Do you track your expenses monthly? Annually? Do you have an app or do you use an excel spreadsheet? Any suggested tools?
I use a spreadsheet and track monthly.
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You Need A Budget.
Okay, well maybe you don’t but most people benefit from having one. The difference between tracking your expenses and deliberately planning what your money needs to do for you.
There’s a thing called the envelope system, or zero-based budgeting, which basically means helps you assign the moneybags you have now, to the expenses you know you’ll have. “What does this money need to do until I get paid again?” It’s a whole thing, and it works really well.
I don’t know how to link to communities but search for /c/ynab (or if you like, also /r/ynab over on that other site).
I love YNAB but I just can’t stomach the price.
I agree with you on the price. They say it pays for itself, and I believe that is true, but it is still a high price.
Agreed. I wish it was cheaper. Although now with YNAB Together my partner and I can share an account and my sister also agreed to have her budget. (I can technically peek as account manager but I’ve promised I won’t and we’re close enough that it’s not an issue.) But now it’s $30/each!
Thanks for the comment. It doesn’t seem to have gained much traction yet but it does look promising.
Ledger or GnuCash. I like Ledger and plain text accounting in general because plain text files work well with version control tools such as Git.
Nothing beats a good old spreadsheet.
Ever since YNABs price hike I wanted to have an alternative, but all were not really up there yet. For a few weeks, I am using ActualBudget which has been open-sourced by the developer and is actively maintained, including the „recently“ introduced support for goals :)
Edit fixed url
I think your link is broken, https://docs.actualbudget.org/ doesn’t load anything for me, but https://actualbudget.org/docs/ does
Thanks for the hint, fixed :)
How do you feel it compares to YNAB?
It‘s mooostly the same, except for the web app not yet being too mobile friendly. It works in horizontal orientation, though :) The sync via nordigen (goCardless now) also works properly.
Its basically like nYNAB when it launched, which was perfect for me. As of now, their [ynab’s] UI is getting more and more cluttered :) I can only recommend giving it a spin.
Controversial take - no budget. Split income into 3 or more buckets - savings, critical bills (rent, utilities, debt, etc), and discretionary. I manage as separate accounts.
Spend discretionary freely and enjoy the peace or mind that your financial future is secured by the first 2 buckets. If you run low, rice and beans til next paycheck.
No need to track coffee expenditures, you’ll realize during rice and beans week that you can make it at home.
Your mileage may vary.
I was on a spreadsheet for years and recently started selfhosting Actual and importing transactions automatically through email alerts.
Would you mind elaborating on your import pipeline? I was thinking of using email as a trigger as well, but thought it wouldn’t work too well.
No problem. I’ve got every account set to send me an alert on the lowest monetary value it supports (stupid AMEX with its $10 minimum), and I’ve got rules in my email to move those alerts into an Actual folder.
Then, I use my transaction fetcher to import the transactions from the email alerts into Actual. I look at Actual periodically to categorize the transactions.
It works pretty well for me at this point. I haven’t published the image to DockerHub yet, but i think it’s ready for an alpha image. Let me know if you have questions or need help (or want to contribute)!
Thank you, that looks awesome!
Do your institutions send alerts with data in a consumable format? I’m in Canada, land of the shitty bank software and it seems I can only get PDFs from most places. I have one that doesn’t even let you download transactions outside of the monthly statement :(
I mean, for a given level of consumable. You can see in the
TransactionFetcher.Readers.*libraries how I’m parsing the data out of HTML emails, which is less than optimal, but it works, at least until they change email formats and I have to make changes.Your neighbors to the south also have shitty bank software, unfortunately.
A spreadsheet, it compares against monthly trends, and splits the transactions by type. It also tracks shares, and debts.
plus I “compete” with 2 mates to see who spends the least month on month. They are super tight though, so it’s hard for me. I did win June though, first win since March 2022
My wife and I use Goodbudget with a single login. It’s pretty quick to add purchases as they are made and easy to look through the history and see trends.
Used to use gnucash on Linux desktop for a goooood long while. I wanted nicer reports so I shopped around with homebank (one developer so slow development but very nice project!) and tried money dance (didn’t like it, though I tried really hard). Eventually tried my own spreadsheets and apsire budget but finally settled on YNAB because I need a hands-off approach as I’m so busy.
I reconcile accounts every few days and auto-sync my banks with plaid (YMMV on how much you’re into that) and it works for me. I’m happy paying the subscription but if it ever goes to US$150/yr I’m probably going to quit it.
Heehee yay YNAB!
I use a google spreadsheet (to have it synced across devices) for manual transactions with physical money. zthat, and the digital transactions from my banks I aggregate in GnuCash about every quarter or so.
Money Manager Ex. It saves the file as a SQLite database, which makes it easy to parse. I have a couple python scripts that extract the numbers, and generate a JSON file with numbers, png graphs using matplotlib, and I have another module that takes the generated graphs, numbers, and a latex template, and generate a nice PDF.
For instance, when the script finds a brokerage account, it separates out deposits / withdrawals from actual P/L to calculate true time weighted returns.
Budget-wise, I look at it on a yearly basis. This is important because some significant expenses have an annual frequency (practice insurance, housing insurance, etc), or bi-annual frequency (car insurance…) And some expenses are discrete frequencies throughout the year (vacation, etc…)
It requires more discipline than on a monthly basis, but the reasoning behind it is if we spend more than we earn on a given month, it is not necessarily bad, because it might just be the month we went on vacation, or the month we had our yearly insurance premium. The important goal is to spend less than we earn on average . So over the long run wealth accumulates naturally. Short term deviations are not important as long as our long term lifestyle is aligned with our income.
So your python scripts extract from PDF statements? Did you use a pre-made template and customized it or did you program it from scratch? I track monthly by copy pasting/transcribing from the monthly statements - it takes me about an hour a month on a Saturday or Sunday to fill out and then another hour of contemplating spending.
The other way around, I use the script to generate a PDF based on the money Manager Ex file (which is in SQLite format).
Fortunately I am able to download a CSV from most financial institutions, so I never have to parse their pdf.
My workflow is
- download all CSVs and import in money Manager Ex
- categorize spending within the software, reconcile transactions, etc
- run the script against the money Manager Ex file to generate a PDF.
I am surprised you have to copy paste from your monthly statements? Is it possible that on your banks portal, deep into the menus you have an option to download as CSV?
Interesting thanks. Where I’m from banks don’t often offer csv export, I will request the feature.
I use Tiller, which is a paid service that dumps your transactions into an Excel spreadsheet or Google Sheets. I like being able to have full control, without needing to copy everything into the spreadsheet.
Does your bank not allow you to download your transaction list as a CSV? I used to do this.
I have lots of bank accounts, and doing that every so often is a real PITA. And each is in a different format.
I get far more value from having those separate accounts than I would save by consolidating to 1-2 accounts.
Gnucash desktop for almost a decade. I use the Gnucash app on the go to log entries id otherwise forget (e.g cash exchanges without receipts)
There was also Aspire Budget thats used to be a free spreadsheet but going on the site now it seems theyve added a subcription charge for something. I never used it so dont know its worth
Sticking with budgeting is really my downfall - I’ve jumped around so many approaches but really struggle with maintaining the habit. Currently I use a self hosted version of actual, which I do like!
