I currently use a Google sheet, but I'm looking for something better.

I have many automatic payments (credit card, telephone, utilities, etc) from a transaction account. I also have a loan with redraw, and I want to have most of my funds keeping the loan balance low, but I don't want my transaction account to go negative. So I need to forecast future transactions.

Future transactions may be annual, monthly, four weekly, two weekly, etc. It's a real mess. Some are easy to predict accurately, others can only be estimated.

I have a column to keep track of which future transactions are predictions/estimates/allowances, and which ones have been confirmed.

I also have a column to keep track of which transactions have been reconciled with the bank. (This is currently a manual cross-checking process, since my bank doesn't have API access.)

My preference would be a text-based system (https://plaintextaccounting.org/), but haven't found one that neatly allows estimates of future transactions that can be modified once the details are known.

I'm you like Google Sheets and automation, check out Tiller - it's pulls your daily spending and transactions directly into you spreadsheets. It also has auto-categorization. It is a paid service.

I don’t at all. Sometimes living “paycheck to paycheck” has its perks. Make sure to have enough money with the last check of the month to pay the mortgage, while having the largest 401k contribution you can manage. Without active investing or any real savings there doesn’t seem to be much benefit to calculating cash in vs cash out any more than my bank app does. If there’s something out there useful for my case let me know! I’m just not sure how much optimization can be done with this lifestyle.

You should still be building an emergency fund at least to cover unexpected expenses, and if you can afford to contribute extra to your 401k than it sounds like you can afford to do that.

Not to shill for YNAB, but it's specifically designed to help break the paycheck-to-paycheck cycle, even for people with a decent amount of cashflow.

I've heard this for awhile, and I never really understood it but perhaps it's just my particular situation. I can take an interest-free loan from my 401k-type plan at any time. I figure if I lose a job or have an emergency taking $5,000 out of that would be basically the same thing as taking $5,000 out of a bank, except it's been earning returns before that emergency. Do most 401k plans not allow you to take out money from your plan as long as you pay it back?

I think the logic here is that you don’t want to rob your future self to cover your current self’s emergency. Imagine a prolonged expensive period (car breaks, then you get sick, then you need funds to help a desperate relative, etc.) - you need extra money over a period of months but you don’t have it coming in current cash flows. When you borrow from the 401k you have to pay it back, which you won’t be able to do right away, and once you can, your disposable income goes down (because you’ve got to make those payback payments now). While you are paying back you are missing investment growth. I think of liquid emergency funds (in both personal, and business contexts) as insurance - how much you need is defined by your risk tolerance, asset mix, and long term goals, but the answer almost never “none”.

Another thing to think about is increasing monthly disposable income with emergency deferment of payments - in this context stopping 401k contributions while you deal with an emergency. Depending on your debt type, debt load, and credit history you can often negotiate deferment on many monthly payments for months at a time (e.g. mortgage, student loans, some car payments, utility bills, etc.).

This all sounds like the solid advice I've heard before, but your very first line is where my disconnect lies. How is it not robbing my future self to divert that money into a savings account instead of having it sit in the 401k? All the money I would've had sitting in the savings account is likely experiencing growth (over time) in the 401k, making the chunk of cash that would've been sitting in the bank larger through growth. I have a decent percentage of the 401k in bonds, just in case the economy were to tank I'd still have some 401k to draw on (like a savings account).

I do see the issue with having to immediately start making payments back toward the 401k loan, but then I think you just take out a little bit more than what you would otherwise to cover those payments for the duration of the emergency.

Sorry if I sound combative, I am genuinely curious to the responses to these arguments. I'd be happy to find the flaw in my outline if it will help me make better decisions, I just don't see it yet.

401k money = pre tax and is invested. 20k in a 401k = 15k after taxes (random example), and how long will it take you to get that money?

Have you been in a real emergency, where you need serious money within minutes, not days? Because that's what an emergency fund is for. If I need 10k for an emergency right now, I have that available via card within seconds or (entirely) in cash as soon as I can get to an ATM or bank. Not to mention I know exactly how much I have available.

