Ask HN: Spending Tracking Tools I’m trying to figure out a budgeting system that works for me. I’ve tried a few that use Plaid integrations but they haven’t been effective for me. I’m looking for something that will give me daily / weekly notifications of how much I’ve spent. Might end up building it but was curious if there’s anything off the shelf like that. |
Instead of tracking your expenses, create a budget in an Excel sheet, put aside the money for your regular expenses immediately after you get your salary, then invest the rest (create an investment plan) or transfer to a savings account.
Wrote a basic parser for this and using it I get the records in JSON which I use to show simple progress bars and dashboard.
I use spreadsheets - download csv from your bank, import, label categories, then you can look at it any way you like. Doesn't take that much time, and with a few heuristics, the tagging can be mostly automated...
Agreed in general though, I don't like having to give a budgeting app potential access to transfer all of my money away (even if they promise they won't)
For example, my car insurance is billed every 6 months, so every 6 mo, I exceed my budget for car stuff. copilot does a better job for accounting for these.
Edit: no notifications. Sorry I forgot that was one of your criteria.
1. Use a debit card or cash for purchases when practical.
2. Pay bills when they arrive, not when they are due. You are not earning money from the float anyway.
3. Supplement with other documentation ad hoc.
4. Improve the system over time based on what works for you.
It’s feature-rich, connects to most financial accounts and feels like a modern piece of software. It’s much improved from its Windows counterpart.
I run my entire financial life from it.
The initial setup seems the most inundating, and is why I haven't started using it.
I asked my highfalutin wealth advisors if they could set this up or knew someone who could. They said to just use a spreadsheet. (Not the answer I was looking for.)
GNU Cash may or may not be beyond the ken of mere mortals. But it's certainly beyond me.
If you're looking for fully automated recognition of transactions, that might be useful for bookkeeping, but I think this creates too much distance between you spending money (and the application just confirming that) and the wish for conforming to your predefined budget.
Another trick I've seen people do, which is of course more time consuming, is manually enter every transaction into such a budgeting tool. This trick keeps you really close to your spending behaviour, instead of mindlessly looking at spending graphs after the fact. It gives you a chance to reevaluate with every transaction whether your everyday spending, or subscriptions, or other periodic spending is still needed, useful, and if cutting those costs might help you stay within budget, and maintaining your preferred quality of life.
I currently use a spreadsheet, and of course, I still do everything manually. I have basically no self-discipline and even poorer self-regulation, but somehow, I am able to enter transactions every day. If you stay on top of your transactions, it's not really that much time. I probably do not spend more than two minutes a day, if that even (about the same when I was using YNAB too).
I've settled for using Projection Lab to keep of my net worth and have monthly targets to hit. There's still work to do. But it's much easier since I only care about the totals.
I've also heard good things about CoPilot (https://copilot.money/) but have not had the chance to experiment with it yet.
LunchMoney is great for retrospective analysis. For long-term financial projections, I really like https://app.projectionlab.com . Great pairing.
I found them after Mint was discontinued and CreditKarma made it impossible for me to set up my account, while I looked into other options which have even been mentioned in this thread.
LunchMoney's multi-currency support and easy API (https://lunchmoney.dev/) were killer features for me, however, since they allowed me to develop a personal solution to also keep track of my non-USA accounts.
When Mint shut down I did a ton of trials and Copilot had the best UI for me and I didn't have to learn a new "system" like YNAB. It relies on Plaid, so just make sure your banks/cards/accounts are mainstream (Chase, Wells Fargo, Goldman, Vanguard, etc).
I think my biggest lack there was that I really needed to see INTO my spending to get value, in particular Amazon is a large blob that I really needed more information on: I get groceries, home repair, toys, tools, work, clothing, health, entertainment. Without seeing into that, all the action I took on Lunch Money really only gave me information on my non-discretionary spending.
That said, I found a middle ground about six months ago. The spreadsheet tracks the budget, brokerage contributions, statistics, and savings (think monthly money being set aside for yearly payments and such), and then I use Monarch Money for tracking transactions.
Manually tracking my transactions in the spreadsheet was just so tedious and having Monarch handle that via Plaid and the three-ish other services that fill the same space has been nice.
