I know you're not asking directly for advice, but if you'd be interested, I find the following is the easiest way of keeping a budget.

0. Forget about tracking things down to the dollar, or even the tens of dollars. That level of precision is unnecessary. If a coffee here or there is going to break your budget, it's already broken and you need to go in to panic mode.

1. Have a spreadsheet with vague monthly costs like 'transport', 'food' and the like. Combine that with your monthly income, and you'll know what your approximate monthly savings should be

2. Every month, manually record your savings.

3. Over time, compare your actual savings with your expected savings

4. If there's a discrepancy of a meaningful amount (however, remember step 0) then you might need to bury in to the details a little bit more.

Given that sort-of system, you have enough manual touchpoints that the budget is in your mind when you're making discretionary purchases, but not so much that it's stressing you out.

I've made a sheet that does basically the above with example budgeting for what I'm familiar with in Sydney - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1KW3i-m8BtJ2O9lKurhJr...

> If a coffee here or there is going to break your budget, it's already broken and you need to go in to panic mode.

I understand exactly what you are saying here, however, there have been several times in my life where buying a coffee here or there will break my budget. I know that's a level of poverty that most people on HN have never experienced before, but it's a reality for many people.

You don't really ever want to go into panic mode. Living on a very limited budget is not the end of the world. I actually chose my lifestyle. I had this idea that there are 2 ways to be rich: make more money than I need, or need less money than I make. Sometimes the second one involves a lot less stress (which is admittedly quite difficult for a lot of people to believe).

If you are on such a limited budget, it is quite important that you know whether or not that coffee on Monday means that you aren't going to eat on Sunday. At the same time, if you do have some wiggle room, it's quite important to treat yourself occasionally.

What is important to track as your expenses has nothing to do with absolute value. It has to do with the value relative to your total budget. If nothing you buy costs more than $5, then obviously you are going to track smaller values. On the other hand, one of the huge advantages of having no money is that it doesn't take long to count it ;-)

So I would rather say that if you need to track down to the level of individual dollars for a personal budget, something like GnuCash is probably not the appropriate tool.

I think the old addage "look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves" really applies.

Some people don't seem to mind not really tracking their spending down to an extremely granular level (ie everything) because they make so much money that small outgoings on their bank account are worthless, or they have to dedicate their time to their family and can't be bothered to track it.

That seems odd to me because they could be paying for things they don't need, or odd subscriptions they really could live without. Small subscription services rely on you not noticing the "small" amounts, but many small items make a big item.

I think a spreadsheet to track everything is really helpful to ensure that you are only spending what you need to spend, particularly if you wish to simplify your lifestyle (work less!) and do your proposed lifestyle 2 (need less money to live).

I have mixed feelings about this and overall I still want to engage in better financial tracking. However, the obvious flip side of the coin is that if I need several hours a month to keep proper track of the budget to save a few hundred more a month it might not be worth it, as I value more what I do with that time and not worry about a budget. The problem of course is that once I start tracking in detail I may find out we're wasting much more than that :(

I'm on the same page as you. I want to make sure my wife and I are not overspending (still happens on occasion), but I also don't want to waste time on it.

So I have a simple metric: Is my money (cash + investments) increasing each week?

If it is, then once every ~6 months, I take a look at my family's spending and see if there is anything we would be happy getting rid of.

I allocate items by credit cards, eg. "meals out" on one credit card, "food" on another, "fuel" on another. That's only 3 lines on a spreadsheet showing the budget.

If at the end of the month, the spend on each card is higher than those figures I've failed.

With modern apps for card balances, seeing if you're near your budget helps.

The alternative is to get money physically out of the bank and put it into separate envelopes and spend out of the envelopes. You'll be amazed at how your spending habits change when you have to physically hand over cash.

If you are finding that looking down a list of 50 purchases at the end of the month "takes up too much time", I would wonder how much time you spend watching TV and compare the time values. One is surely more important than the other.

Takes me about 20 minutes once a month to compare my bank's monthly PDF with my own records, and update anything I missed. One reason not mentioned so far is to identify payments I don't recognize, just in case someone got access to my account or a monthly charge suddenly tripled.

So far nothing big (some things on Amazon change price by a few dollars up or down after putting in the order), but I always wince a little when I see someone not bothering at all.

Not sure if we're talking about the same thing. I do look (more than once a month probably) to cc statements for unexpected charges. I do not keep track however of how much I spent on categories such as subscriptions, clothing, groceries, take in, dining out, toys and then trying to come up with a budget for each and stick to it. That's more work than 20 min a month.

You probably only need a few months of data to make conclusions.

I hope my comment wasn't too insensitive to this issue.

I don't think so! It's just a different point of view. For a lot of people, having to scrape by with a small amount of money is a really frightening situation. And truly if you are in debt (especially if you are in a cycle of debt), it can be absolutely crushing. So there are definitely times where you need to engage emergency measures. But a lack of money (from a Western perspective) is not in itself reason to worry, per se. There is enough money and there is not enough money. Where you draw that line is surprisingly flexible. Especially in these difficult times, it's something that I would like people to understand.

> 0. Forget about tracking things down to the dollar, or even the tens of dollars. That level of precision is unnecessary. If a coffee here or there is going to break your budget, it's already broken and you need to go in to panic mode.

Yes and no. Late last year I did track everything to the cent (well, to the grosz, the fractional part of Polish złoty) and used ledger (the CLI double-entry accounting tool) to analyze it. My main discovery there was that most of our spending was so thoroughly distributed across every category that there was no easy wins to be had. Pretty much the only things we could do that weren't serious lifestyle changes involved garbage-collecting some subscriptions and instituting monthly limits on $favourite-foodstuffs. But before doing a high-granurality trace of expenses, I was sure there were trivial cuts to be made. Turns out, they weren't.

