Ask HN: How do you keep track of your personal expenses? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you keep track of your personal expenses?

14 pointsnoobie19 comments

I whole-heartidly recommend YNAB (You Need Another Budget). http://www.youneedabudget.com

You have to enter all your income/expenses in manual, but that's part of it's value - it really makes you accountable for what you spend.

Since tracking all expenses for maybe 5 months, I have probably saved thousands of dollars simply by making cheaper choices and being mindful of excess.

whole-heartildy agreed. very different way of thinking compared to the post-mortem options like Mint. See http://www.youneedabudget.com/method

bonus: here's Jesse Mecham's MicroConf 2014 talk http://www.microconf.com/videos-2014.html

I use mint.com, which is free and pretty amazing. It makes automatically tracks all of your credit card and bank account activity, creates useful and informative graphs, lets you set up budgets and notifications, and all around is fun to use. highly recommend.

It's awesome but it has stagnated and slowly started to go downhill since Intuit (the Quicken/Turbotax company) bought it. First there were no updates for a long time, and recently they FINALLY started changing things a little bit here and there.... those changes being more overt advertising, that is. :(

I wish the mint folks had never sold out. But you can't change the past, so now I just hope Intuit doesn't ruin it before the next personal finance tracking startup comes along to kick mint's ass so I have a replacement.

I've been using Mint.com since 2008, and just the other day I contemplated how astonishingly little it has changed since then. The "Investments" section is still as unusable as it was back then (personalcapital.com is running laps around it). I think the homepage/log in screen was redesigned, and as you said, more overt advertising was added. Maybe there were some backend changes, but as a customer, the lack of progress is staggering.

I use Money Lover - an Android app that's easy to use and quite usefull. Also for a few weeks now I've started keeping track using Quip sreadsheets.

I'm also using Money Lover everyday. The Budgets and Events features are really powerful.

Low tech solution that has evolved over time - spreadsheets, fortnightly budget reconciliation, and a hand-written Personal Balance Sheet (which I replicate in the Wealth+ app).

The Budget spreadsheet has a (annual/qtrly/mthly/weekly) budget for about 100 items (this is the bit that's evolved most over 10+ years), broken into 15 categories (including Investment and Cash Reserves; this also evolves). Most expenses are Food or Entertainment - these get a fortnightly cash amount, rather than having to reconcile that individually. Everything else goes on a Debit Card and is recorded - takes us about 20-30mins a fortnight.

The Personal Balance Sheet was a revelation for me at the beginning of last year - suddenly when we talk about money, we're talking about our net worth and assets not how much we spent on lunches or clothes. I write it out longhand as part of my monthly 'Board' financials - so it includes my own business, property, and some categories like Other Business Equity that are currently empty. The Wealth+ App graphs it all, and you can see some cause and effect - our Cash dropped last month because of some renovations, but our Property Values have gone up this month.

A Funds Manager I know who used to lunch with these guys for work once told me high-net-worth-individuals disproportionately use cash - they see money as real, not abstract.

For me, there's an analogy with understanding my finances. Sure, I can have a system spit me out a personal balance sheet each month - but hand-rolling my own in coloured markers connects me to the reality.

I'm always happy to share these templates if it might help anyone - email is in my profile.

[Edit] I should add, I'm going to review the other options in this thread. Like a To Do List app, with Budgets it can be hard to find something that replicates how you do it.

Apps definitely. I'm using Saved, fairly new iOS app. It has clean graft, pie chart and a list of expenses in week/month mode. But the main benefit is speed. Saved takes seconds to use at any point, especially during entering figures and immediately get a clear overview of what's going on. I strongly recommend this app, if only you don't demand it syncs with credit card. https://www.snappymob.com/saved/

Step one is to use cash as little as possible. Then practically any reasonable thing you pick (Mint, Quicken, etc) can pick up your expenses from your credit card or bank.

Excel.

Learn and practice double-entry accounting including how to manage many accounts: payable accounts, receivable accounts. For a personal solution, it can't be beat (IMHO).

Ledger [0] (or any of its clones; hledger, beancount, etc.) beat Excel for this, as you don't have to implement the logic for double-entry accounting (or accounting for different commodities/currencies) yourself.

[0] http://www.ledger-cli.org/

Any suggestions on where to start learning?

I've recommended and have had good feedback on the Coursera course Introduction to Financial Accounting.

I have tried serval applications on both PC and smartphone, but 6 months ago I decided to stick to Money Lover every day. Easy to use, friendly and it contains most tools and functions I need to manage my expenses. I extremely love the function Event Mode which support users tracking all spending during trips. And web version is pretty cool, very simple for lazy guy like me.

I switched from Mint to Personal Capital (https://www.personalcapital.com) and haven't looked back. The interface is more modern, and the graphs and summary emails are more on topic with what I care about in my spending trends.

I like ledger-cli.

Open source, command-line, double-entry accounting system that handles multiple currencies, stocks, recurring payments, etc with highly customizable reporting.

http://www.ledger-cli.org/

I use Shoeboxed. https://www.shoeboxed.com/features/

I just send them a prepaid envelope full of my receipts every week or so.

I keep track of my expenses in gmail. I manage them with scalc.

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