Ask HN: Do you use budgeting software?

I use Mint to track my spending. I don't budget.

Gnucash, but I haven't gotten the hang of it's budget features yet.

Most budgeting is done in a spreadsheet. Cash in --> Cash out, line by line.

YNAB is pretty great. I allow it sync transactions from my bank accounts, but its budgeting system works fine if you're willing to enter transactions in manually.

It is a refined form of envelope budgeting, and allowed me to go from an engineer that made a lot of money, but spent willy-nilly to an engineer that knows what's up, and with a rising net worth.

I like that it encourages you to look at the money you actually have and allocate it to what it needs to do ("Rent", "Savings for christmas gifts", "Car replacement", "Efund"...), as opposed to forward looking budgets that are just guesses about what you want to spend going forward.

YNAB is pretty good, i bought a year's license, but I didn't stick with it because it started to chug running in my browser :/

I use Personal Capital and really think it's a great piece of software. If you're worried about a cloud solution that has access to your financials, you might as well use a spreadsheet.

I'm pretty sure YNAB (You Need a Budget) does not require cloud storage of personal information.

Built an ad-hoc system using flask, Google Spreadsheets, and Twilio (where I work) that my wife and I have been using for 18 months now -- far longer than any other system has stuck.

- budget tab: tracks category + allocated budget for the month

- expenses tab: tracks date, amount, category, description

- when we spend money, my wife and I text, eg, "13.31 restaurants lunch at chipotle" to a Twilio number. A flask app splits the body of the SMS expecting "X.XX category description", and uses the Google spreadsheets API to add the row to the expenses tab. (Yes, we manually enter every expense, either via SMS or via the spreadsheet. This was a habit we picked up the old YNAB. We could automate this to some extent, but the discipline of having to do something when we spend money has been beneficial).

- I get a confirmation text. My wife gets a text saying "Greg spent $13 on Chipotle. We have $132 left in the lunch category this month."

- Texting "report" to the number kicks back a text with each category and the amount remaining this month.

It's an imperfect system. Some small dollar stuff gets missed. But it's super flexible for reporting since its just a spreadsheet. Because I built it, I actually use it. The confirmation texts have instilled a bit of accountability between the two of us and also serve as a nice reminder during the day of what the other person is doing. ("Hey! Thanks for logging your lunch. How was it?")

Been meaning to write a blog post about it for a while. Will do so if there's interest.

I would feel better with a paid solution.

I use EveryDollar; it ticks most of our boxes, but it's not a ledger (it doesn't give me any confidence that I didn't make an error in my allocations). Still, it's good for planning and trcking. They also have a $10/month premium plan (which I use) that automatically pulls in transactions (a la Mint) but I don't get the spammy adverts and they had a much better privacy policy last I checked. Still, it's SaaS...

I've been using YNAB for about 6 or 7 years I think. I really enjoy the software and the ideology behind it. It's helped me quite a bit.

The biggest problem that I find with programs like mint is that they aren't real time. Even my bank accounts aren't current. They often lag 24 hours, so when I look it may seem like I have more than what I do ... so I guess (often wrong, or forget something) what I spent the day before and try to mentally assign that amount to different categories (like groceries, Transportation, restaurants, etc).

Does anyone know software that can keep real time accounting of my personal expenses?

Yes, YNAB, it rocks: https://www.youneedabudget.com/

They have an opinionated, cult following that seems a bit weird at first, but if you approach the situation with humility and the real need to budget you'll realize YNAB is really good. You want opinionated software when it comes to something like budgeting. You want a system you buy into and has been proven to work, not a system that lets you do anything how you want.

If you tried YNAB before and didn't jive with it, try it again. The new version they released about 6 months ago was a really good update.

It's $5/mo. The software is simple but works. The mobile app is good. The bank syncing is as good as it can be. Realizing how using a credit card for most payments affects your budgeting process is tricky at first, but that's because it's a tricky thing to account for. YNAB make it pretty easy to make credit card payments mesh with your actual budget.

The founder wrote a decent book: https://www.amazon.com/You-Need-Budget-Paycheck-Paycheck-ebo...

Re: cloud solutions accessing your bank account—the benefits outweigh the risks. Living without a budget is very expensive because it's so easy to spend money on things you don't actually care about instead of things you do care about.