Doing this level of tracking is probably not sustainable in the long run (unless you're in emergency mode), but doing that for couple of months is a great opportunity to reevaluate all spending in your life.

I and wife have been tracking our expenses (and income) to a penny for more than 10 years now. It's easy when you don't have a lot of cash expenses and have a habit of entering them every night you make them. Dealing with card and other electronic transactions is even easier. Convenient software also helps a lot. We use KMyMoney, but there are many good choices.

I did the same a couple of years ago, and came to the same conclusion, which is why I've settled more-or-less on the system above.

Nice!

I just stop spending money unless I absolutely have to. A cup of coffee and a bit of candy at the gas station every other day (2+4 euro) * (365/2) * 10 years. Thats ELEVEN THOUSAND euro I could probably be doing something more interesting with. At 7 euro/kg and 30 gr/liter 11k is 52380 liters of coffee or 314285 cups or 86 cups/day for 10 years. 2/3 was candy (we are not buying that) so we only have 28 cups left per day. At 2 cups per day (which is 4 times as much) it still is 140 years of coffee every 10 years.

I pick 10 years because its short. If we take 50 years it is 55 000 euro. Now imagine throwing money around like that all day long.

Think about that when you get a free coffee.

I know it doesn't sound very convincing but most people manage to match their spending with their income. It really doesn't matter how much you earn. Real wealth is in not spending it.

Also, if you hoard enough cash and enough discipline it eventually stops making sense to work. More time to enjoy life! (jay!) Also, that bag of candy is probably killing me. If I'm hungry I must have planned things poorly.

> More time to enjoy life!

What if I enjoy life by buying a fancy coffee & drinking it on my walk to work?

The downside of your formulation of "why buy coffee? you could be enjoying life instead!" is that this worldview encourages people to feel guilty about buying coffee. Extreme frugality has its place, but remember that "your life" that you have to enjoy isn't something that starts in 5 years or 10 years or once you save $x, it's what's happening right now, all the time. I might not be alive in 5 years, none of has that guarantee. So I enjoy my coffee.

It sounds like you enjoy frugality for its own sake which is fantastic, and more power to you. But I think most personal financial planners would suggest that you have a goal you're working towards rather than "hoard cash." What's the point of that? "Thats ELEVEN THOUSAND euro I could probably be doing something more interesting with" figure out what that "something more interesting" is and it might make sense to forgo your daily coffee. Hoarding cash is not a goal.

> If we take 50 years it is 55 000 euro.

Yippee! I'm 85 years old (assuming I haven't died already) and I have an extra €55k. Am I allowed to drink coffee now?

Yeah, but how fancy is the fancy coffee though? Are we talking Starbucks or a three day roast sourced from a micro lot in Kenya?

If it fits your budget, go for it, but let's not confuse convenience with enjoyment or quality.

I say this in order to share constructive feedback, because I know a lot of people on HN are not great at "tone" and sometimes appreciate an explanation why their comment might accidentally offend:

This comment is very condescending and pointlessly critical. You suggest that I do not know how to enjoy coffee correctly, and am instead perhaps "confusing convenience with enjoyment." Rest assured that, I, along with basically everyone, can be trusted to know what they themselves enjoy or do not enjoy, without your advisement.

To clarify, I am using "fancy" as a shorthand for "expensive," i.e. a $5-6 coffee rather than a $2 coffee.

> Hoarding cash is not a goal.

Especially considering the inflation tax. Especially lately.

And money should be making more money after the $5000 point.

Yeah... well... I'm terrible at that. Recently I learn many more purchases can simultaneously be investments. The topic now makes me wonder if this 7000$ vintage espresso machine is robust enough for another 20 years of service. https://coffeemachinewarehouse.com.au/product/gaggia-vintage...

It looks more solid than fiat?

> What if I enjoy life by buying a fancy coffee & drinking it on my walk to work?

haha, are you asking for my permission here? We are different people! Thank god! Imagine if our hard worked grand-design for life turned out exactly the same. Now that would be truly terrible.

> this worldview encourages people to feel guilty about buying coffee.

I don't feel guilty when I don't, I feel stupid when I do.

> Extreme frugality has its place, but remember that "your life" that you have to enjoy isn't something that starts in 5 years or 10 years or once you save $x, it's what's happening right now, all the time.

Right, dopamine is going to happen. Don't worry about it. I resist the cravings also because I don't want to become an instinct and emotion driven creature.

> I might not be alive in 5 years, none of has that guarantee. So I enjoy my coffee.

If you skip this one the next one will taste at least twice as good. Eventually you sit there clamping onto the cup with both hands and making conversation with it.

The thing with bodies is that they always want something. There is no end to it! (haha)

> It sounds like you enjoy frugality for its own sake which is fantastic, and more power to you. But I think most personal financial planners would suggest that you have a goal you're working towards rather than "hoard cash."

Of course! They wouldn't have a job if they didn't!

> What's the point of that?

I'm not hoarding cash. There is no point in that for me!

> "Thats ELEVEN THOUSAND euro I could probably be doing something more interesting with" figure out what that "something more interesting" is and it might make sense to forgo your daily coffee.

I just want to be able to live without ever worrying about money.

> Hoarding cash is not a goal.

Money doesn't make you happy but a lack of it is just awful. Hoard enough until it stops making sense.

> > If we take 50 years it is 55 000 euro. > Yippee! I'm 85 years old (assuming I haven't died already) and I have an extra €55k. Am I allowed to drink coffee now?

haha, thanks for that. I can live comfortably on 1000 euro so the 55 k would allow me to reduce my earnings to 500 euro for 110 months spread out over the 50 years or 11 months every 60 months. If I brutally cut 5 more corners like this I could spend most of the 50 years reading HN poke peoples mind like this (and better)

Thanks for just saying what you think.

