Re:Show HN: I made a simulator for personal finance
by endominus on Wednesday April 28, 2021 @02:32PM
(#26972524)
The importance of this cannot be overstated. I used to use Mint when I was in college, but got sick of them pushing credit cards on me, and the uncomfortable feeling of giving a service full access to my bank account. I tried tracking all my expenses in a spreadsheet for a year, which worked fine, but wasn't the most flexible system (or rather, it very quickly became a UX monstrosity).
Now I use hledger, which has been fantastic. I back up the file to a shared drive that's sync'ed to my phone, so every time I get a message from the bank or pay with cash, I can immediately note it down (this would have been much less workable before I found the "cone" app) and track my spending across dozens of accounts.
There are some improvements that could be made as to the visualization of data, which I might write a quick webapp for, but in terms of simplicity, robustness, and ease of use, plaintext is definitely the way to go.
Very few people I know understand and appreciate double entry bookkeeping for finances. I learned about it recently from beancount [1] and it was a revelation. I don't go overboard with detailed transactions and keep it high level with around 5 accounts salary/mortgage/cc/investments etc.
I now personally keep my raw data (monthly income/expense/balances) in a spreadsheet. I have 1 html file with js embedded that does my homegrown calculations (works great on a phone). Spreadsheet is updated monthly. I add data from my monthly bank statements (same day I pay my credit card bills so I don't forget). Run the calculations whenever I need to (so far has been very rare).
My takeaway: discipline around personal finances is more important than what tool, services or process I use.
Looking at my income/expense/balances and mapping to what happened last month, looking at trends is valuable. For me that comes from piggybacking on the critical routine/ritual of paying my bills.
1: https://beancount.github.io/docs/the_double_entry_counting_m...