Ask HN: How do you manage you money?

I do this because I do not expect to be able to depend on anything outside of myself for my later days.

I don't use any outside advisors but I do have someone keeping the books and occasionally they will inform me of some detail that might be worth pursuing. (One of these for instance is that in NL income from rental property is nearly tax free if you own the property privately.)

In term of investments, I tend to prefer long term investments rather than short terms one. I've bought some apple shares which I don't touch and I have invested in some index funds.

I do have an accountant to keep my company's book.

I do not expect to be able to get pension from my country by the time I retire so I save and make sure that I'll have enough to live by that time. To that end, I live well below my means and try to save 60% of my income each months.

This does mean that I have a relatively small apartment, that I do not splurge on restaurants and that I tend to not want to buy stuff (this is connected to the fact that I like not having much clutter in my life). I strongly believe that it's easier to continue having the same lifestyle as you did when you started working than returning to a cheaper lifestyle after having had a taste of luxury. So I avoid luxury for now.

In term of spreadsheets, I maintain two spreadsheets.

1. Recurring income and expenses. This allows me to track recurring expenses and decide or not to cut them. I make sure to review it every 2 months

2. Investment spreadsheets, this is a spreadsheet I use to track the different investments I do and the monthly return I get on them. I only review them once a month because I do not want to make impulsive decisions regarding my investments. I've found that it's too easy to panic and make bad decisions and it's also healthier not to worry constantly about one's investment. I probably leave money on the table because of this but it's the choice for me (and then again I have less risk of losing everything).

In term of credit card spending, I set a limit as to what I spend every month and will only really analyze my spendings if I near that limit.

EDIT: Quick hint for people who need to deal with multiple currencies, it's worth looking at a specialized service like Currencies Direct (but there are many others), they tend to give much better rates than banks. I've saved over $1000 this year by doing this.

I really can't wait for digital currencies to penetrate further into mainstream.

Thanks for asking, hopefully I'll spot some good tips here.

Unfortunately, Microsoft retired this product about five years ago but still makes it available as Money Plus Sunset Deluxe edition, available as a free download.

It's a free cross-platform GUI like Quicken (I guess). Developers make money by selling addons.

My bank allows me to export statements in CSV or Quicken(?) format, but it is often easier just to key them in manually.

I treat credit card spending as a "Black Box" only recording the monthly payments out. Should probably break that down further so I can see where we're wasting money.

I try to align Direct Debits (regular monthly payments in the UK) so they come out on the same day / week. Some companies are more helpful than others at moving them.

No cheques - thankfully their use is in the way out in the UK. Similarly, I try not to use cash - far harder to track spending.

I leave investing to professionals. There's no way I can compete on the stock market with people who do it full time and have billions to play with. So I let my pension fund do that work for me.

Hardest thing to track is ad hoc payments through PayPal - either to people or as payment from friends & companies.

Sadly, my bank doesn't offer mobile banking, but I'm happy enough with Web access. I don't need spending alerts, to make sudden payments etc.

The most important thing - if you're married/living together/in a relationship - talk to your partner! Explain your priorities, talk about realistic goals, work out how you'll split bills etc. Money breaks up too many relationships.

I live in the UK, have to pay my US student loans, which is a bitch.

I used to have a US bank account registered to my parent's address over which my mother had Power of Attorney. I'd transfer a decent sum of money using a forex 2-3 times a year and pay the student loans monthly out of that

However, the bank account kept going dormant because of there being no personal type contact. So I ended up closing that account out of fear I'd lose access to it.

That left me with two ways to pay my student loans, forex and paypal (looking at you Discover, only allowing paypal is terrible).

So I paid off the loan that required me to use paypal by socking all the saved money I had at it, and now use a low-fee, good exchange rate forex to pay the other loan monthly.

Everything is handled completely online, and I only keep one set of UK bank accounts.

Personal savings into a stocks and shares ISA happens automatically every month, plus a work pension that I manage online.

I don't see the need for management, I know in my head how much I have. I tried to set up spreadsheets, apps or other fancy things to keep track of my spendings, but I abandoned all of them in a few days due to lack of motivation.

I wish I had your problem :)

That might change once things start getting more complicated, (Kids!) but for now, it's very easy to keep track of everything.

It does a few nice things like automatically determining your recurring income and expense patterns, which allows it to do a bit of forecasting. I'm working on expanding that capability at the moment to summarise savings progress for recurring expenses with multi-month periods. Contributions welcome!

Once you're up to speed on that and want to get really fancy you should check out https://www.youneedabudget.com.

Good luck on your journey.

For obvious reasons I tend to charge everything to my credit cards and then just pay them off before the due date.

I have an account and a debit card that's only for ATM usage. The account behind that card has a nil balance unless I'm about to get cash, in which case I just use a banking app to do a quick transfer. It takes about a minute or so from app launch to available funds. I have this separate account in case the card gets skimmed.

In essence, with this separate ATM account and my credit cards, I'm keeping my cash in cold storage until it's go-time.

Other than this, I don't really do anything magical or fancy. I used to diligently keep track of every expense but it didn't really add anything to my life so I stopped doing it. I'm not a fan of wasting time.

As a contingency against losing my wallet (which has happened exactly once!) I have a second set of bank accounts and credit cards. These backup cards stay at home. If my wallet disappears and departs from my life I don't have any downtime; I just switch over the backup while replacements are on their way.

I keep my wallet as empty as possible and only carry the bare minimum I need for my day to day. Most of the time I don't even get my wallet out and just use my phone to pay for things. Most places where I go have PayPass enabled terminals.

I don't have a credit card. To be fair, nobody here has a credit card. I just spend less than I get, and I try to save something every month. I put my savings on a saving account.

That's all.

I'm based in Europe but have most of my investments in the US largely due to my phenomenal broker there: https://www.interactivebrokers.com/

Interactive Brokers allows you to exchange currency basically without fees and at real market rates.

In terms of investments I keep it simple and split the money in fixed percentages between cash, bonds, index ETFs, and gold. This saves a lot of time and fees.

I pay an accountant / financial advisor to help me with taxes on payments from multiple freelance clients and she's also recently advised me what savings accounts to use:

1. 3 month emergency tax fund 2. Unit trust with 50-50 shares / bonds composition 3. Pension 4. Cash saving for property