HN Explorer

Ask HN: How do you track your personal expenses?

1 points by cactusface ↗ HN
My girlfriend tracks our expenses for each month on a piece of paper as follows:

  amount, location, category, date, payment method
  $50, Whole Foods, food, May 19th, MasterCard
  $19, taxi, transportation, May 23rd, Visa
At the end of the month, she adds up the amounts for different categories and payment methods. It's a bit of a chore to do it manually. I know how to process this with a text file, but I'm wondering if there are any good iPhone apps that will do this. Failing that, a simple browser or cross-platform desktop app. There must be something but I have no idea where to begin. I don't really want anything more complicated than what I've described. Quicken or whatever the heck is too complicated, I would rather try and hack something into Excel.

3 comments

[ 5.9 ms ] story [ 19.0 ms ] thread
nklas
I've just made a simple django app to keep track of my expenses.

It's pretty simple, but still very useful. Supports tagging for easy filtering and will automatically convert any items in a foreign currency into my currency (SEK), useful when you are traveling and want to compare prices in different countries for similar.

i0nutzb
I'm using YNAB for about 2 years now and even if has it's own downsides (e.g. not available on Windows Phone), it's fairly good (if you add a lot of items while you're mobile, you'll have smart..ish matches for payee and categories).

You can use my referal (and get $6 discount): http://ynab.refr.cc/ZCDFD5D or clean url: https://www.youneedabudget.com/

cactusface
I'll try the demo out first, cheers.