One issue I have that isn't the fault of any app or service is that there are still plenty of banks that don't support OAuth for reading data. The big ones I use all support it no problem, but my primary, smaller (not tiny) bank and even Discover want you to use your _same_ username and password along with a checkbox in the settings to "allow third party access". They don't tell you what is limited via that third party access either, so I can't tell if it allows read-only when there's no MFA involved or what. In those cases, I still manually input transactions, but it's the vast minority of my transactions.
Monarch will give you notifications for transactions, overages on budgets, etc, but I bet any half decent service will do the same at this point.
What I want is an app that can do OCR recognition of the bill or invoice and categorize the individual items and not just the whole invoice into a broad category. Sadly this tech does not exists.
Sometimes, you're in the moment trying to make a decision about whether or how much to spend. Call that use 1. And sometimes you're looking back at your spending history needing to make some sense of what has already happened. Call that use 2.
For use 1, I have started using Paktol[0], a weirdly-named phone app made by the guys who created ClojureDart[1] (and written in that Clojure dialect). It's extremely simple, and that's the point. You set a target amount of discretionary spending each day, and it tells you how much you have left or whether you're "overdrawn" for the day. That's it. There's no categories, no analytics, nothing like that. You just plug in every expense that's discretionary and it tells you if you're on track. It's so simple it almost annoys me that it's paid. But it's working and no other money tracking app I've ever tried has. It has already paid for itself in better decision-making on my part for having it, so I actually can't complain.
For the second function, I'm just using Excel. I have my own cobbled-together categorization system that's working well enough, and aside from having to go download transactions manually from my different accounts because they don't have an API, the bulk of the categorization work for new entries is automatic (Power Query is very cool).
Part of me wonders what an all-in-one solution could look like and I daydream for ten minutes about making one myself. But that never lasts more than a minute or two. There's a reason so many have tried and failed. I'm not smarter than any of the hundreds of people who have already tried and only partly succeeded.
The added friction of having to manually copy everything over is a nice incentive to buy less stuff.
Spreadsheet + Pivot table is all you need in many cases.
Why?
One, I pay cash as much as I possibly can (fuck surveillance finance), so using something that brings in my transactions isn't that much of a time savings. I have a minimal number of monthly scheduled transactions, so bringing those in manually just isn't really that painful.
Two, it adds a tiny bit of friction to my spending. This is a good thing (at least for me). If I know I have to write down the amount, and if only briefly think about what I've already spent this month, it slightly dissuades me from conducting the transaction.
Again, this works for me. Sharing in case it works for you.
(When I was a graduate student with $20k income, I spent a lot of time thinking about how to save money. Then, one day, all of a sudden, I realized that I should use that time thinking about how to earn more money instead. These days, I earn more than 10x that number, and the only rule I try to abide by is do not buy things I don't need, as I already have a good spending habit. I never felt as financially constraint as when I living on ~$2000/month.)
Quite a bit of a ramp up to get used to it, but no other tool outside of spreadsheets comes close to flexibility.
While I don't think this approach meets OP's requirements (they seem to be looking for something a little more turn-key), I hope other readers of this thread will fall down this rabbit hole.
I'm now in my 5th year of tracking every penny in and out of my life with hledger[0], with a mostly manual approach. Some benefits:
- as noted by a spreadsheet user, it adds friction to spending money, which has curbed frivolous/ unplanned expenses for me (and double entry accounting makes it impossible for money to "disappear")
- if you subscribe to Files over Apps[1] hledger and its ilk (beancounter, gnu cash) are hands down your most mature, stable options
- I've learned a great deal about accounting and how money works in general
- the reports I can generate from my ledger give me a decent starting point at tax time
Happy accounting!
I tried one file per account, one file per account per month, multiple accounts in one file per month, and eventually everything in one massive file per year. No matter what I seemed to choose I always seemed to end up with just a complete mess.
SimpleFIN is fast and a quick Plaid alternative for just $1.50 a month or $15 for the year. I created my SimpleFIN account, copied the API token, and added a bank account. Then I jumped back to Actual Budget, entered the API token, and linked the account from Actual to SimpleFIN. You can link as many bank, credit card accounts as you want with one SimpleFIN account.
The website says "Connect up to 25 institutions and 25 apps"
We are a family of three and the 25 institution limit seems fine to us.
The key issue in this world is that everyone wants a slightly different set of features, so any one-size-fits-all app will be too complex. DIY-ing it means you get exactly the features you want and no gratuitous complexity.
