Ask HN: How do you record your personal finances?
This is a recurring question that pop up every couple of years, but it's always interesting to see what people use nowadays.
How do you track your personal finances? Excel sheet? Python script? Self-hosted dashboard?
Do you use open source software, did you code your own, or do you subscribe to a service?
I'm more interested in the basic spending tracking functions (auto importing from bank, auto tagging categories, etc) than having it track my investment portfolio.
76 comments
[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 55.5 ms ] threadHaving lately used Google Sheets along with AppScript for other purposes, I think I would go with that.
I was paying, as long as it was in the ballpark of $60/year, and that was already a lot. (I live in a country with lower overall income.)
However, my impression is that they have gone through a pivot. From their messaging it looks like the customer they’re after is someone going through more serious financial trouble. Someone in need of a sophisticated set of tools and methods to get out. That user is probably willing to pay more and for longer than someone like me.
I just wanted to know how much I’m spending on snacks and fast food.
I have many automatic payments (credit card, telephone, utilities, etc) from a transaction account. I also have a loan with redraw, and I want to have most of my funds keeping the loan balance low, but I don't want my transaction account to go negative. So I need to forecast future transactions.
Future transactions may be annual, monthly, four weekly, two weekly, etc. It's a real mess. Some are easy to predict accurately, others can only be estimated.
I have a column to keep track of which future transactions are predictions/estimates/allowances, and which ones have been confirmed.
I also have a column to keep track of which transactions have been reconciled with the bank. (This is currently a manual cross-checking process, since my bank doesn't have API access.)
My preference would be a text-based system (https://plaintextaccounting.org/), but haven't found one that neatly allows estimates of future transactions that can be modified once the details are known.
If I was doing it again, I'd probably go with one of the cli text ledgers so the process is easier to preserve and closer to ETL.
[1] https://github.com/raphaelm/python-fints [2] https://github.com/phil294/fints-transaction-tracker
The community is also very nice and they were very accommodating towards my bug reports and fixed them very quickly (it had something to do with IME not working well on macOS).
The risk there is that they use Plaid on the backend.
Not to shill for YNAB, but it's specifically designed to help break the paycheck-to-paycheck cycle, even for people with a decent amount of cashflow.
Another thing to think about is increasing monthly disposable income with emergency deferment of payments - in this context stopping 401k contributions while you deal with an emergency. Depending on your debt type, debt load, and credit history you can often negotiate deferment on many monthly payments for months at a time (e.g. mortgage, student loans, some car payments, utility bills, etc.).
I do see the issue with having to immediately start making payments back toward the 401k loan, but then I think you just take out a little bit more than what you would otherwise to cover those payments for the duration of the emergency.
Sorry if I sound combative, I am genuinely curious to the responses to these arguments. I'd be happy to find the flaw in my outline if it will help me make better decisions, I just don't see it yet.
Have you been in a real emergency, where you need serious money within minutes, not days? Because that's what an emergency fund is for. If I need 10k for an emergency right now, I have that available via card within seconds or (entirely) in cash as soon as I can get to an ATM or bank. Not to mention I know exactly how much I have available.
To answer your question, these are the points you're missing: - Money in a 401k is pre-tax. Any money you want to withdraw will cost you taxes.
- You can't put money back in a 401k after withdrawing it. You will lose the tax advantages on that money forever.
- Withdrawing from your 401k before retirement costs you a penalty on top of taxes:
> If you withdraw money from your 401(k) before you're 59½, the IRS usually assesses a 10% penalty when you file your tax return. That could mean giving the government $1,000 or 10% of that $10,000 withdrawal in addition to paying ordinary income tax on that money. https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/investing/early-withdrawa....
- If you take a loan against your 401k, that comes with a lot of conditions and what-ifs. That's not going to help you in a real emergency.
- Using your 401k to get emergency cash is not going to be quick. If your house burns down in 20 minutes from you reading this comment, it would be nice to have money available to make arrangements immediately, rather than waiting until your 401k loan/withdrawal is ready.
The ideal is to max out your 401k and have an emergency fund _on top_ of that. Using your 401k to fund an emergency will come at significant short- and long-term cost. Having a post-tax emergency fund (again, that's _on top_ of the 401k) gives you short-term security without compromising your long-term security.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/roth401k.asp
A final thought here - there’s a temptation to see “emergency” savings as something you _might_ use, but I think for most folks (especially those with families) emergency funds are something they WILL use at some point (life happens, and it’s expensive) - so they need to be saving in addition to retirement planning. If your retirement plan explicitly includes the notion of looting the 401k at some point, then that might work for you - but for most people viewing a retirement account as emergency savings is dangerous because it leaves them under saving for inevitable bumps in the road.
