Show HN: Penny, an easy way to track your spending(pennyapp.io) |
Show HN: Penny, an easy way to track your spending(pennyapp.io) |
[0]http://youneedabudget.com - they recently upgraded to a subscription based web app but I'm still using the classic version that's a one time purchase: http://classic.youneedabudget.com
But now it's good and I don't sweat the small stuff, and I can skip eating out in order to buy a new bike part or whatever. I do look quarterly-ish and see what I am actually spending on.
It's not a great solution, but it's the one that I've stuck with best.
YNAB completely changed how I view my money. Now when I go to buy something, I don't just go spend. I see how much I have in that category, and if it's not enough, I either move money to it from another category, or not buy it.
It's been very helpful for me in my goal of saving more than 50% of my take home pay.
Totally anecdotal, but the people I know who have trouble managing money are just completely unaware of it. Money goes in and money goes out, and they only do something if someone calls them or sends them a letter. As soon as you show these people the numbers, they get it. It clicks for them.
Mint and Penny both suffer from the same thing those "hire a maid" apps suffer from; Once I've made the initial contact, I have no reason to continue to use the service, I can just contact the maid directly. Same thing with Mint/Penny; Once I am shown my finances, I have an awareness of my financial situation and don't need the service any more.
What will drive me to continually use this service, beyond my initial few weeks? You can only analyze my finances so much before there is nothing left to tell me. And then you will get to the point that Mint is at, where you start offering me credit cards and credit reports and mortgages, because that's the only thing left to do in this space.
Lol, no.
We may not think of it this way, but this seems like correct legalese for any sort of assistant app, whether it takes your username and password, or you give it an API key.
One thing to clarify: it's just me and one other guy (imalex) working on this, although we're hoping to hire another person soon. We're not trying to screw anyone over with the privacy policy. We just don't know anything about legalese, so we relied on existing terminology.
And for completeness: in the US the competition includes Level Money and BillGuard.
For the German market there are https://www.centralway.com/ and http://www.epost.de/privatkunden/epostapp/banking-app-kontop...
Two things that I dislike with my banking app:
- No real differentiation between fixed, monthly cost and variable expenses. It would be nice if the automatically separated monthly expenses and one-time expenses.
- Lots of "-$100 Cash" transactions whenever I use an ATM. This is my main concern actually. It's really hard to have some sort of insight about my finances without seeing the biggest part of my non-expenditure spending: The stuff I pay for in cash. Especially since it distorts the monthly overviews: If I retrieve $500 from my bank account on July 31st, it's not helpful to add that to my July spending, since 90% of that money will probably be spent in August. This is really a data-entry/UX problem, no API will solve this. One thing that I would suggest: Make an extension that makes it really simple to "scan" receipts. Just one glance of the camera, some OCR and the data is in there. If it's simple enough, it may become part of my "muscle memory" to scan receipts with the app whenever I buy something, so I get meaningful analysis results.
(By the way, if you want to build something like that, check out this API: https://scanbot.io/de/sdk.html - great product & company, I'm not affiliated in any way)
From my experience tracking what I spend, it's those transactions that I actually need to keep track of if I'm going to spend money more sensibly. All of the headline, automated bills that get paid monthly are easy to manage. It's the little transactions of a few bucks here and there that add up to that "Where the hell did this month's wages go?!" feeling.
If there isn't a good way to track cash transactions then it's not likely to change the way I handle my money, and consequently it wouldn't be very useful for me.
Aral Balkan couldn't be more spot on : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upu0gwGi4FE
I don't want to throw Mint under the bus: I used it for ~6 years before starting to work on Penny and it's a great tool for people that enjoy spreadsheets and crunching numbers (myself included). That said, it can be pretty intimidating to just to about everyone else. Penny requires a lot less effort on your part, since the number crunching is all done behind the scenes to generate cool insights.
To answer the specific question of why _you_ might switch: Mint hasn't really improved beyond the addition of more ads in the past four to five years. It's painfully slow (at least for me) and still has not learned that my gym membership is not software.
Can you talk about the measures that you use to protect banking credentials so that I might feel similarly safe about giving them to your service?
Check out PocketSmith. It may not have every feature I want, but at least it actually works. There is a nominal monthly fee associated with it, but well worth it if you want to actually use an online money analysis tool to do anything.
The app seemed fine but I could never consistently remember to enter all my puchases into it right away. After a few days or even a week or more of forgetting I would struggle to remember exactly what I spent and where, especially from generic ATM withdrawals listed on my bank statement.
The app became useless for me because of that.
I really want a budgeting solution that works for me but haven't found one yet, beyond just making an Excel spreadsheet of monthly incomings/outgoings and then using that to work out what my remaining 'fun' money is.
Looking around I don't see a list of supported accounts or account types. Is it hidden somewhere?
It's an iPhone app, so there's a minimal level of DUNS/screening/etc., but enh.
Though i can't tell if anything has changed since the last posting
What does that mean to you? Just an SSL cert of XXXX-bits?
http://colin.keigher.ca/2016/01/bank-of-montreal-has-horribl...
Can this connect to Venmo? Square cash? Or similar systems? That would be neat.
The same applies for software, hardware, clothing and a lot of other things now that I think about it.
You're totally right that people who have trouble managing money in general don't use these kind of apps. Before starting work on Penny, we asked a hundred or so people "how do you manage your money?" The prevailing answer was, "I don't." So when you give them the tools to do that, it really helps them understand their situation.
What we see as the real problem is comprehension and usability. Many people we talked to shy away from apps like Mint because they're complex and intimidating. From a more technical/analytical/affluent standpoint (where I come from), I don't have an issue using Mint and querying my own data, but it's important to remember that I'm different from most people. So, we think that giving people that awareness of their financial situation in a friendly, relatable, and understandable manner goes a long, long way.
Regarding continued use: everybody's finances are a representation of their life, and as life changes, your finances do too. So we think there's a lot Penny can do to help you on an ongoing basis, like tell you about how your new commute to your new work is affecting your gas spending and your savings rates; mention how Comcast just bumped your bill up by 10%; point out that your Starbucks spending has been trending up and might start being a significant money drain, etc. We might be wrong, but we think we and everybody else in this space have only scratched the surface of what insights can help people with their finances.
I see a lot of services going this way; interacting with an AI, rather than a user interface. Facebook is doing this with their messenger, Microsoft with Cortana, etc. etc. I suppose you guys are the next iteration of this for financial management. Maybe I'm just being "old-man-get-off-my-lawn" by preferring a UI over a textual conversation with an AI...
Far and away the most important part of any such strategy...
Also even if that stuff wasn't explicitly written into the agreement, as long as it wasn't excluded, that's kind of what you pay good lawyers for. I highly doubt a reasonable judge is going to rule on the side of the fraudsters without such a clause -- pretty sure it falls under the purview of "good faith".
Have you studied what mint and personal capital are doing right/wrong? Just wanted to say a word of caution as I've heard of different banks making life hard for mint.
While that may be standard language in a ToS, I can't waive that broadly written right.
We never store any credentials on our system, and our access is read only. I can go on for days about why I think our system is more secure than, say, Chase[0], but if you trust Mint's practices it's probably sufficient to say that we use an almost identical system.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_JPMorgan_Chase_data_breac...
I really wish banks could provide a read-only API token instead.
I predict, that it is only a question of time until they will encounter some disastrous data leak.
Begin a YNAB user for more than a year now, I am really angry at them for this move. So I'll guess I have to move on to something else after the support for the YNAB4 apps will be shut down.