Ask HN: Personal Finance Management | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Personal Finance Management

11 pointsgigel828 comments

Hi,

I've been using mint.com for a long time but I've always been uncomfortable with how much information they're collecting on my spending habits.

Tried Microsoft Money last year (an Excel add-in) which -while pretty basic- did its job, but they're unfortunately deprecating that :(. I know there are other paid options (like YNAB) which use the same backend as MS Money (plaid), but I'd much prefer an open source / self hosted solution (like Firefly III) if it supported at least some automatic transaction downloads (Fidelity, Citi, etc.).

I've explored setting up a dedicated email address and using the credit card's alert functionality to send an email for every transaction (> $0.01) but that's finicky as banks change their email format often and it also doesn't always work as advertised.

What other options are available / what do you use?

Thanks!

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You don't need fancy software, just a spreadsheet

Just sit down and analyze all your outgoing finances versus income, figure out the average of what you spend per sector per month, figure out where the big purchases are/were/going to be, and then draw some plots. You will clearly see where the money is going, and be able to know how much extra you can spend over time periods.

https://www.ledger-cli.org/

Of course no bank provides 'downloads' in this format so you have to 'roll your own' converters from what they do provide.

Quicken. In recent years under new ownership they have fixed a lot of the bugs and it now does math correctly :) It has two features that I love - the projected balance chart that uses all your memorized payments to show you if you're overspending. And the retirement planner where you put in your investments, assets, future income, and desired income in retirement to see if you will be solvent after you leave the working world.

It has the ability to download transactions from your bank and credit card accounts, but I'm not comfortable giving it login privileges. So I keep the paper credit card receipts and enter them manually (I normally don't have a lot of them).

AceMoney, for when you need finance software with a CAD reference in the domain name!

Not FOSS but definitely in the near-indie category so you'd still be sticking it to the man. Works on Linux, Windows, & Mac. Used it for almost 20 years now.

https://www.mechcad.net/product/acemoney-personal-finance-so...

I also tried HomeBank some years ago for a little bit, it was OK but at least at that time it was nowhere near as convenient. YMMV.

Maintain-a-CAD-kernel-or-home-banking-software_hard-freeway-exit.jpg

Beancount with csv download from the bank and a script that converts that into the input format, with manual fixes. Without direct access to the APIs you're not going to escape having to write adaptors and doing some manual work.

Been using gnucash and it's perfect no nonsense system for for me

I’ve thought about trying Zer0 out. Might be worth a look.

https://sites.google.com/view/zer0

We use KMyMoney for family finances.

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