- Multiple, variable income streams (2 W2s, RSUs, real estate rental income) - Fixed monthly expenses (mortgage(s), subscriptions, bills) - Variable monthly expenses (groceries, gas) - Fixed yearly expenses (kid tuition, travel) - Investments (401k, ESPP) + retirement targets (total NW, age)
Specifically, I am looking for a system that manages away some of the complexity and leaves my wife and I with some tools and accountability for how much we spend out of pocket month over month in various categories. We don't mind manual entry, but I am hoping to avoid straight up manual transaction entry + reconciliation for every dollar of outflow...but perhaps that's unavoidable? Curious to see how the folks of HN do this and what ideas I might steal.
You cannot get out of manually categorizing everything, but the transactions use regex for auto categories so that reduces some work.
Once I approve all of my expenses, I go into Simplifi's spending plan and I make a plan for large one-off expenses (roof repair, new tires) for the month. These are added to a copy of the spending plan from the previous month. What this does is leave you with the transactions that are "unplanned". I check those and I add anything I missed to planned expenses, or I dispute those charges.
It works extremely well for me, and I balance a large number of accounts.
The only issue is that it doesn't work well with investments. For those accounts I keep a separate spreadsheet with a column for each month. I put balance and returns for that month as well as returns minus Inflation month on month. Every three months, depending on my income stream, I may deduct some money from investments, but the rule I use is I only deduct a positive 3 month return - inflation over that period. That way I only take money out of the market when it's up.
The system works well for me.
I should also say I keep a 3-5 month buffer in stablecoins on Gemini. I earn a relatively nice return 7%-ish on a very liquid asset that I can draw from within 3 days. I also keep 1-2 months of expenses in my checking account.
[1]: https://beancount.github.io/docs/ [2]: https://beancount.github.io/fava/ [3]: https://github.com/chazeon/beancount-extra
Reconciling I do by hand but because I import from the banks, it's usually just a couple of clicks.
I chose to use SQLite as the data store and have run one off SQL to fix some things.
I like that it is quite open to hacking, so if you like that sort of thing, give it a try.
Huge purchases, I agonize over and research for months anyway.
Food, drink, snacks, etc -- I just try to limit eating out to 2-3 nights a week, and I don't go any place especially fancy.
It helps that most of my hobbies involve some up-front one-time investment, like a bike, but I can take on most of the maintenance tasks myself and basically never spend a penny unless I catch upgraditis.
It's one of those cases where a fully automated solution might be better, but seeing the balance mismatch between any given bank account and what's stored locally in the app forces me to trace down that transaction and figure out whether it comes from a service or a subscription of some sort so I can describe and categorize it away.
The data entry also being ever so slightly annoying (e.g. 1 minute per expense/income) is a good thing for me because I can be lazy and it has saved me from making impulse purchasing decisions in the past. So when I want to buy something, I'm also okay with checking my corresponding bank app for the details and to verify the exact amount a second time.
As for the CSV, in its most basic form I can just save it as an OpenDocument Spreadsheet and do some quick graphs etc.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument
It's also that my bank can give me CSV files for any individual cards, so the same workflow can be used there to validate/explore that data as well. That's actually how I graphed my earnings for 2017-2021 in my blog post "On finances and savings": https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/on-finances-and-savings
Disclaimer: this probably wouldn't work with too many family members or a large amount of cards. But for now the approach scales wonderfully, given my circumstances. As long as you can get the CSV files, working with them becomes not too bad.
I use Pocketsmith now, it has the automatic transaction import that is mandatory for me to use an app. I find the categorisation loop to be fairly easy, with a good interface for adding new categories on the fly. It can automatically categorise transactions for you, but always lets you check it over before it commits.
I don't think my situation is as complex as yours (2 people 2 mortgages, 3 income streams and an investment), but I can still see it being useful for you.
It's not super techy, but it is easy with a customisable interface. I like it.
My wife and I have a joint account where all income goes. We then have a monthly stipend that is guilt free, no questions asked. The stipend is a fixed sum and equal between us. We both have to agree to change it. We also agree amounts to go into savings.
Since cash is fungible, we dont have budget pots really.
This system ensures that it is fair, as I out earn my wife by a huge margin and reflects her non-financial work.
As nowadays most of my purchases are card, smartphone or BLIK (widely adopted local payment platform) it's not that hard. Banks also pre-analize each transaction and if they know what kind of business was that, it is pre-categorized as medical/groceries/travel/car/house bills and so on.
Overall result is poor - I spend like madman and only recently started to monitor reports successfully. Usually biggest surprises are SMALL purchases, not large ones. Overpaid yogurt in a small local store is fine, done once. But doing that every day, plus add eating out when working from office - this can can be surprisingly costly.
for non-fixed recurring expenses (like water and electricity), i set a high estimated monthly cost and adjust downwards as patterns are established
i don't trade stocks enough to track them with any regularity.
expensify for capturing regular expenses, like groceries and food, which are paid with a credit card that is paid off every two weeks. because all bank alerts route to expensify, i capture every transaction i make. i go through expensify weekly and separate "budgeted" recurring expenses and daily expenses. i also made an API that uses their backend for their frontend to send receipts with iOS Shortcuts.
i aggressively convert repeated transactions into recurring expenses to smoothen free cash forecasting. amazon subscribe and save has been immensely helpful here.
this has been my stack since 2016. it has been amazingly successful for me. i know exactly what i can and can't afford and their % of my net income. i can also track lifestyle inflation with incredibly high granularity.
Nothing beats the flexibility of a spreadsheet and I have nothing it respect for people who use one for budgeting. I’m general they seem to be more on top of their finances than anyone I come across.
We try to keep within that budget, but if needed we pad out for extra expenses. Those times there is excess we go on a trip or have a nice dinner.