Ask HN: How do you manage your personal finances and budgets?

13 points by cdahmedeh ↗ HN
Do you use any specific applications or websites? Any neat tips that you may have would be interesting too.

Thanks! - Ahmed

13 comments

[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 99.4 ms ] thread
mint.com, betterment.com, sigfig.com
We use Quicken, Personal Capital, and spreadsheet.
Although I would probably find mint.com very useful, I won't use it while doing so still means violating your bank's TOS [0].

Mint.com requires your online banking credentials. Most banks will state in their TOS that sharing these credentials with 3rd parties is a violation and absolves them of liability should your account be compromised (via any means).

[0] http://www.moneysense.ca/spend/the-banks-take-a-bite-out-of-...

I use a plain text file with columns separated by tabulations. First column is my earning, and my expenses that are predictable (like phone, loan...). second column is my expenses on a daily basis. A simple awk command and I can compute a projection of the money that will be left on my account at the end of the month. Each month I use a new file. The beauty is that I can print the result of my command and put it in my status bar, next to the temp of my proc. It's a metric value like another after all.
I'm writing my own. I used Mint for past 3 years or so but it's just not working out because it keeps creating duplicate copy of accounts, the expenses/income per month isn't right and so on. I've a prototype that I'm using personally for past two months. Still need to add few more features. After it's ready I would probably do Show HN.