories that seem to be out of control ... but this can only happen if you are proactively aware of where your money is going.

I've heard it explained this way: "managed money goes farther". If you make a budget (a plan, really) for your money, you're telling it where to go. If not, it'll easily disappear through behaviors you're not aware of.

Many people have said that when they finally started budgeting and making a plan for their money, it felt as though they got a raise. Of course, no new money came in because of the budgeting, but the act of making and following a written plan led to far less waste, achieving the same effect.

I was asking myself the same questions and ended up just writing an app - my first one - that simulates your future financial I/O based on earnings and spending etc. It's free:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.codelemma....

What the app does is it takes your income, expenses, savings and debts, and generates tables and graphs showing future monthly cash-flow, savings, net worth. Each element may be independently configured with rates, amounts, durations etc.

It's my first app so I'd be very happy to hear feedback on usability, usefulness, etc. Thank you.

Mint is awesome and I really like my bank Simple (https://Simple.com). It makes it easy to set goals and monitor your money. If anyone wants an invite you can email me I have 9 at the time of writing this.

Sadly neither Mint nor Simple are available in the UK.

I used to use a lot of budgeting tools like Microsoft Money. At the end of the day I realized that they were all a waste of time. No amount of new bank accounts helps you make more money.

Everybody has the same common goal of making more money. The only way to do this is to earn more and/or spend less.

No amount of time spent budgeting, forecasting or plotting graphs helped me earn more money. Maybe it would help you keep an eye on your spending. If you are good at that, then there is no need. Spend your time setting up a startup instead.

How about Money Lover App (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bookmark.m...)? I have used it for a long time. It was good, but keeping spending info was actually a challenge.

Service to fill the gap in online banking - Mint.com

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