I agree with the "I will teach you to be rich" (it's a book) approach a bit more than "i can't buy a $5e coffee daily".

Their approach is more like a performance engineer. You look at the biggest costs first and reduce it down. I.e. Ask for a raise, refinance your place, find a cheaper place to rent, etc.

When you get down to the coffee you would be faced with: is it cheaper to make good quality coffee, or am I paying for the experience?

Personally I tend to view these re-occurring costs and I try to look at a way I can amortize them over a longer period of time. It's easier to justify the cost of a 200+$ espresso maker if I'm really that big of a fan and already have a defined habbit.

I love the IWTYTBR philosophy too. My favorite part is the concept of "guilt-free spending". Once you get the "big wins" down like you talked about, you can set aside 15-20% of your monthly net income to be spent any way you like. This seems intuitive at face value, but the example Rami uses with buying a $150 pair of cashmere sweatpants brings it home. It was inside his $500/month or whatever "guilt-free spending" budget, so it doesn't matter if it was a good deal or not. You just have to want it. He says his friends all commented how it was a dumb purchase and he could have gotten regular sweatpants for $20 instead, but that's missing the point.

I've taken the same approach, and this month some of my guilt-free spend went to a nice burr coffee grinder to replace my old blade one. But I'm not going to try to calculate the amortized joy per $ or long-term savings I'll get out of it, I just love brewing coffee, this makes it better, and I could afford it.

>Once you get the "big wins" down like you talked about, you can set aside 15-20% of your monthly net income to be spent any way you like.

In fact, I think no matter what your budget is like, it's important to have at least some "doesn't have to be justified" budget set aside, even if it's just $5 a month. If your monthly "doesn't have to be justified" budget is $5, and you decide to blow that $5 on an expensive coffee every month, that's perfectly OK and you shouldn't feel guilty.

I think there's a distinction to be made between "guilt-free" and "dumb/wasteful" spending. I can totally understand spending $150 on a pair of sweatpants if they "bring you joy" and are useful and will last you a decent amount of time. But just because you're willing and able to spend your money without guilt, doesn't mean any and every purchase is a good one. At the very least, spending a lot of money on a series of low quality items that you end up having to replace is a sustainability issue.

And that doesn't preclude you from getting a good deal either. That doesn't mean you should spend days shopping around for a few dollars off every purchase, but "voting with your wallet" is always worth doing.

No, I think the point is that you shouldn't make this distinction with respect to your budget. It's saying that if you take care of other wasteful spending, get your big wins, then plan for $500 of spending, then it doesn't matter if you make a dumb purchase. Don't feel guilty that you didn't get the best deal, don't feel guilty about the concept of a "good" or "bad" purchase, it just was within your budget, you wanted it and someone was selling it. You can't always do this comparison and avoiding dumb/wasteful decisions.

Yes, I am exaggerating a bit, but I think you missed the point.

I don't feel guilty at all. I feel fantastic not buying the sweatpants. I [quite specifically] don't want the joy from them. I just need clothing and I like to look sharp. A month ago I visited a second hand store. It was really well maintained, the experience was much like visiting a museum. They had a lot of second hand clothing all washed, ironed and nicely folded / on coat hangers and it was all nicely sorted by size.

I buy 8 pants for 3 euro each simply because they look fantastic on me. If it was a [new] clothing store I wouldn't buy 8 but I'd spend 100 euro on 5 of them and at most 50 for the other 3 if I ran into them there. I just didn't put myself in a [new] clothing store type of situation. I prefer to expose myself to (usually not very nice) second hand clothing at some interval. Sometimes they have something nice. Parts missing I buy new.

I see some wonderful old leather chairs too, the best one was sold regrettably. I also consider buying a really heavy suitcase massage table that I absolutely do not need but it looked really awesome, was in mint condition and was absurdly cheap. A fun day.

Clothing stores nowadays strike me as if everyone is going to a funeral. By comparison its a depressing experience but sometimes you have to. I wouldn't be able to sell those cloths at those prices, I'm paying for their ability to sell me things. (fool me)

If I have the time I do like to browse used merchandise, as well as find stuff on craigslist etc. that I know I can fix up or deal with rather than buy a new one.

Often it's cheaper given the bigger picture just to buy a new one, though. But, finding some old tech t-shirt in a thrift store is fun!

I definitely don't buy new vehicles.

You know, I had a technical job interview a few months ago where the interviewers told me I spent too much time on the little details and ignored the big picture. I didn't get what they meant until this comment, so thank you!

> It's easier to justify the cost of a 200+$ espresso maker if I'm really that big of a fan and already have a defined habbit.

That's exactly what I did: Started a small spreadsheet to work out how long it would take to pay off a $400 espresso maker. Turned out I would make my money back within a year.

Then there's the added bonus that I now own a decent espresso maker which has been great for making guests coffee/showing off. I also get to choose the beans and milk which means that if I wanted to, I could substantially lower the price of my self-made cup of coffee if I was ok with lower quality beans/milk (turns out that I am not ok with that, so no savings there :().

> It really doesn't matter how much you earn. Real wealth is in not spending it.

Have to add on that this is definitely not correct. Yes you must not simply inflate your spending to match your 100% of income if the latter increases, but while there's a limit to how much you can decrease outlays, income increase has no exact limit. Bob makes $60k, never buys coffee, brings lunch from home every day, stays focused on his personal finances, saves $5k/yr on lunch & coffee expenditures. Alice makes $60k, buys a $5 latte every single day, spends $12-15 per workday on lunch, focuses on job skills & networking, and negotiates a $10k raise upon switching jobs. Who comes out on top in this situation?

