I guess people are downvoting him because of his assurance that instead of managing finances one simply has to earn more.

For most people earning more is not feasible, at least not while having some personal live, family matters and depends also on their education, upbringing and people they know.

Some people work a fuckton of hours for a measly pay, and so they can't get to earn more, because they have no time to improve themselves or even to go to interviews.

For these kind of people, that is the majority, some time of personal accounting will be easy and will bear lots of fruits, while they wouldn't be able to improve their jobs in the near future.

I didn't read it as "one simply has to earn more".

He's saying it's better to work on things that will lead to one earning more money, rather spending time monitoring how much one is spending. The first leads to an improved state, the second is just for ensuring one's state does not worsen. With one your increasing your 'cap', with the other you're just maximizing given a 'cap' (cap meaning the amount of money you can work with).

Its not an either or proposition though. It's frankly ridiculous to propose that I could give up actively managing my finances and use that extra time (an hour a week maybe) to significantly increase my income.

The post in question currently stands at 31 points. One quick downvote and all up from there. You are right that for most people earning more isn't feasible. But I wasn't speaking for everybody. Specifically for the upwardly mobile. If you aren't in the position to increase your income then you by definition aren't upwardly mobile.

It's a mix of different issues going on in that comment:

- Some kind of perfectionistic NIH accounting system is probably not what people have in mind when they talk about this personal finance accounting being useful

- The project details seemed to overcome the initial scope

- Rather than addressing the need for a more elegant framework for personal accounting, OP decided to just make more money, and for all we know has discarded personal financial accounting

- We know not what kind of blind spots this may have created (for real: You are absolutely discarding a level of granularity and the freedom to find a way to make use of it)

- While we can trust that OP will probably be fine, we are left to wonder if it's really so great to tell people not to do this kind of accounting when you kind of turned it into a hyperbolic mess when you implemented it yourself.

The project wasn't perfectionistic, I specifically designed it to be as easy to add and look at what I was spending as possible. Instead of putting spending into accounts, I used simple categories. I had a dashboard view that gave me exactly the window into my finances I was looking for.

It was good enough for my purposes. But I kept running into situations that called for extended customization. Sure I could have extended the app to account for temporary changes in how I wanted to do things. But it just kinda stopped making sense after awhile. It made me look into how I managed my finances before I ever did accounting more closely.

What I found was that I never really got into the sort of mindless spending habits that kill most people. Accounting was, in essence, a unnecessary addition to an app that was already working just fine. It didn't buy me much when I was doing it, and I didn't miss it when it went away. My life just isn't that complicated.

Similarly, I've never needed productivity software other than, on very rare occasions when I'm super busy, a pad of paper and a pen. And I was a GTD zealot 8 years ago.

My advice in my original comment was tailored towards people who plan on being upwardly mobile. If that's what you want to do, then personal finance is a waste of time. Ramit Sethi's advice is the best, chase big wins, automate your finances, and don't stress out over small repeated expenses.

If you've hit a career plateau and don't see yourself making more money anytime soon, then by all means make the most of what you have. But c'mon, this is Hacker News. We can all be upwardly mobile here if we want to be.

The foundation isn't the issue. You can write an intuitive interface around a double-entry accounting system, but you must keep to the fundamentals of money flowing through the system.

I just save (401K, HSA, etc.) a set amount from every paycheck, and view the rest as "spendable" and don't worry about accounting for it beyond that.

This is a form of personal budgeting, even if you don't view it like that.

Yes it's a simple budgeting technique but it's not accounting (particularly accounting as in the context of the article which we are debating).

I haven't downvoted him, but I can't see how he gets a better idea of his finances from a non-balancing financial system.