To answer your question, these are the points you're missing: - Money in a 401k is pre-tax. Any money you want to withdraw will cost you taxes.

- You can't put money back in a 401k after withdrawing it. You will lose the tax advantages on that money forever.

- Withdrawing from your 401k before retirement costs you a penalty on top of taxes:

> If you withdraw money from your 401(k) before you're 59½, the IRS usually assesses a 10% penalty when you file your tax return. That could mean giving the government $1,000 or 10% of that $10,000 withdrawal in addition to paying ordinary income tax on that money. https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/investing/early-withdrawa....

- If you take a loan against your 401k, that comes with a lot of conditions and what-ifs. That's not going to help you in a real emergency.

- Using your 401k to get emergency cash is not going to be quick. If your house burns down in 20 minutes from you reading this comment, it would be nice to have money available to make arrangements immediately, rather than waiting until your 401k loan/withdrawal is ready.

The ideal is to max out your 401k and have an emergency fund _on top_ of that. Using your 401k to fund an emergency will come at significant short- and long-term cost. Having a post-tax emergency fund (again, that's _on top_ of the 401k) gives you short-term security without compromising your long-term security.

Post tax Roth-401k's are a thing. When you quit your job and roll it over to your personal account they also go into your Roth ira. But your point still stands.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/roth401k.asp

You don’t sound combative at all. As others pointed out - the main issues with the 401k is liquidity and taxes. If your going to rely on that as emergency funds you’d want to make sure you had an open line of credit with a sufficient credit limit to dip into while you’re in the emergency room, mechanics shop, etc. You’d want to make sure that you had enough lead time on the payment of that debt to get to the 401k funds, and understand the tax implications.

A final thought here - there’s a temptation to see “emergency” savings as something you _might_ use, but I think for most folks (especially those with families) emergency funds are something they WILL use at some point (life happens, and it’s expensive) - so they need to be saving in addition to retirement planning. If your retirement plan explicitly includes the notion of looting the 401k at some point, then that might work for you - but for most people viewing a retirement account as emergency savings is dangerous because it leaves them under saving for inevitable bumps in the road.

I think the best reason would be to consider what would happen in an emergency situation that goes beyond just yourself - war, natural disaster, etc. What would happen if you needed to flee with very short notice? What if an emergency caused enough chaos that you couldn't take a loan from your 401k, possibly because the electrical grid is down?

Are these scenarios likely? No. Are they a possibility? Yes.

There is some inherent risk in earning that return on your emergency fund. Maybe it's not much but it's there and it's something to be aware of.

401k loans must be repaid when you lose the job. Borrowing against it while unemployed is not borrowing, it's withdrawing. Which means penalties and taxes become due (taxes dependent on if it's a Traditional or Roth 401k).

Now, you may not mind that, but it's worth keeping in mind. So while you're employed, this can work, but once you become unemployed you lose 10% on that withdrawal if you're too young, and maybe also owe taxes. That's a steep penalty.

German banks support an open protocol: FinTS/HBCI with which you can automize stuff. There's a Python library for it [1] and I wrote my own little cli tool that allows you to configure your (potentially recurring) target vs. actual expenses, while setting expiration dates to get notifications about unexpected transactions. Still somewhat WIP though

[1] https://github.com/raphaelm/python-fints [2] https://github.com/phil294/fints-transaction-tracker

I've been using YNAB (You Need A Budget) for more than a decade now. Big fan, not affiliated.

https://www.youneedabudget.com/

Is it still worth the $14.99? Especially for "simpler" needs like someone living in EU, only one bank account, no investments, etc..

In my opinion, YNAB allows me to plan for the money I have in my accounts. As I have more plans than I have accounts, I find YNAB inherently useful.

It has changed my inner hesitation to deal with exact financial situation and where my money goes to a good understanding on how much money I have planned for which purpose and priorize where my money goes (or shouldn't).

