Ask HN: How do you track your expenses?

9 points by guildmaster 6 years ago | 14 comments

What's your process for tracking your expenses? Do you use an app? How sophisticated are the apps that you use? Do you know any terminal based app for expense tracking?

jnfr 5 years ago |

I used to track everything in a spreadsheet manually and early last year finally found time to turn it into an app which pulls in my credit card transactions automatically. I still input lots of expenses manually since I'm living in a primarily cash-based society and it works great for my needs.

Not sure what your idea of "sophisticated" is, but it's definitely the opposite of a terminal-based app. It's built on a modern web stack and it's called Lunch Money (https://lunchmoney.app)!

matt_the_bass 5 years ago | |

Looks great! I’ve checked it out before. The primary limitation for me vs YNAB is iphone support.

I’m currently a YNAB user and I love it. There are a lot of YNAB users. They already understand the value of this type of tool. If you want to try and convert YNAB users you might want to consider a way for YNAB users to migrate to your tool.

iends 5 years ago |

For personal expenses, YNAB has literally changed my life. It’s also helped my wife and I’s relationship with money and forced us to plan each month. When my wife was furloughed due to COVID19 a month ago, we knew we’d be ok because we have been planning our finances for 5+ years.

frompdx 5 years ago | |

Also happy with YNAB. I've used it for almost a year now. To be honest, I don't really budget down to the dollar like YNAB recommends. For example, a lot of stuff still ends up in the "stuff I forgot to budget for" bucket. However, I find it useful for general expense tracking and understanding trends in my spending. I also find it useful as a way to confirm that bills were paid, etc.

matt_the_bass 5 years ago | |

I’ve been very satisfied with YNAB too. It’s easy enough that even my spouse uses it. I really like having a clear picture of the budget.

nicbou 5 years ago |

I have to comb through my monthly transactions for business income and expenses. I also get a notification for every transaction with N26.

I used to have a homemade tool that graphed my net worth across several bank accounts. It proved very difficult to maintain, but it was super useful. I could easily see my savings rate, and catch unexpected dips.

verganileonardo 5 years ago |

I have a budget on Excel (with 12-15 months planned) and download the data from my bank/credit card every month to assess how I'm doing vs the plan.

If I'm on a cash-tight period, I increase the assessment frequency accordingly. Typically, my biggest expenses are rent and groceries, so I pay closer attention to those.

blaser-waffle 5 years ago |

I used You Need A Budget (YNAB) for a while, but supplemented with a google doc/spreadsheet. Eventually moved to a gDoc entirely, but I may move back to YNAB as I try to de-googlify.

I would call them reasonably sophisticated, but ultimately something I did by hand. Mint.com and some of the automated tracking solutions are attractive, but I don't like giving access to sensitive things to random companies, plus I don't need deep, regular breakdowns, just broad trends; if I miss a couple of lunches out, or forgot to add an oil change it won't impact my overall financial picture.

I don't know any terminal-based apps, though I did have a basic python script that hits the Yahoo Finance API to track my stocks. It doesn't work now because I think Yahoo shutdown the API to the public. See also: https://pypi.org/project/yahoo-finance/

2rsf 5 years ago |

An Excel file, manually updated from the bank when needed.

We are trying to avoid credit and loans which makes budgeting quite trivial, many times downloading bank transactions of the last months/years and putting them on a graph is enough

donnanorton 5 years ago |

I do it in an old-fashioned way - in a notebook. For example, you can find lots of different expense trackers on Amazon. I prefer paper planners instead of digital ones in general.

Chetane 5 years ago |

I manually track expenses in a spreadsheet. I'm using tillerhq.com to pull transactions to the spreadsheet automatically.

rochak 5 years ago |

I use Spendee. It has a nice interface and doesn’t get in the way.

catacombs 5 years ago |

ledger-mode in Emacs.

guildmaster 5 years ago | |

https://www.ledger-cli.org/3.0/doc/ledger-mode.html#Introduc...

This?

I prefer vim, will try this out though.