- The benefit of having a budget long-term is probably hundreds of thousands of dollars, and getting the things you want out of having money vs. haphazardly blowing money. - The risks of a budgeting company screwing up with your cloud data is real, but doesn't outweigh the great benefits.

I've also been tracking this company which is building a pretty slick looking desktop app: https://medium.com/actualbudget http://actualbudget.com/ https://twitter.com/actualbudget

Bought YNAB for a year ($50) -- heard great things but then couldn't get it to work. It massively helps if you can get your bank to sync transactions with your budget but at the time YNAB didn't have a script for my bank (N26) so made the whole endevour somewhat 'manual'.

So anyone thinking of going for that software my recommendation is to check for such a script is available/easy to use/maintain with your bank first -- then proceed.

I use YNAB (You Need A Budget). I don't really keep a strict budget. Just a loose idea of how much I want to spend and use i to track my spending more than anything else.

I like the software a lot, but the subscription model really turns me off. I am grandfathered in to the $40/yr plan from last year so I'm going to keep using it.

I don't link any of my bank accounts, because I feel like it defeats the purpose of budgeting. I love manually inputing my transactions. It makes me feel more connected to my finances and makes me more mindful of my spending.

I use a combination of Personal Capital to get a high level overview of income and expenses by category, along with a custom Google Sheet I made that breaks out projected and actual spend by category. I started out using Mint and was largely happy with it, but found the PC interface much cleaner and faster, along with a better mobile app. That, along with my own personal dislike of Intuit as a company, was enough for me to switch to Personal Capital.

Each weekend I'll take a bit of time over coffee and breakfast to review, mostly to keep tabs of how much money is flowing towards certain categories and how I am doing towards my own personal financial goals.

It's a great habit to get into, and once you get the hang of it, its truly eye opening, but I'd caution not to become too obsessive over it. Life happens, some times you will go over in some categories, and thats OK. Learn to roll with the punches.

I used to use Mint. I'm not an impulsive spender so there was minimal benefit. It doesn't require software to figure out most of my disposable income goes towards housing, health insurance, and car expenses.

I use Mint to track my habits retroactively. I wouldn't have guessed otherwise that I spent $20k on Amazon alone last year, and $12,000 on Seamless! It really adds up. It also makes adding up business expenses at the end of the year a breeze.

I'm using YNAB while manually inputting each transaction, rather than having it linked with my accounts. It might sound like a hassle at first but it's just a reflex now, whenever I buy something I just enter it in there. At the end of each week I'll open up my bank app and compare what is in there against what I have in YNAB and this flow has been fine for me. I had tried a few other apps before but I couldn't stick to any of them, the idea of budgeting upfront and then adjusting as purchases are done, moving money from one category to another, really clicks for me.

It works great and has drastically changed the way I spend money since I've started using it, I'm much more aware of what I can actually spend and less stressed. The reporting features are also great to see how much I spend on average on a given month etc.

Pricing has gotten a bit steep for new members but I still think it's really worth it, it's the most useful service I'm subscribed to. Some of Android app recent UI changes were a bit questionable but I got used to them.

I'm just trying this (free and open source): https://github.com/firefly-iii/firefly-iii

I dislike giving all my data to (cloud)services like Ynab, who sell all your data/profile to others...

Mint for budgeting, Personal Capital for overview of finances and investments.

YNAB (You Need a Budget) is fantastic

ledger https://ledger-cli.org

Wave Apps. It’s free with some helpful paid tools for businesses.

I built my own, using daily since 2010. Finally getting serious about offering it up as a product.

Yes. I use old school Quicken. I manually enter transactions to categorize them (most are split -- so anything automatic based on retailer doesn't work well) and then I use automatic reconciliation against the banks' online stuff. I've been doing this since 2001 or so and it's been quite useful. YNAB seems interesting, but switching to a new platform would be... complicated.

We use Ledger CLI[1], and once I got over the learning curve I really liked it. We keep individual files for each card or account and have a set of scripts to tie them all together and give us the output we want. Toss it all in a self-hosted git repo and update every week or so. While I do wish we could make use of ofxclient and ledger-autosync (just isn't gonna happen with some of our accounts), the discipline of going through each line item is really valuable in tracking spending and kinda the State of the Household.

[1] - https://www.ledger-cli.org/