This gives me peace of mind. For this, I am willing to spend money. I think 15$/month is worth it. (Even without Bank-Syncing).

Of course I could achieve this by other (cheaper) means, but then again I like how frictionless it makes managing my situation. And economically the return of invest in my first year of using YNAB payed for it for quite some years ;)

As someone dealing with two currencies, I can recommend RMillan's Plugins for YNAB [0].

[0] https://ynab.rmillan.com/

Edit: Not affiliated with YNAB, just a simple user somewhere in switzerland

Is it? I think so.

YNAB has taught me one thing (they had a whole philosophy of budgeting section when I started using it): budget for your expenses ahead of time. I pay yearly, I've been setting aside its monthly price along with my utilities for years. Another point of their philosophy which I agree with is a budgeting tool saves you money in the long run. I'm pretty sure it saves me more than $15 a month — with good budgeting practice, you can choose yearly billing on many services instead of monthly, which often is cheaper.

I've used this one for so long I really am not interested in learning something else, and in the grand scheme of things, I've spent almost twice that for a takeaway dinner yesterday. YNAB is as expensive as a pizza in London.

Lastly, I don't have big uses myself, but money tends to get complicated with time. I have a current account, a savings accounts, a business account, some crypto I bought years ago, a disposable credit card for travelling, my Vanguard investments. It's good to have them all together in one place. It's good to have a nice chart showing me my net worth change over a decade.

Do you have goals bigger than $100/year? If so, are you hitting those goals? If you aren't achieving your goals, YNAB can help.

I knew I wasn't achieving the goals I had with my DIY spreadsheet and mint.com, and once I started using YNAB everything came together very nicely.

> I knew I wasn't achieving the goals I had with my DIY spreadsheet and mint.com, and once I started using YNAB everything came together very nicely.

That is exactly what I hope to express in my sibling comment. Increasing the friction (be it UX or multi-device usage) might make my hesitation to manage my financial situation bigger and I might cease to manage it. This would be quite a bad scenario (well, at least for my savings ;) )

Just an excel sheet that I put balances into monthly. As long as the numbers go up, everything's fine.

The hardest part is separating investment "earnings" from real earnings. I'd like to know whether I'm saving money from my direct compensation, or whether I'm leaching off stock market gains, but I'm not sure of the right way to track the difference.

Gnucash. Not that hard to learn and use, free, libre, and pretty solid community support. It's served me really well for several years including some changes in my financial situation and complexity.

I switched from YNAB to Gnucash and I am very happy with it. I even wrote a couple of scripts to convert Shift JIS encoded csvs to work with Gnucash transaction import. I have an accounting routine that I run through every month and import everything from dozens of bank accounts.

The community is also very nice and they were very accommodating towards my bug reports and fixed them very quickly (it had something to do with IME not working well on macOS).

You're also making a great point about Gnucash: We're both using it differently, but it works well for us. That kind of flexibility is golden.

Is there enough integrations ready (like to autoimport from banks) or does everything need to be "coded in" whenever required?

It has a pretty thorough feature set baked in and extra scripts and coding shouldn't be needed. It can fetch balances and transactions directly from your banks, though I need to check if that's automatically run or manually triggered.

I use these as a stack: hledger + dab-dab + Surfingkeys

Basically all I need to do is: login in to the bank's web app and press Ctrl+Alt+P

I wrote a script which can take transactions from my banks webapp, gave it to dab-dab (https://github.com/Yaser-Amiri/dab-dab), added a key binding to Surfingkeys to extract the token and other related stuff from the cookies, send it to dab-dab to run the script, the script adds the transactions to the ledger files.

By the way I have some extra sugers in the script for resolving the destination/source of money to hledger's accounts and descriptions.

I eyeball the outgoings and incomings of my bank account a few times a month, nod at the results and move on with life.

The only things I track are stuff which has tax implications - in which case things like that go in my FY<year> folder until tax time.