My point is not that budgeting or frugality isn't useful, but that focusing on changing outlays and considering income fixed or even irrelevant, as you suggest, is not a useful or accurate way to look at things.

I think you‘re making a good point.

I would add though, that 6510‘s statement...

> * it really doesn't matter how much you earn. Real wealth is in not spending it.*

didn’t remind me of extreme frugalism (in which case I would side with your argument) but with my encounters in the workplace: No matter how much most people increase their income, they also increase their spending. And some manage to par their spending increases with with their income increases.

Like many in tech, I‘ve made great income progress and during that I saw and continue to see colleagues struggling financially even though they‘re in the top income decile.

To me, suggesting that I save money by not buying coffee for fifty years is extreme frugalism.

12-15 is 1200-1500 cent. Lets say 1300.

10 cent coffee (12 euro/kg 30gr/liter) + 20-50 cent sandwich (5 cent slice or 15 cent bun, a 10 cent egg and/or 25 gr cheese 25 cent, 5 cent butter) is 30-60 cent. Lets say 40.

1300/40 = 32.5 while Alice only got a 17% raise. The extra 5k doesn't buy her anything. She will just favor the 15$ lunch which is 20% more expensive(!)

Coffee was just an example of course. Bob wont be able to save this much on everything while some things will be even cheaper. There are other perks like growing your own food and making your own stuff.

But the real kicker is perhaps that Alice could [naively] spend all of her savings on a big purchase, get fired and turn her life into hell on earth. If Bob does that he can be reasonably certain he will figure it out. His big purchase is also more likely something that can be converted back into cash.

Agreed, and that whole "oh just ignore purchases less than $10" is what causes people to go into debt without realizing it.

Buying $8 daily coffees, lottery tickets, in-app purchases for crates of Candy Crush tokens, and subscribing to all kinds of useless subscription-delivery services (razors, shirts, Japanese candy, etc) adds adds up even if you're on Silicon Valley salaries.

You are pretty much buying shots of endorphins. You get those anyway. You can get more of it for a short while but then sensitivity is dialed down and you have to buy candy crush crates forever. I really enjoy turning down the offers.

I think I phrased my comment poorly. I agree that a daily coffee is probably worth considering at ~$3x5x50 = $750 a year. (actually in my case I have multiple coffees throughout the day so if I were to purchase them it'd be more like $1500 or more). What I mean is the _occasional_ coffee is not worth bothering about.

I think any recurring payment is worth recording, but where you set the level is pretty personal

While I agree that recurring costs should be accounted for, I'm trying to get a bit of balance in my approach.

To put it in perspective, it's not out of the realm of possibility that I could switch jobs and make $11k extra this year. It's also not out of the realm of possibility that I have an injury that puts me out of work for the next 2 years. (Or, hypothetically, a global pandemic that reduces or increases my hours)

I deal with that level of uncertainty by only tracking the broad strokes.

> 0. Forget about tracking things down to the dollar, or even the tens of dollars. That level of precision is unnecessary. If a coffee here or there is going to break your budget, it's already broken and you need to go in to panic mode.

I'd suggest considering using a separate payment method for those things, and only those things, that you just think are going to be just a little expense here or there that doesn't need detailed tracking.

Track the total spent via that payment method every month on your budget. It's then easy to tell at a glance if you were right about not needing to track these things in detail or if you have missed some things that you should be tracking in detail.

My bank has this feature where the same card has two PIN codes. The PINs are coupled to different bank-accounts, the PIN determining which account will be charged. So groceries I pay with 111222, coffee-to-go with 333111... My bank does the rest. All easily analysable and exportable.

I've never heard of that being an option at any bank. Who are you with? Sounds really useful.

What do you do if PIN pads are disabled due to COVID concerns and customers are only permitted to make contactless payments?

Have you actually seen disabled PIN pads? I have seen places refusing cash (which I believe is illegal), but the PIN pads are easily wiped down between uses.

Federally, assuming you are speaking of the US, a business refusing to take cash for goods/services is not illegal, as you are not paying a debt:

https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/currency_12772.htm

Business owners should note that state and local laws can and do vary on this topic!

https://blogs.findlaw.com/free_enterprise/2019/08/is-it-lega...

Yes, in Poland I have seen a few shops where the clerk and the PIN pad are behind a sealed glass barrier and there is no way to hand the PIN pad over to the customer. The clerk holds the card reader up to one side of the glass, you hold your card up to the other side, and the contactless transaction manages to reach across the glass.

Also, refusing cash is perfectly legal -- and increasingly common -- in a number of countries.

> 0. Forget about tracking things down to the dollar, or even the tens of dollars. That level of precision is unnecessary. If a coffee here or there is going to break your budget, it's already broken and you need to go in to panic mode.

I use Homebank[1] which has pretty useful auto-assignment rules. I then have vague categories - think groceries, lunch & dining (e.g. buying lunch is more luxurious than buying lunch and dining is even more extravagant)

Every couple of weeks I import my statements and have a quick look at anything that wasn't auto-assigned - there's usually a couple of things and I add these, based on the merchant name or description, never to worry about again.

I figure this gives me the best of both worlds.

The only reason this small amount of work works for me is that I don't have to pay cash for much. When I do, it's unique enough I remember and categorise it, no biggy. I understand this wouldn't work for most though.

I wouldn't want to lose track of the small things, as they do add up! Keeping the categories loose (and not caring about the difference between coffee and a sandwich) makes it work.

"Look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves." as my grandma always says.

[1] http://homebank.free.fr/en/

When all the financial aggregators (Wealthfront, Personal Capital, Yodlee) fail me and I need to get a clear understanding of my finances, I always regress to something like this.