The big down side is that it is fairly expensive, I spend almost $200/year on it. Which would be fine, if I felt like I was getting something for it. But, in the 2 years I've had it, I've not really felt like they've done much improvement of it, and my customer support experience has been pretty bad. For example, one time some of my "auto transfers" just vanished, leading to a couple hundred dollars in late fees, and when I contacted support they "recovered" them, but then I ended up with a bunch of duplicated auto transfers.
I also really just don't ever feel like I have much of an idea of how much money I have available. Simple was always very good about that: I could look and it would tell me an exact number I had that was unused.
Now, that $200/year is for a family plan, so it covers 4 people. Having debit cards and accounts for the kids is fairly nice. Transferring money to the kids for chores is handy.
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/amazon-order-histor...
I got it when I had kids and my energy and time was redirected.
My prior system was boring: plain text transactions updated daily, and collated using ledger. (Ledger-cli.org)
The reporting and budgeting is top notch, and the lack of an integration means you're on top of every penny since you have to type it out. Honestly even with a full house it was only 2 or 5 transactions a day. Easy.
Now I’m just using a banking app (https://moneymoney-app.com/) that fetched the status of all accounts and shows them in one place including my portfolios etc.
One is, how much money do I actually have to spend right now? Account balances don’t mean anything here. You don’t have that full $3k balance to spend if rent is due tomorrow! And what if I need to pay an insurance bill in 6mo that costs thousands? My account balance doesn’t know that, but a budget item can save for it periodically. So I can rest assured that the “available money” shown in the budget is real, I can spend it (or save it) on anything, and every known expense or bill is still accounted for. Not to mention, it automatically makes sure every credit card transaction results in money set aside for the credit card bill.
It’s hard to quantify the stress you avoid by knowing for sure that you still have the money for big recurring expenses after spending a bunch on something fun. This was more impactful when I was making less money, but it’s so nice to make sure the handful of big yearly bills are already taken care of, and I won’t have to come up with $5k more than normal when that happens.
Also, it’s extremely worthwhile to analyze your spending habits. It’s a chance to understand the true cost of owning your car, or if you spend more on dining out or groceries. That gives you power to make changes. You can easily realize what habits have an outsized impact and what are probably harmless. If you want to have money to buy a house, maybe you need to cut back on an expense. Well, saving $20 on coffee each month won’t be much. But saving a few hundred by using rideshare less might help.
And you get all of that just for spending a few minutes each week double checking the budget categories on automatically imported transactions. The app does all the hard work!
I know manual expense tracking might sound like a bear, but I find it cathartic and reflective to have to enter expenses.
It's end-to-end encrypted, open source, and you can self-host it.
When you open it, you can see with a simple green/red bar with how much you've spent and how much you have left for the month (for the whole month and per budget), in case that helps.
In the end, i ended up creating a simple react app. All the data is stored in a single json file that I sync. I load web app/app and just upload this json file.
Uses react-spreadsheet so all fields are editable.
I'd like something like Privacy that creates temporary credit card numbers, but is also anonymous from the provider side. Sort of like buying a new visa gift card to use every month.
But I also like getting points to use while traveling
I've settled on Capitol One. They call them Virtual Cards. I have lots of temporary cards, mostly I use them for specific vendors (utilities, different SaSS subscriptions) so if some low security site gets hacked it won't work anywhere except with that vendor.
I'm not sure if that feature is only for specific cards they offer.
Maybe enter purchases in a linked spreadsheet from your phone to your desktop to track purchases? Might just be better off sucking up purchase information from your bank’s API to your spreadsheet. Smaller bank APIs tend to suck though.
Since I review my finances weekly, there's really no need for notifications. Habit is enough. My bank already sends me notifications for possible fraud (almost always incorrectly, but I suppose I'd rather it err in that direction than the other).
Simple works for me, but there are certainly some ways to add complexity to it if that's helpful to you.
Most of the major telcomms have an email to text setup. Verizon is {phone_number}@vtext.com, AT&T is {phone_number}@txt.att.net
I use telegram or ntfy to notify myself.
I also went through a couple file organization schemes and have (tentatively) settled on file-per-month since that leads to a nice cadence where setting up the new monthly file coincides with paying bills and is a good time to do any necessary account reconciliation.
That said, it also has a bunch of things that I’m missing in YNAB, so I should probably just set up an instance and go a week with trying it, so thanks for the nudge :)
Of course I can keep receipts and do it later but just wanted to know how others handle it.