Pen and paper. I don't like the idea of giving yet another private company access to my private info, and I find that the manual aspect of tracking finances by hand makes it feel more real and impactful to me.

I switched from Mint to https://copilot.money/ a year or so ago and haven't looked back. Vastly better experience. Automatic categorization of downloaded transactions that you "review" day-by-day (to make any category adjustments) is great. It also has automatic budget calculation and tracking (and allows you to set some categories as "carryover", so you have more to spend later when you spend less.)

You got me to try it out. Wow, it is a LOT more functional than Mint. Thank you!

Oh wow this one looks very promising.

Beancount (https://beancount.github.io/) plus a script for formatting bank statement CSVs.

Give Fava (https://beancount.github.io/fava/) a try: It's a web frontend for Beancount (Disclosure: I'm a former maintainer)

One Excel spreadsheet, four bank accounts (only one of which is "actively managed"):

Protected Checking, Protected Savings, Discretionary Checking, Discretionary Savings

All income and all "regular bills" are aimed at Protected Checking. Every Friday, a fixed (but mutable) amount of weekly "discretionary" money transfers to Discretionary Checking, and a fixed amount goes to Protected Savings.

Discretionary Checking is ALL food, groceries, gas, dining out, random crap. If the I swipe my card, it is discretionary. Protected Checking is ALL bills, utilities, mortgage, etc.

To manage Protected Savings, I use a spreadsheet with 7 columns:

Date, Payee / Source, Category, Sub Category, Amount (all income is positive, all outflow is negative), Balance (=one cell up + amount on this row), Cleared (blank if in the future, "X" for when I reconcile)

I took a few hours about 7 years ago and added ALL expected paychecks (excluding bonus), bills/expenses, and transfers to Discretionary and Protected Savings for the next 5 years to it. So I only spend time reconciling the Protected Checking account - once a month or so I copy the ledger from my bank website and go down the list, checking them off and updating the amounts as needed.

Other than a quick glance for anything unexpected, I don't reconcile/audit the discretionary account.

I've been using a spreadsheet for about 20 years and occasionally I'll be curious enough to try something else but I always come back to the humble spreadsheet, plus a script to massage the CSV export from my bank.

Though it's not fully automated, it's close enough, it provides unlimited flexibility (every other system I've tried eventually gets in my way a little too much), and the price ($0) is just right.

I have been trying out Lunch Money. It's pretty much a YNAB clone but seems to be more developer focused (uses mono space fonts and has API). It uses Plaid just like YNAB, but somehow auto import seems to more reliable on some banks.

Here is my referral link: https://lunchmoney.app/?refer=goipolll

https://actualbudget.com/ it is now open source and free

Thanks for mentioning this. I've been procrastinating on finding an alternative since they hiked the price up so much (not even my grandfathered $45/year pricing is immune!). It looks a lot like YNAB from the screenshots, but I'll give it a shot to see just how similar it really is. Being self-hostable is just icing on the cake!

This looks interesting, but at the moment only in self-hosted mode: "Actual is now open-source and 100% free. New signups are currently disabled until we figure out a plan for a potential hosted option. Go to the repo to learn more. You can self-host it and modify it however you want"

I wrote my own[1] version of ledger-cli[2] that was a lot simpler in the format it accepts, but has features outside of the format, in the program, to do what I need/want. I have an import feature for csv files, a web interface for reports and portfolio tracking, and the usual cli features from the original.

I've got about 15+ years of transactions in a single file, and I have every intention of continuing forever.

I've been so impressed by how well plain text works for this, I always try to use plain text for as many other things as possible. Future proof. I got burned by MS Money going away, no proprietary formats again if I can help it.

[1]: https://howeyc.github.io/ledger/ [2]: https://www.ledger-cli.org

Long time ledger-cli user here. I recently discovered PTA [1, 2, 3], a Perl script by OpenBSD developer Ingo Schwarze. I'm in Europe, so the account numbering he uses is much preferred in my country as compared to Ledger's system.