My way is as follows. Have three accounts: current, savings and retirement. The first two are cash, the third is something more long term. First work out the percentage of your income that you need to go into your retirement fund to maintain your current lifestyle when you retire. I plan to retire at 50. Your salary will get paid into your current account periodically. When it does, you check how much was still in your current account from last month and (hopefully) move the correct amount to your retirement fund. Whatever is left after that goes into your savings account. You can spend your savings on things you don't need like car, holiday etc. But never spend it all as you don't want to liquidate your retirement in an emergency. You'll know you always have enough in your current account for your essentials (bills, groceries). You never have to worry.

0. and 1. is exactly why I built myself a 'this-should-be-aspreadsheet' webapp to estimate my expenses to have a rough budget. I only update it once in a while and check if it's somewhat accurate. I'm quite happy with that approach.

Thanks for the ideas of 2-4!

> 0. Forget about tracking things down to the dollar, or even the tens of dollars. That level of precision is unnecessary. If a coffee here or there is going to break your budget, it's already broken and you need to go in to panic mode

I strongly disagree. Entering every penny, and tagging every transaction correctly, lets you see where your money is going very quickly. A coffee won't break my budget but now I can see that I'm spending $x/month at my local cafe, etc.

Also, for most of the vast middle-class and below, an inability to track your spending down to the dollar is itself a sign that your budget is broken. Most of us don't have so many transactions coming in and out that this should be difficult and it's a possible sign of dysfunction if you do.

Cutting down on the small stuff like has really helped us out over the long run.

Coffee is about 4.5 USD where I'm at, which is part of the reason.

The big expenses are still what matter though.

You should try my sheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1c24ZmUy19_n_QggMOjcE...

Thanks! It's much more sophisticated than anything I've tried

I've evolved it over time - I think budgeting, the csv import is key to get a rough handle on expenses, but I guess not every bank supports that.

> That level of precision is unnecessary.

It may be unnecessary if you are just trying to see how you spend your money, but may be necessary if you are running a business. YMMV.

some years back I started working on an app to track finances in that kind of way. No micro-management, just macro-management of budgets and categories. It would also forecast considering past data and future predictions and see where you would attain goals or go broke! :)

I should get back to it sometime

I like the idea, but I would be wary of it for this reason: the people who would like to use it are probably the most miserly members of /r/personalfinance. The kind who are likely to quibble about the $8/mo plan compared to the $9.50/mo plan. Basically the worst customers you can imagine.

That said, let me know if you do it!

>0. Forget about tracking things down to the dollar, or even the tens of dollars. That level of precision is unnecessary. If a coffee here or there is going to break your budget, it's already broken and you need to go in to panic mode.

A coffee is $5 give or take.

If I have one every day that's $1,825 a year. If I splurge and have two every other day that's $2,737. That's a lot of money.

The simplest way to budget is to just give yourself a set amount of cash every morning and keep spending it until you run out. You get immediate feedback because you can see how many banknotes you have left.

Funnily enough I think that's the main reason why there's a war on cash.

Yes a coffee every day is worth tracking, my emphasis was more on 'here or there'. I would say any ongoing payment is probably worth tracking unless it's truly trivial

Imagine simple government software that acts as a middle man and sends out automatic fines if the api is not up to spec.

I would like to see a complete log of every purchase made like my bank keeps only with much more detail, each bill broken down to well described products with pictures, serial numbers and manuals. As that involves sensitive data we would have to think of some way to wrap it.

I also want tax office to have real time access to a relevant sub set. One administration with every purchase in the country and ever hour worked.

Then do salaries and taxes by the second and split off tax payments right where the transaction happens.

Might as well aggregate everything for sale into one giant government web store.

If everything is made insanely convenient it doesn't matter what it costs. No more sloppy fuzzy business but everything by spec.

I wonder how many people want to start a business but are simply to terrified by the paperwork.

There is software provided by TPP (third party provider) that acts as a middle man between user and bank. User just "connect" all banks, and then TPP can retrieve the data using differen sources

> automatic fines if the api is not up to spec

Fines As A Service?

> Then do salaries and taxes by the second and split off tax payments right where the transaction happens.

ACH literally takes O(days) to move a few bytes of data from one bank account to another and the system simply stops working evenings and weekends, so this is a bit much :)

If / when BTC and LN become ubiquitous, you can probably achieve this without much effort.

Slow banks would still be a thing, they just cant (be allowed to) process these transactions.

Also, the bytes don't really have to flow from A to B. The payload is much to predicable. For 8 hours money flows into the account and flows out of the other account at a fixed rate. A daily or weekly validation would be enough. (with automatic fines for not updating the work schedule)

In Australia, the "consumer data right" is about giving fintechs (and probably AUSTRAC too) standardised access to banking data, but if you go and say "I'm a consumer and want to access my data", the banks are all "lol no": https://github.com/ConsumerDataStandardsAustralia/standards/...

Same in EU as far as I've investigated.

So the issue is that large banks (I feel like I can speak with a bit of authority as I work at one and know many colleagues who work at others) have no desire to give up user data, and I don't think this problem will be solvable without governments stepping in to force banks to comply. They're in a better position than more traditionally tech-centric companies in this regard because they fall under heavy regulation, and can do all kinds of legal hand-waving to show why their data must remain private.

There are a lot of great APIs that banks provide, but my personal opinion is that they're largely meant to distract from the fact that the vast majority of your data ISN'T accessible through an API. A lot of banks are building genuinely great tools for developers - thinking specifically of JPM's Quorum and Capital One's Cloud Custodian. But these aren't open banking tools.

Plaid and similar services are great, and the best we can currently do, but they have inherent shortcomings in that they face the same restrictions as any other developer trying to get information directly from a bank.

