Ask HN: How do you manage your personal finances?
I just graduated and I feel like managing and keeping track of my finances can be quite challenging. Most of the time, I wonder where my money has gone even though I "know" where I spend my money most of the time.
What kind of apps do you use to assist in managing your finances?
On another note, how do you even "learn" managing finances properly (i.e., spendings, banks, investments, etc). Using Excel does not work for me. I'm thinking of focusing my time on beancount. Feels pretty simple enough to use.
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[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 90.6 ms ] threadOther than that, I don't do anything more than watching my "total assets" value move up and down. If I ever need to retroactively assess things, I can do it in Excel again.
Also, don’t like MS Office (feels like bloat) and Google Sheets ( slow for me at times). I do use excel though for something that I don’t need to edit that often.
I've never been great at tracking spending - what worked for me was just being strict about separating "spending money" from "savings money". I'd get paid $X into a savings account every month, my rent $Y would be drawn from that, and I'd transfer a $Z "monthly allowance" into a separate checking account. Credit card and everything else would come out of the checking account. I know I'm spending $Z every month. I know each month I'm accumulating $X - $Y - $Z in savings. I can adjust $Z however I like, make emergency transfers from savings to checking if I have to, and the transaction history for the savings account is easy to understand.
There are lots of ways to do it and it's important to find something that works for you. I know people who have big mortgages, with an expected windfall when they retire and trade their huge house for a smaller one, because they know it's the only way they'll save enough!
[1] This functionality always costs money or a crazy amount of ads/spyware (like mint.com), but it's always worth it unless you just pay for everything with cash.
Link: https://www.monarchmoney.com/ Referral link: https://www.monarchmoney.com/referral/chszg37bgv
There is a clear separation between the cmd line tool and paisa. It should be relatively straightforward to add support for more. I will look into it later.
The idea of surprise charges is completely unknown to me. It takes a little setup initially, but it gets you into checking your finances briefly every day which makes sure you are briefly checking whether you are going over your budget. You wake up in the morning with your transactions from the previous day and it does a fantastic job of matching them to your categories in your budget.
Unlike other systems you can't budget money that you don't have, so you have to break up your budgeting on a schedule of when you get your paychecks. You get into the habit of budgeting for your debts, bills, and things you are saving up for and you get to see how much you have left over for everything else in your life. It tracks average spending per category as well.
It's fantastic for tracking spending and debt but it's meant for your daily finances. It's not great at tracking stocks, 401ks, etc. But it's not meant for that and doesn't try to be
If you want a referral link: https://lunchmoney.app/?refer=3xlamc3c
https://www.fidelity.com/spend-save/full-view/overview
Here’s my referral code if you’re interested: https://lunchmoney.app/?refer=igqb31gn
I used to use YNAB and tried Mint, but I don’t want to pay a monthly fee. YNAB is cheap ($5/month) but it was just a spreadsheet with categories and I expect I’ll need this info forever so $60/year x 50 years adds up.
I have 13 years of data and it’s useful for taxes, business disputes, planning, long term budgeting, and backup/restore.
I'm from India and I use Fold¹ for this. They make money tracking easier using the account aggregator framework², which is provided by an RBI³ regulated entity. They are currently in invite-only for both iOS (beta) and Android (alpha).
They are very feature-rich and implement those with utmost care to design, UX and engineering. The team is small and everyone is committed to the goal of making finance easier and seen. All amazing people!
Highly recommended for people in India.
1: https://fold.money
2. https://sahamati.org.in/what-is-account-aggregator/
3: Reserve Bank of India
Imagine a Google sheet where 1 tab pulls in all your transactions from each of your banks / credit cards / investment accounts and the other tabs are... Whatever you can imagine.
I am a huge fan, after I graduated from mint.com I've never looked back after finding Tiller.
You can customize to your hearts content (it's Google Sheets, after all), plus they have handy template sheets to get started with.
I personally have sheets to track my monthly spending (by category), my networth, my checking account balance vs sum of all credit card bills, my progress on credit card signup bonus minimum spend challenges are more.
I have been thinking, if I were to create a budget tracker, my hot take would be to make an imperfect one, aimed at people who don't need to budget "to survive" and so can make a mistake, overspend and then reign it in next month.
This software would just track the major source of discretionary spend: your credit card, and auto allocate to buckets using AI mostly, and maybe email you an alert if overspending (like the battery alerts from Ring!).
Any non credit-card account tends to be used for essentials like bills, mortgage and so on. Since I am not going to not pay those, it doesn't matter.
The idea is to say "can spend $10,000/m on credit card" or whatever, and go from there.
MVP: download credit card CSV, run some local python code to auto allocate and fire off email if there is an issue (there was an API to email thing posted on HN a while back).
