Ask HN: How do you manage your personal monthly budget?

5 points·JamesAdir··6 comments

Are you using an online service? A customized spreadsheet? A great app? Would love to get some ideas how to handle this properly.

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I used YNAB (http://www.youneedabudget.com). It's a customized web service that handles budgeting, and it has a Mobile App as well. While it has integration with banks, I chose to enter/record everything manually, since the action itself reminds me "You should stop spending."

Before YNAB, I use Mint for a while, but it didn't help in terms of managing my budget due to the auto-import feature. I also used YNAB 4 in the past (you pay $50 and that's it), but felt it's great enough to spend $5 a month on budgeting.

Been using AceMoney [0] for years. Small, stable desktop app that just works. Every so often I poke around at a couple alternatives just to see what's out there, but haven't found anything compelling yet.

Also recently started using CalendarBudget [1] to track monthly income/bills, and forecast balances. Free, and has some nice options for generating repeating entries.

[0] http://www.mechcad.net/

[1] https://calendarbudget.com/home/

Mobile apps

Monefy (android) [1] and Speendee (ios) [2]

Using while travel too keep track where to money go (it can go fast :-)).

Recommending both for daily use. Even to get 'snapshot/sample' of daily spend for one week.

[1] http://www.monefy.me/ [2] http://www.spendee.com/

GnuCash. I like that there is both a MacOs and Linux version (and probably Windows as well).

Ledger cli. Intimidating at first, but everything is in a text file so it's super portable.

Thx for the tips everyone! Will check them out!

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