It's largely the same picture in healthcare. The government is trying to force healthcare companies to open up their environment, and healthcare companies are fighting tooth and nail to stop that. The CEO of EPIC Systems got the heads of many, many major hospitals to directly oppose a rule the HHS is trying to pass basically forcing health record companies to open up. For the time being EPIC has their "App Orchard" which... well, go visit apporchard.epic.com and you'll get a picture for how much they care about giving individuals the right to their health data and developers the right to build more systems on top of their own.

The EU had the right intentions, but made a big mistake in pushing this onto the banks. Which indeed results in each bank now having a "mandatory" shitty expenses section.

What they should have done instead, is standardize a secure export function of all your expenses, allowing open source, and vendors to provide statistics and utilities based on this format.

Especially when you are a customer at multiple banks.

Doubly especially when you're a developer that can handle a proper API themselves, and do a better job at it than all the startups that will pop up to sell you a budget management service, nothankyou.

All these years I wanted a widget that would display three numbers and a graph on my phone's home page. A total sum of money on all my non-savings accounts across all banks, the amount I already spent today, and a "burndown graph" for the month showing how much of this month's income I've already spent. I can write that widget myself, and I will do a better job than any of the startups - by virtue of not needing to include tracking, telemetry, not needing to make it a webview rendering React because $multiplatform, etc. But I can't do this, because the API endpoints needed don't exist unless you're a company with a large enough budget to afford it.

> because the API endpoints needed don't exist unless you're a company with a large enough budget to afford it.

I’m pretty sure Plaid’s free tier is more than enough for the use case you suggest.

Took a look, it looks promising. With two caveats. One:

  Plaid supports institutions in the following countries:

    Canada ( 'CA' )
    France ( 'FR' )
    Ireland ( 'IE' )
    Netherlands ( 'NL' )
    Spain ( 'ES' )
    United Kingdom ( 'GB' )
    United States ( 'US' )

My country (Poland) is unfortunately not on the list.

Two, there's some mention that "Some European institutions use an OAuth authentication flow, ...". I can't find any info on how long the OAuth tokens are valid, but I suspect they'll be short-lived enough to destroy any possibility of having a script placed in cron.

What personal finance apps have you tried with budgeting? There are a few on the market, the most popular being YNAB and Mint. My personal opinion is that Mint tries to do too much while YNAB forces you into a rigid philosophy.

I made Lunch Money (https://lunchmoney.app) as a potential happy medium between the two. If you end up trying it out, feel free to let me know what you think!

Jen, thank you so much for LunchMoney. It feels like you really love developing it, and it shows.

I've first heard of it from the IndieHackers podcast featuring you [1] and remember myself signing up and thinking "wow, this is exactly how I would design and build something like that".

Everything is polished, thought through, and the pace with which you push out new features is crazy.

Thank you!

[1] https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/150-jen-yip-of-lunch-mo...

That's so awesome to hear, thanks for sharing!

I’ve been meaning to get a sense of my day-to-day finances for a while now and I have to say that your site is great. Concise, answers all the obvious questions, and directly compares to the two most popular solutions on the market. Amazing work!

Q: Have you ever considered alternative payment schemes, e.g., student pricing, loyalty pricing (pay $X first year and then $Y for all subsequent years, Y < X)?

Thanks!

We raise our prices every few months so you will be grandfathered into the pricing plan at sign up. Aside from that and occasional coupon codes for first year subscriptions, we don't have any other payment schemes (yet!).

Every bank I've used lets you download your transactions as a csv or qfx, which is then trivial to import onto gnucash (I still need to spend ~20m each month carefully sorting things in categories).

Do they let you download it programmatically? Because if not, it's next to worthless for any kind of frequent use.

Once a week I do this. It's far from worthless. It's how I do my budget. Ever dollar earned goes into a spending category. I spend out of the categories. It works amazingly well. Before I had a mortgage I just had 11 bank accounts one for each category. That paired with a stack of automatic payments to allocate each pay check and had pretty well automated my budget.

Well, worthless is a strong word, it's better than nothing as it saves you typing. But having programmatic access to that data - even being able to skip the auth - would enable series of different usecases, like keeping the budget always in sync with your spending, or being able to preview your last activity conveniently, or trigger further actions on the basis of that, or just make a banking frontend that doesn't suck.

(Case in point: every month I have to send a bunch of PDFs with transaction details to my accountant; every month I waste almost an hour, a really frustrating hour, on fighting my bank's broken React SPA, and then manually renaming the PDFs I've managed to tear from the mouth of that beast. An hour on doing things that would take 30 seconds with a shell script if I could only trigger a list of transactions and a PDF summary request via an API. An hour on manually doing the only thing that's preventing me from completely automating away my regular interactions with the accountant.)

You can always try selenium to download it programmatically if they don't let you. Or make a script to download it.

There are tons of third-party doing this for you, and I'll just cite one because it makes sense here: https://www.budgea.com/. It's much like any other, except they're a commercial entity that was born out of an open source project called weboob (https://weboob.org/). That project aims at getting information out of website without having to use websites' javascript or restrictive APIs; it's still browsing the web, but not with a browser.

weboob has many capabilities, such as "listing messages" or "listening to music" and an important one is "getting financial information out of an account". Each capability is in the middle of 2 things:

- Applications, which want to implement a given capability; a basic one is boobank (https://weboob.org/applications/boobank) but you can write anything

- Modules, listed in the same page; a module is a website

The weboob project is completely open source and written in Python. If you use the boobank application you can use it to download and store all your financial transactions, and automate it as needed. As the example on the homepage shows, you can pipe it into munin (or any other graphing tool) and see the evolution in your accounts automatically.

