that was it for me! i started using hledger because of:
- tracking irregular payments from a bunch of sources, often outstanding for a while
- tracking how much somebody owes me / i owe them
- being pretty much cash-only for a long while (long story). with cash, if you don't track the expenses manually, you wake up at the end of the month with a whole bunch of money gone and no idea what happened to it
- not knowing how much money i actually have available because it's spread across my wallet / bank account / paypal / piggy bank
hledger really helped me not go crazy with all of this!
PS. another unexpected benefit - tracking expenses can also help with ambient worries like "ugh i spend too much on takeout food". like, if you track it, at the end of the month you can look at how much you spent on it and conclude that it's actually reasonable (within your budget) and stop feeling guilty about it!
Inspired by your example, here's our rolling monthly sums of food expenses, COVID marked [1].
You can see where we moved (temporarily) to a place with lower food costs, and stopped eating out.
But there's also a dip around the holidays, because we spend a lot of that time with family and our food expenses go down proportionally. That dip happens to be consistent YoY, but we don't realize it because we have other things on our mind.
It's just great fun to have this stuff at your fingerprints.
It’s kind of tricky. I have an AWK script that reads a ledger report to compute the X and Y-value pairs. These are written to a temp file that is read by GNUPlot.
It’s a bit of work to get setup, but I’m able to copy paste the idea around my reports.
I’ve also found the GNUPlot manual to be very easy to read!
I’m away from my laptop now, but I’ll add a gist tomorrow.
It probably would have been better done in python (I probably wouldn't have needed the zero-inserting hack), but it works pretty well.
It's also a single source of truth for your entire financial existence. You can use it to track your asset allocation. Which some people in the bracket you describe care a lot about.
Of course, you can pay people to do all of this stuff for you. (Accountant, Investment Broker, etc). But there are well-documented costs to these solutions. Basically, you have to trust them a lot, and if you don't speak their language you can't verify their choices.
Edit: to be clear, I'm not saying that maintaining a ledger is the right choice for everyone. It's a trade-off, like anything else, I just wanted to explicitly observe the variables that were at play in my decision. YMMV