I seem to be in the same boat like Schwarze: ledger-cli is really nice, but has too many features for my modest needs. I also really like the terse single-line syntax in the journal [4] as compared to ledger-cli's multi-line entries.

A port of Schwarze's PTA to awk would be lovely, though (as compared to awk, Perl is huge! :); maybe I'll try to hack something together some day.

Is anybody aware of other plain text double-entry accounting utilities that would use the numbered chart of accounts?

1: https://mandoc.bsd.lv/pta/

2: Great discussion on the implementation involving the author: https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20200928123430

3: The Design Goals section in the readme is also interesting: https://mandoc.bsd.lv/pta/README

4: https://cvsweb.bsd.lv/~checkout~/pta/journal.example.en?rev=...

I only have one excel showed which contains all our bank accounts including brokering.

I don't live over my means so I stoped trying to record everything but because I'm saving for a house, I need to know roughly how much I have across different accounts.

And for everyone curious about why I have more accounts: I have my account, we have a shared account, my wife has one, 1 company brokering account, private brokering account and most critical an banc account for reserved funds/emergency/maintenance.

I assume that when we buy a house that we will throw everything together to get the best quote.

My mane bank account actually has this analysis feature but I disabled it again because it did not add any value.

I always wire money every month out of my account. Everything I have in there is money I can just spend if I wanted to.

I use a Google sheet, and look at my finances twice a month. Each time, I duplicate the sheet from a month back (so 2 new sheets each month). Each sheet has the bills to go look at and handle. Either to ensure they were paid (autobill) or to set up a payment.

It's in need of an update to stop duplicating sheets and just either add columns, that way I could easier do things like compare over time or create charts, etc. But I often have extra notes or other things in each sheet as needed, so I'd need a way to still incorporate those. And it's been working well; mostly ensuring I don't forget any of the individual bills.

The harder thing for me is when I get a paper bill, ensuring it gets scheduled to be looked at and paid if I don't do it right away.

I use this same method and have been for over a decade. It helps to never miss a bill (which is much easier now that most bills are eft/ach) and to better predict how bills will effect each paycheck.

I don't anymore. I have a monthly overall budget (a single number) I try to stick to. It encompasses all expenses except for rent. So this one number includes groceries as well as discretionary spending.

If I go a little over it's no big deal, but I try to stick to it. I pay myself a pretty low salary. The rest stays in my company, some as a buffer and some gets invested.

I find this solution works best for me. I'm constantly working on suppressing my impulse buying habits, but YNAB or other systems didn't really eradicate them and having this single number to aim for each month is just less stressful. I have no debt and OK savings, so I guess it's working.

I used something on my Psion for many years, then Quicken for a long time, Gnucash and now a much simpler budget driven Excel workbook. Probably looking at Sqlite and Datasette next but tbh the simpler the better.

I used to use YNAB, but they kept on jacking their price up, and I kept on procrastinating with keeping up a record.

Having lately used Google Sheets along with AppScript for other purposes, I think I would go with that.

I was looking into YNAB but $14.99 a month seems a lot

Yeah that price is just insane for my needs.

I was paying, as long as it was in the ballpark of $60/year, and that was already a lot. (I live in a country with lower overall income.)

However, my impression is that they have gone through a pivot. From their messaging it looks like the customer they’re after is someone going through more serious financial trouble. Someone in need of a sophisticated set of tools and methods to get out. That user is probably willing to pay more and for longer than someone like me.

I just wanted to know how much I’m spending on snacks and fast food.

I've kept YNAB4 running. That was the last non-subscription version.

I don't.

I know that my mortgage/utilities/insurance/food bill is roughly X% of my take-home earnings.

My savings are Y% of my earnings. X% + Y% is roughly ~90%.

The other 10% is an everything fund that goes to my liquid checking account in the bank. So that bank account is growing very slightly. So the only thing required from me is to look at the bank account once a quarter or so, and make sure it's still roughly at the same level and there were no outlier expenses.