Don't know about GP, but I don't want to touch any third party. Beyond data concerns, I haven't seen one that would provide me with necessary amount of control (which amounts to being able to run SELECTs against my finacial data and graph them how they like).

Thanks for the link to weboob project, I haven't seen that one. boobank looks much more like something I want to have, though I can't find anything on how it works - how are the banking modules implemented? In particular, are they accessing an API, or just scrapping the bank's page? The reason myself and others are pushing for consumer-open API access is because, while scrapping is something a competent programmer can do (+/- jumping through the increasingly arcane authorization hoops), it's technically against ToS, and I'm personally not willing to risk my bank thinking I'm trying to "hack" them.

I only mentioned the third party to show it can be done with the project that is behind. I do agree with you on the reluctance to depend on third parties for things like that.

Weboob relies entirely on web scraping: like I said, it's a form of browsing the site, just not with the usual browser. I do agree that services should provide APIs, but webood is targeted at websites won't/don't want to do it.

Sticking to a budget is an emotional problem, not a mathematical one. Helping solve emotional problems is extremely difficult.

Yep, emotional solutions work better for many. An example:

1) Pay rent and all bills on time, fully. This is sacred. It is called the Golden Rule for a reason.

2) After rent and bills, take the rest out in cash.

a) Split the cash into the number of weeks it needs to cover.

b) Split the cash for each week into two equal parts. Put one half in an envelope labeled "Monday" and the other half in one labeled "Friday".

c) Hide each week's envelope in a different part of your room or house.

3) Put the first week's "Monday" money in your pocket. Spend it until it is gone or not. You decide. If you overspend, hopefully it was on a Wednesday because you must make do. Eat oatmeal, eat rice, eat spinach. Get through it.

4) On "Friday" put the other half of the week's budget in your pocket and spend it before you go to bed on Sunday.

5) Repeat

I would love to do this, but I live in a country where cash isn't a thing. It's explicitly not accepted in most places.

How can I spend the same effect if I only have a debit card? I am wondering if two accounts or a currency card is a good idea. But it's just not the same as having a physical pile of cash that you can judge how fast it's going down and how much is left

Every purchase can involve a receipt. Put the value of the receipt onto a spreadsheet after each purchase. Discard the receipt. Get into a habit of doing it.

Also, spend on a credit card instead of debit. The credit card takes the fall in case of fraud or scam but this is not the case with debit cards and you'll be out of pocket.

Alternatively, spend each item on different credit cards, eg. fuel on one, food on another, partying/treats on another. You will be able to quickly see how much you're spending using their apps, or the realisation of how often you're getting one particular card out of your wallet.

Anything that creates friction to over-spending is a benefit. It won't stop you outright, but over time it will tend to get the job done. Multiple accounts is a great way of doing this. I have several accounts. Some examples...

I have a 'bills' account. This has all my semi-fixed bills. Some bills like electricity fluctuate, but it's generally always in the same ballpark. Every paycheck the same amount of money goes into this account. It's enough to cover the bills plus a small bit to account for fluctuations. I also keep a "buffer" amount in this account. If we imagine that the buffer is $500. Then I don't worry until the balance drops below $500. Otherwise, everything going on in this account is "automatic."

I have an account dedicated to just my car. My car is paid for, and every month I put in a "car payment" into that account. Any repairs, new tires, etc. come from that account. This changes a flat tire from an "emergency" into a "minor inconvenience." When it comes time to get a new car, I usually have enough money in there to pay for the next car in full after trade-in.

I have an emergency/savings account. Every paycheck $55 goes into this account. It covers medical copays, house repairs, etc. that exceed my ability to pay out of my "day to day" budget. So a regular doctor visit gets paid for out of my regular money, but a hospital visit with a big copay gets paid for out of the emergency fund.

One part of my budget is, "Burn money." This is money I have budgeted for random shit that I just feel like getting. This is easily accessible, usually in cash, but could easily be a debit or cash card. When that runs out, I stop spending.

This kind of system isn't for everyone. And of course I could technically transfer money from any account to another in seconds on my phone. But just that tiny bit of friction between me and the bad decision GREATLY improves my behavior. I'm still not perfect, but I'm meeting my savings goals, and am quite happy with the results. Whatever system you devise for yourself, remember that friction between you and bad things is the key. I've heard of people going so far as to freeze their credit card in a glass of ice in the freezer. In order to be able to use it, they have to go through the annoying process of thawing out this big hunk of ice. It really gives them time to consider whether it's really worth spending that money/taking on that debt.

Also, think in terms of systems, not goals. A goal is wanting to save money. A system is a series of processes or behaviors that lead to a result. If you're a runner, your goal might be to run a marathon. Your system is the training schedule you complete every week. Systems are better than goals. There's lots of literature on systems vs goals you can read up on.

> I just want a bank account and to have that bank record my spending and let me download it, securely, and automatically.

My (US based) bank and both my credit cards do this just fine and I download them to gnucash; it does this with a third-party library AqBanking, which includes both a GUI configuration program and a command-line tool for downloading to a CSV, which you can the process with whatever you like.

I have my financial institutions send me an email every time there is a transaction. Those emails are then scraped and forwarded on to a spreadsheet.

It works Ok, but I hit my zapier limit sometimes.

I'm currently working on setting up my personal server to receive emails from my account and parse them into a table locally, which I can then connect into Google sheets with an API key.

It never occurred to me that this might be an option. Great idea. I wonder if credit cards have this too...

I've been downloading monthly statements manually and feeding them into my data woodchopper, but email sounds like a good alternative (or maybe complimentary?).

I have a similar pipeline (bank and credit cards included) although I run my own SMTP server to capture the transactions as they're forwarded from my main email account. It's a pain to setup the first time but not hard to maintain if you lock it down.

