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Comment by sanderjd | Hacker News Reader

I have a very similar setup, except using YNAB[0]. I never felt like I really used Mint, besides just going and looking at my balances and (infrequently) thinking, "huh, looks like I'm over-budget again". With this setup, I feel like I'm taking matters into my own hands, which has had a noticeable impact on my spending and planning discipline.

Thanks for the link to your project, looks really useful!

[0]: https://www.youneedabudget.com/

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FYI, if you use YNAB with Chase you might find that QFX payee/memo information is garbled. If so, here's a little script that can repair the file by cross-referencing your transactions against the CSV-copy.

https://github.com/DHager/chase_fixer

YNAB recommends the manual entry of purchases to better understand the relationship between the things you buy and your money. This has helped me be much less impulsive and more aware of the large money sinks in my life (lunch!). Whatever setup works for you to help you budget though, it is great software.

Yep! I did that for awhile, and still do it quite often for purchases while I'm out and about at target, grocery stores, restaurants, bars, and coffee shops. But for me, importing dumps from my banks and going through each transaction to "accept" them is plenty enough for that mental jolt. The tedium of entering names, categories, and prices might be a bit more powerful, but just seeing every transaction is (for me) a 99% achievement of the same goal.

Yeah. I actually really liked Mint, before it I had no idea where my money was going. But the security stuff started to bug me, and there were mounting frustrations with Mint's inflexibility that finally pushed me to go a different direction.

Also, the first link I posted isn't my work, just a nice utility I found. I did roll my own Python for converting OFX to Ledger though, been meaning to clean that up and post it but haven't gotten around to it yet.

Yeah, as I looked at that project more, I suspected that I had been wrong in assuming it was your work. In any case, I hadn't seen it, and appreciated the link.

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