I feel there are many use cases for an app that can just regularly pull financial transactions, perform a function on them and spit out an email on a regular basis or on some kind of a trigger.
I wrote a SaaS tool for letting me know when a stock sale would trigger a wash sale event for tax purposes. I host it at https://washsaleadvisor.com. It uses plaid to pull the trade transactions from most bank APIs and sends me a daily email with useful info. The last feature I added was refactoring the wash sale functionality into WASM functions and then put a code editor in the dashboard. Anyone who signs up could theoretically turn "wash sale advisor" into basically any operation that iterates through transactions and renders an email and sends via sendgrid.
I use beancount, it is a great fit for a specific type of user who can put up with double entry and who wants to run sql-ish queries on their transactions and who doesn't need a GUI. It probably won't work if you are not all those things but if you are it is great.
Conceptually, I would suggest looking into books that do a basic job of explaining accounting- balance sheet, income statement, cash flow. While it is a much bigger space than the world of personal finance, personal finance itself has gotten very complex, with lots of seemingly indistinguishable places/apps to put money. The indistinguishable becomes just crisply defined if one has the basics of accounting.
However, financial institutions in the USA are making it harder to pull transactions via an API without involving third parties. So I’ll soon need to resort to scraping via selenium to automatically fetch transaction data.
1: https://sagar.se/blog/where-is-the-money/
Last year, I got in touch with the City's public service, where they have debt counselors and financial experts who help people get control of their finances. And I sat down for a couple unproductive sessions where I recited my budget items from memory, the guy plugged the numbers into a spreadsheet, and then I compared it to bank statements. They were unproductive because there was no possibility of information sharing between me and his office. We couldn't even match our calendars for an appointment, or transfer a simple file.
Another resource that has helped is a 2" binder full of consumer finance information, published by the US Federal Government. I think it's the CFPB: https://www.consumerfinance.gov/ and I'm sure there are online resources now to match. They can really help you with solid facts and education about basic financial literacy and getting out of debt.
I also signed up to Mint a few years ago, after a recommendation by a friend. I found Mint to be no more helpful than when I started. Also, it was spamming me with special offers, which is how they monetize the free service, of course. I canceled Mint and I also shut down my whole Intuit account. I use H&R Block's software now, for tax preparation.
So these days, in terms of managing my finances day-to-day, I use little else besides my two online banking apps. And, I'm happy to say that their limited automation features have finally come together for me. I've got a flow going where all my bills will be paid, necessary transfers and credit card payments go through, and of course, all deposits are direct and electronic. So barring something unexpected, all my bills should be paid without intervention, even if I were to be incarcerated or go to the hospital, or be incapacitated in some way.
My bank apps are still inept at categorizing things. I mean, like, if I buy a Subway Sandwich, it might get categorized as Public Transit! So I still don't rely on that stuff for figuring out how my expenses are distributed, but thankfully I don't really need to know, and my discretionary/entertainment expenses are minimal already.
I'd still really like a master budgeting app that's capable of ingesting machine-readable files from both of my banks, and visualizing stuff on a monthly/annual basis, with colors and stuff. I suppose I could whip something up with Google Sheets. I don't own any other spreadsheet application anyway.
Been using Firefly for several years.
https://www.firefly-iii.org/
Joint account is only used for bills, and barring some terrible emergency I don't plan to cash out my investments.
I also have an autosave set up on my bank account that each paycheck it shifts $400 into my savings.
Whatever is left, I just pretend that's my paycheck and work with that for the next couple of weeks. Sometimes I stretch myself a bit too thin, and then I dip into my savings account to get me by until the next paycheck, but I try not to make a habit of it (it's not our primary savings, that gets taken out of the joint account, I mainly use my personal savings account as a buffer now).
And in addition to that I have a 401k that gets taken out of my paycheck right away as well.
I'll get to see the numbers go up each paycheck, and then I don't really have to think about it outside of that. Investing and paying my loan and shifting money over takes about 20 minutes of my time, then I'm done for two weeks.
I'm definitely not as efficient with the rest of the money as I'd like (we eat out too often and get too many toys), but at least I'm still saving/investing a respectable amount each paycheck anyway.
I didn't really start having this habit until my 30s, though, and never worked at a place that gave out RSUs, so I'm way behind a lot of people on this site that are younger than me, I'm sure.
I just put everything on my credit card that I can. From my bill every month I know my expenses. Then I just pay it off. If I get really curious I can export the statement transactions and break it down more. I also get rewards.
Idk simple and caveman like? Maybe. it works for me though
It was initially meant to replace a spreadsheet I created based on the budgeting advice given on the r/personalfinance subreddits. It can
help you figure out where your money went, plan your budget ahead of time and analyze past expenditures.
source code @ https://github.com/rare-magma/guitos