It started out fairly basic (just CSV files dumped somewhere monthly) but the more history is there the more I find to do with it. I recently rewrote the whole thing and added auto-reconcile support, so it can tell if my record in Ledger is wrong and point out the exact discrepancies. I have a tendency to be lazy about recording things so making the machine check everything is nice.

It sucks that there aren't any good APIs for this sort of thing. But until that happens I'm stuck running Postfix and scraping HTML out of mbox files.

Well, my swiss banks both provide a download in this format:

  CAMT.053: Bank to customer account statement. Detailed and structured payment data.
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_20022

But quite what motivated them to move from their proprietary .csv they used to have I'm not sure.

I feel this, I ended up writing a python script with a selenium browser to scrape the data off of my banks website so I could automatically insert it into my firefly-iii instance. Originally I had it going into a complicated google sheets spreadsheet. Only breaks three times a year for the last 7 years.

I agree totally. The worst part is loyalty card companies have an easier time tracking my spending than I do.

> I just want a bank account and to have that bank record my spending and let me download it, securely, and automatically.

I don't think this solves the problem, unless you use incredibly broad categories for budgeting such that you never want to split a single transaction over two categories.

This reminds me of that Upton Sinclair quote: 'It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.'

I think banks benefit from a certain amount of sloppiness. Get hit by a finance charge here, accumulating unnecessary interest on a credit card there? Who cares! Let the bank handle it, don't worry, banking should be convenient...

So despite endless paeans to customer service and 'community' and whatever horns the banks are tooting these days, seeing how you spend your money simply remains difficult.

By design.

Which is why the fix is not coming, and never will be coming, unless you implement it yourself.

Because it is difficult to get a bank to build a tool when the bank's profits are improved by them not building it.

You're overestimating banks abilities: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

I don't think it applies. Your bank's website and app are two best places they can use to upsell you their financial products. Exposing the data in a sane way would cut directly into their profits.

We've pretty much given up. Waiting for N26 or another neobank to support CHF deposits (not likely going to happen though).

Until then we've been using a mix of Excel and YNAB.

Can't you scrape / download a bank statement? Or if you use a credit card scrape the card pdf statement.

Wouldn't it be nice if they provided all of that and more with a REST API?

This is what's confusing me about this chain of comments. All the big banks i'm aware of have APIs (Wells, Capital One, etc.). Most of the "neobanks" do as well (Monzo, Mercury, etc.)

If that's not enough, you can just use Plaid. Am I missing something here?

Generally speaking, bank APIs are for use by businesses that want to be able to pull bank customer data. There are integration hoops and so forth. They are not for end user use.

Plaid has, or used to have, a mode where in preprod you could give it your credentials to a limited number of organizations and then pull in your data. Not sure that survived the Visa acquisition, but even if it did- personally implementing a Plaid integration gave me the willies. Handing over creds was in clear violation of bank terms of service. Plaid seemed to be playing fast and loose from a security perspective (IMO) and retained the right to keep your data even if you removed credentials. Was not comfortable.

Having implemented scrapers to pull my data- that option also painful.

OP is not wrong.

> Generally speaking, bank APIs are for use by businesses that want to be able to pull bank customer data.

Generally speaking, yes, presumably because API access to checking and savings accounts is only applicable to businesses 99% of the time.

Most consumers, even programmers, don’t have a real need for API access to their accounts that isn’t already covered by simple CSVs or Plaid.

It's not about the format, it's about the access. I'd be fine with a CSV of my bank transactions, even the completely broken pseudo-CSV that my bank outputs. What I need is the ability to pull that CSV with an API call automatically, instead of having to log in to the bank (which takes almost a minute and involves retyping numbers from a mobile device), and navigate to the right place to find the CSV download (which takes another minute).

Basically, the bank UX sucks for my needs - and I'm guessing, for most people's needs[0]. Cynic in me says that the reason I can't get an API access is because somebody then would make an interface that doesn't suck, and the banks would lose the best place they can upsell people with financial products.

--

[0] - There's a reason why "preview your balance and last transaction" feature shows up in mobile banking apps these days.

The other thing you need is a transaction I'd. Transaction amounts can change over time. I got caught by this when I tried to build my own tracking tools. Credit card transactions in foreign currencies commonly change over time. My balances never added up and I couldn't figure out why. Turns out most banks support ofx. That has IDs so you can track the changes.

if only there were a currency that existed completely transparently on a public ledger that can be integrated into any finance tracking application without asking a company for API keys or scraping wouldn't it be crazy if someone made something like that money without permissions

Plus it’s really easy to track your finances when you don’t have any transactions.

If you just want to know what businesses you tend to spend money on, many credit cards in the US do this. E.g. Chase has pie charts showing dining vs travel vs utilities, etc.

If you want more fine grained data, you can download statements for the month or year to date, etc

If you want to see your net worth across every bank/brokerage over time you can use an app like weslthfront or personal capital

> Chase has pie charts showing dining vs travel vs utilities, etc.

Bank software almost always miscategorizes something.

My bank categorizes my purchases from the liquor store as 'home improvement'. The house certainly looks better when I'm drunk, but that's probably not what they had in mind.

Whereas what I would want is to not use an app, not log in onto the site to download statements, just use an API endpoint to get a list of all the transactions since last time I called it, dump it into SQLite database, and run SQL queries against it. In my own software. That fetches the statements several times a day, or - better - updates whenever a new transaction is recorded by the bank.

Tracking your own finances independent of any other party is very much not a solved problem and is more a matter of trust than of technicalities. This is your finances were talking about here.

As to financial discipline no amount of tooling is going to help you out with that. Tools can help you you what you already want to do but they can't make you want to do something that you don't want.