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Ask HN: How do you handle personal finance without giving data to third parties?

1 points by francesco_gab ↗ HN
Most personal finance tools require either a direct bank connection (Plaid, Tink) or uploading your data to a cloud service. Both mean giving sensitive financial data to a third party.

I've been thinking about this for a while. The alternatives I found are either too manual (spreadsheets) or too complex to set up (Firefly III, Actual Budget with full Docker stack).

Curious how HN handles this. Do you: - Use a local tool and accept the setup complexity? - Trust a cloud service and accept the privacy tradeoff? - Just use spreadsheets? - Something else entirely?

I ended up building my own solution (happy to share if there's interest), but I'm more curious about what others do.

2 comments

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Rotundo
I have everything set up as direct debit. I see, maybe, two invoices a year, if that.

To be honest, I don't "do" my finances. I look at my bank statements (on my phone) once every couple of months or so. It never goes wrong.

jontycollins
I've been spreadsheeting for a while. Recently been looking for better alternatives. People often mention YNAB although I'm not a big fan of it, I know there's a few others. I've actually been building a budgeting tool that I'm hoping to ship for free soon - it stores all of users data within the users browser so nothing enters a cloud service. The only difference here is that you have to save a copy of your data every so often incase the browsers cache clears, or your latop breaks. Check it out here if you want to try it/ let me know if it serves your purpose. https://jontycollins.github.io/Voulta-Personal-Finance-App/