I use a homegrown web app that uses GnuCash behind the scenes via a Python Flask app. Works just well enough that I don't have to open GnuCash anymore.

You can try it here if interested: https://demo.checkyour.finance

Source code: https://github.com/bxbrenden/GnuCash-Helper

I did firefly-iii a few times when I was interested in historic trends. Wrote some custom tooling to auto import from the banks. But in a long term, annotating weekly/monthly just doesn't provide enough benefit for me to continue doing that. It's easier to do a big import every few years when I actually need the data.

If I was doing it again, I'd probably go with one of the cli text ledgers so the process is easier to preserve and closer to ETL.

I use a home grown set of scripts to automatically pull transactions from banks/credit cards where possible, auto categorize them, and create shareable dashboards. All without sharing credentials with any third party.

The method is described in this blog post: https://sagar.se/blog/where-is-the-money/

Moneydance, using the technique described here https://youtu.be/eIcsMHL0NJ0 and https://youtu.be/QOtZ6Bwzlf8.

It's a super simple way to use envelope accounting (ala Dave Ramsey), without using actual cash.

I built this purely frontend tool to plan out my budget. It looks like crap but it works great. I built it in 2012 and havent touched the code since.

It lives on an S3 bucket and stores the data in local storage.

http://www.mindlessflash.com/budget

I almost exclusively via debit or credit card, so those expenses are tracked there. If I need a log, I can download a .csv file. Income is only once a month and pretty predictable, more than we spend with a margin that goes to savings, so in short: I don't keep track really.

I save the annual account statement PDFs in a folder and add up the amounts across accounts manually in a simple spreadsheet. There's no need for me to go crazy tracking every dollar in and out because I spend well below my cash flow.

YNAB. But the old version, not the new subscription based service. I've been using it for years now. It's budgeting system really helped to turn my money management skills around. I was crap with cash before I started using it.

I used to do it by hand with a spreadsheet I built, but after finding a few bugs in my spreadsheet and getting tired of manually managing things, I switched to YNAB.

The risk there is that they use Plaid on the backend.

A checkbook register, mostly, along with reading the credit card bill.

A paper checkbook for regular spending things, keeping the old ones filed away in order, and tracking of other accounts and balances on sheets of paper (one per month) in a folder.

I use Pocketsmith for their automated bank feeds, but I'm thinking of moving as they don't support the bank I have my mortgage with, leading to periodic statement imports.

I use a shared spreadsheet with my wife. We’ve tried various apps and different methods, but we’ve found the spreadsheet works best.

Dowload csv from bank once a month. Use python to automate categories. Add to database, explore with datasette

mint.com to track everything + a google spreadsheet for forecasting.

It's OK, not perfect but OK.

Quicken is one of the only subscriptions I have that I don’t consider canceling.

Toshl. I have been using it since 2015, perfectly suits my use case.

This also looks very promising, and $5 a month for the higher plan seems very interesting since it provides auto-sync with the bank.

Anyone using Homechart?

Homechart dev here, Homechart is extremely similar to YNAB4 when it comes to finances [1]. One thing it has that YNAB4 does not is the idea of "Budget Goals"--you can set a budget amount for a certain date and Homechart will calculate backwards what you need to save for it. My family uses this for saving for vacations and property taxes, among other things.

While Homechart supports importing from CSVs and QFX files, I'm not sure when/if it will support automatic bank importing due to the costs/privacy/security associated with it.

Homechart is meant to be a "whole home data management" solution. Budgeting is a small part of its functionality and will expand in the futurel.

1 - https://homechart.app/budgeting/

Thanks for replying!

I'm soon gonna move by myself into an apartment and I'll have to keep budget of expenses and stuff, so I've been looking into Homechart which seems to fulfill all my needs. I'll give it a try before trying the other paid services that only do budgeting.

Just a simple Excel (LibreOffice Calc to be exact) sheet

A Google spreadsheet

personal capital

https://www.personalcapital.com/

Excel