Ask HN: Any nicer alternatives to Mint for personal budgeting? |
Ask HN: Any nicer alternatives to Mint for personal budgeting? |
I just recently launched, so there might be rough edges. It's almost feature complete, though. It's very similar to YNAB 4. It's $12/year with syncing. No signup is required and no internet connection is required -- it syncs when you have a connection. Mobile app to come!
I would really appreciate any feedback. :) For the next week, I'm giving out the first year for free (just email hello@financier.io or PM me on reddit).
I have a recent Reddit post with more info here: https://www.reddit.com/r/ynab/comments/527wiv/ynab_alternati...
Thank you! Alex
In the meantime, I wasn't sure what "sync" meant in the context of your app. I had to read a lot of your page before I understood (even after reading this post first).
I actually thought you meant syncing bank accounts or something similar.
Do you want it browser based? Standalone - mobile, desktop, both?
Does it need auto-import of transactions from your financial institutions?
Do you need budgeting or accounting or both?
EDIT:
I've used Mint for a long time, I like them for tracking my accounts but never quite got the hang of using it for budgeting.
I liked YNAB (standalone) for putting my inflow/outflow in terms of a monthly view, and their general financial philosophy is really good for people trying to get out from under debt (even small amounts) and move towards being more financially stable. It's useful if for nothing other than that. Their reports were also nice ways to view my money over time, to see where I could cutback on spending to make room for savings or other planned spending. It doesn't do auto-import, but does handle importing CSV files if you can download them from your bank/cc company. Other pros, it works on mobile and desktop using dropbox as the syncing mechanism. This is nice since that means syncing isn't tied to YNAB (though does require Dropbox to continue operating, safe for a few more years I imagine).
I tried their web version and was left dissatisfied. Lacked reporting, but gained auto-imports. So tradeoffs, also cost $5/month (discounted if you pay for the whole year).
I like ledger as an accounting tool, but I haven't got the hang of its budgeting mechanism. It's a CLI tool, but uses a plaintext file for managing your transactions. ledger-mode in emacs is solid, and it plays well with org-mode. I won't say this is "nicer" than Mint. It is, however, a good bit more powerful. It's a full-featured accounting system that's fairly approachable for programmers (IMO). There are some variants like hledger which are mostly compatible, but also offer some extra niceties like a self-hosted web interface.
I tried GnuCash, but found its interface on OS X particularly unpleasant and buggy so I didn't get far. More feature complete for accounting, I did setup budgets and thought I'd like it. But, again, the glitchy interface on OS X drove me away from it before I got far enough to really decide.
> I tried their web version and was left dissatisfied. Lacked reporting
However, if you absolutely need it, there's a browser extension called Toolkit for YNAB: https://github.com/toolkit-for-ynab/toolkit-for-ynab. Besides reports it adds some more essential features like search.
YNAB recently got the ability to automatically pull your bank transactions, but I would actually recommend against this for a few reasons.
1. This the same problem mint has, there's a delay on the order of DAYS a lot of the time. Makes it hard to tell how much of a given category you have left.
2. Actively recording expenses the second you spend the money is easy, and a really good habit, because you'll be more in touch with where your money is going, with fewer surprises.
I fail to see the value in sorting my personal spending into categories, especially when it means that I have to take a couple hours a week to either manually enter each item or to correct the mislabeling.
But it's not "nicer" by any means, but much more private. Also, caters to control freaks.
I haven't used the newer web-based version enough yet to know whether you can really roll your own system on top of it, but I suspect you'll find path of least resistance is to do it their way. The good news there is that they explain their way very well, with lots of supplementary material available.
They have transitioned to SaaS but it looks like you can still get v4 on Steam.
In the end, there's only one rule that counts: spend less than you earn (or earn more than you spend - either way, you need to have control over at least one of these variables or you're totally fucked anyway).
Sorry to be so blunt. Of course, some people like the process of keeping on top of statement reconciliation - hell, I used to be one of them. And there's no doubt that watching your net worth increase will bring pleasure to your day.
But it's easy to become obsessed. It's only now that I've surrendered the "comfort" of knowing where my money went that I realise I was actually stressed out all the time. These days, I'm a little more relaxed about things - so long as we stick to normal spending patterns and don't splurge on spontaneous things, we'll probably be ok.
In my case, I can live with this level of uncertainty. Ignorance is bliss, and all that.
(I'll echo the other sentiments around here: YNAB was my favourite. I never tried Mint.)
the user can aggregate his own data without exposing private data to any third parties /web site.
This new technology enables the user to download his financial information from any financial institution.
Once they desupport YNAB4 maybe time for me to create OSS version ;-)