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Ask HN: What are you using for personal financial planning/tracking?

9 points by max-si-m ↗ HN
I used to try a bunch of different apps for tracking personal finances(YNAB, Mint etc.). But they didn't fit my "model". There are a few options that I would like to have:

- Transaction fees, I want to see how much I lose on transactions

- Smart budgeting

- Family sharing

- Recurrent savings (e.g >10% from each income)

- Multi currencies

- The planing of big purchases (e.g >5% from each income with deadlines)

- Maybe available money per day (total income - recurrent transactions(e.g savings/subscriptions) - purchases planing / days in month) something like that.

Google Sheet doesn't fit my expectation, because I fill in transactions from the iPhone. I already started working on the app for myself but feel that there is a loooot of similar stuff. So no need for one more.

Please, share your experience of tracking the personal budget. What are you using for that? What have you tried to use? Maybe you already made something that will be suitable for me?

16 comments

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pwg
Ledger-CLI:

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

max-si-m
I don't think that fill transactions from CLI will work for me. There are a few cons that I found in features:

- don't have family sharing

- didn't find a mobile app

- budgeting

Did I miss something?

pwg
Family sharing could be handled by a file sync app (i.e., dropbox or otherwise). Do note that this means dropbox also knows your finances unless you also encrypt somehow.

Budgeting is covered within the documentation. There's an example inside of budgeting.

There's a few mobile apps that have some 'support' for ledger (search "ledger" on the F-Droid [1] store to find two of them). There are also a couple web interfaces (general internet search) that could substitute for "mobile app" in some ways.

But as the data file is just text, any mobile text file editor would support "use" of the system for data entry.

One very nice part about the data file being just a text file is that it is also trivial to automate updates so that for recurring bills/income that are equal in value, you can automate the addition of those transactions with any form of job scheduler (i.e. cron on a Linux system).

[1] https://f-droid.org/

rayhendricks
I’m using google sheets, updated in the 1st of each month. It Calculates total net worth which is all in really inverted in. It could be adapted to handle multiple currencies though.
max-si-m
Can you share it or made some simplified version?
stakkur
Libre Office spreadsheets. I also have a few Python scripts I wrote to consume downloaded CSV files of my bank account transactions, summarize them a bit, and drop them into a spreadsheet.
max-si-m
Why do you choose this way? It seems to be a bit complicated, doesn't it?
stakkur
One spreadsheet with two worksheets and two python scripts seems fairly simple to me. No third party, no feeds, no sharing data, nothing. And it just works.
max-si-m
Hmm, in that case, it should works
jnfr
Based on your list of requirements (especially multicurrency), check out Lunch Money (https://lunchmoney.app) Disclaimer– I am the indie maker behind this :)
max-si-m
That looks pretty! I would definitely try this. Could you tell me more about budgeting? Do you have some way to handle "recurrent savings" (e.g 10% from each income)?
jnfr
We don't support any saving goals right now, but we've gotten feedback that users want this. We do show you charts so you can easily compare your expenses vs your income.

The budgeting feature is on a monthly basis and you can choose which categories to allow budgeting and you'll be presented with charts showing you your spending habits vs budgeted spend to help you make your decisions.

Hope that helps, if you have any other questions or feature requests, my email is wide open :) (jen at lunchmoney.app)

danaw
Looks like a great product, will checkout!

Curious, how do you do your change log? Is it automated or do you just update a page/doc?

jnfr
Thanks!

The changelog is a manual effort right now :) Haven't felt the need to automate it or pay for another SaaS to handle it for me yet!

sbfeibish
3 Gnucash files/directories. Handles 2 corporations and my personal life. It's a lot of work. It gets in the way of other work. But since the data is confidential, I put up with it.
max-si-m
It looks a bit too complicated, doesn't it? Does it cost that to dive into it?