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A comment on The Surprising Ease of Plain Text Accounting. Parent comment

Re:The Surprising Ease of Plain Text Accounting by vinceguidry on Tuesday July 19, 2016 @03:02AM (#12120265)
If that's how you're defining accounting, then I'm "accounting" right now, even though I don't manually track anything anymore. To me accounting specifically refers to the act of tracking individual expenses. Budgeting means to control spending so that it fits into boxes. I do neither, I spend fairly freely and keep only rough tabs on what goes out. But am I in control despite that? I think so.

What I believe I have is insight into my own life enough to be able to subconsciously manage my financial life. Is that accounting? I guess if you want to play semantic games then sure.

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Re:The Surprising Ease of Plain Text Accounting by bloat on Tuesday July 19, 2016 @07:33AM (#12121100)
I suspect that it is not a matter of insight but actually you just enough income not to worry about it too much. Good for you!

However if your expenses rise, e.g. you buy a house, have kids, etc. you might find you need to put a bit more effort into making sure your income covers it all.

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Re:The Surprising Ease of Plain Text Accounting by graeme on Tuesday July 19, 2016 @09:47AM (#12121699)
Is it possible that building an accounting app + tracking for months improved your accounting intuition, such that your "living freely" approach is actually kept intuitively within certain budget limits?
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Re:The Surprising Ease of Plain Text Accounting by vinceguidry on Tuesday July 19, 2016 @09:54AM (#12121754)
Oh it generated a few insights, for sure. But mostly it just brought attention to the subconscious process I already had in place. I may have tweaked that process a bit, but making the app wasn't the genesis of that process.
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