Now, you may not mind that, but it's worth keeping in mind. So while you're employed, this can work, but once you become unemployed you lose 10% on that withdrawal if you're too young, and maybe also owe taxes. That's a steep penalty.
Are these scenarios likely? No. Are they a possibility? Yes.
There is some inherent risk in earning that return on your emergency fund. Maybe it's not much but it's there and it's something to be aware of.
It's a super simple way to use envelope accounting (ala Dave Ramsey), without using actual cash.
Though it's not fully automated, it's close enough, it provides unlimited flexibility (every other system I've tried eventually gets in my way a little too much), and the price ($0) is just right.
It lives on an S3 bucket and stores the data in local storage.
http://www.mindlessflash.com/budget
The only things I track are stuff which has tax implications - in which case things like that go in my FY<year> folder until tax time.
It's in need of an update to stop duplicating sheets and just either add columns, that way I could easier do things like compare over time or create charts, etc. But I often have extra notes or other things in each sheet as needed, so I'd need a way to still incorporate those. And it's been working well; mostly ensuring I don't forget any of the individual bills.
The harder thing for me is when I get a paper bill, ensuring it gets scheduled to be looked at and paid if I don't do it right away.
It's OK, not perfect but OK.
While Homechart supports importing from CSVs and QFX files, I'm not sure when/if it will support automatic bank importing due to the costs/privacy/security associated with it.
Homechart is meant to be a "whole home data management" solution. Budgeting is a small part of its functionality and will expand in the futurel.
1 - https://homechart.app/budgeting/
I'm soon gonna move by myself into an apartment and I'll have to keep budget of expenses and stuff, so I've been looking into Homechart which seems to fulfill all my needs. I'll give it a try before trying the other paid services that only do budgeting.
https://www.youneedabudget.com/
I knew I wasn't achieving the goals I had with my DIY spreadsheet and mint.com, and once I started using YNAB everything came together very nicely.
That is exactly what I hope to express in my sibling comment. Increasing the friction (be it UX or multi-device usage) might make my hesitation to manage my financial situation bigger and I might cease to manage it. This would be quite a bad scenario (well, at least for my savings ;) )
It has changed my inner hesitation to deal with exact financial situation and where my money goes to a good understanding on how much money I have planned for which purpose and priorize where my money goes (or shouldn't).
This gives me peace of mind. For this, I am willing to spend money. I think 15$/month is worth it. (Even without Bank-Syncing).
Of course I could achieve this by other (cheaper) means, but then again I like how frictionless it makes managing my situation. And economically the return of invest in my first year of using YNAB payed for it for quite some years ;)
As someone dealing with two currencies, I can recommend RMillan's Plugins for YNAB [0].
[0] https://ynab.rmillan.com/
Edit: Not affiliated with YNAB, just a simple user somewhere in switzerland
YNAB has taught me one thing (they had a whole philosophy of budgeting section when I started using it): budget for your expenses ahead of time. I pay yearly, I've been setting aside its monthly price along with my utilities for years. Another point of their philosophy which I agree with is a budgeting tool saves you money in the long run. I'm pretty sure it saves me more than $15 a month — with good budgeting practice, you can choose yearly billing on many services instead of monthly, which often is cheaper.
I've used this one for so long I really am not interested in learning something else, and in the grand scheme of things, I've spent almost twice that for a takeaway dinner yesterday. YNAB is as expensive as a pizza in London.
Lastly, I don't have big uses myself, but money tends to get complicated with time. I have a current account, a savings accounts, a business account, some crypto I bought years ago, a disposable credit card for travelling, my Vanguard investments. It's good to have them all together in one place. It's good to have a nice chart showing me my net worth change over a decade.
I don't live over my means so I stoped trying to record everything but because I'm saving for a house, I need to know roughly how much I have across different accounts.
And for everyone curious about why I have more accounts: I have my account, we have a shared account, my wife has one, 1 company brokering account, private brokering account and most critical an banc account for reserved funds/emergency/maintenance.
I assume that when we buy a house that we will throw everything together to get the best quote.
My mane bank account actually has this analysis feature but I disabled it again because it did not add any value.
I always wire money every month out of my account. Everything I have in there is money I can just spend if I wanted to.