What kind of apps do you use to assist in managing your finances?
On another note, how do you even "learn" managing finances properly (i.e., spendings, banks, investments, etc). Using Excel does not work for me. I'm thinking of focusing my time on beancount. Feels pretty simple enough to use.
The idea of surprise charges is completely unknown to me. It takes a little setup initially, but it gets you into checking your finances briefly every day which makes sure you are briefly checking whether you are going over your budget. You wake up in the morning with your transactions from the previous day and it does a fantastic job of matching them to your categories in your budget.
Unlike other systems you can't budget money that you don't have, so you have to break up your budgeting on a schedule of when you get your paychecks. You get into the habit of budgeting for your debts, bills, and things you are saving up for and you get to see how much you have left over for everything else in your life. It tracks average spending per category as well.
It's fantastic for tracking spending and debt but it's meant for your daily finances. It's not great at tracking stocks, 401ks, etc. But it's not meant for that and doesn't try to be
Invest in learning how to use Quickbooks.
Quickbooks is the industry standard for bookkeeping and accounting - the exact topics your OP references. Mapping (your vocabulary) to Quickbooks terms, you can budget by category (manage your finances), import and categorize your transactions daily (keep track of your finances), and run reports to see actuals vs. budgets (where your money has gone vs. where you planned for it to go). Also, every so often (monthly), you reconcile your categories against your financial accounts (banks, investments, loans, etc.) to make sure everything is in-sync. Quickbooks also has other advanced features to keep track of more complicated bits like depreciating assets, interest-bearing accounts, etc.
Your return-on-investment for learning Quickbooks will be many times higher than any other tool. You can grow with the tool as your financial complexity grows, something tools like YNAB can't do; easily handover your financials to an accountant for filing come tax season; transfer the skills you've learned through personal bookkeeping over into running the books for a side business.
To get started, I'd suggest taking a class that teaches how to use Quickbooks for personal finances, or hiring a bookkeeper to setup your books and teach you how to run them to meet your goals.
Starling lets you divide your account into spaces and you can have virtual debit cards associated with a space, or pay bills by direct debit straight from a space. At the beginning of the month the monthly budget for each space is put into that space and most spending comes directly from its space using a virtual card (in Google Wallet for physical purchases or with the appropriate card info for online purchases) or via direct debit. A few transactions are on the main card and are categorised later by transferring from the right space in the app.
Some budgets we expect to pretty much fully use each month, like groceries or bills. Others like the car budget we aim for rollover to cover occasional big expenses like a service. We also have an emergency fund to cover unanticipated bigger expenses.
I've tried various methods and software in the past and this has worked best. Tracking everything in an app or using ledger / beancount is too much work for too little benefit in my experience. It also hasn't worked well for me for budgeting as it tells you after the fact where your money went but doesn't by itself help / force you to stick to a budget the way the envelope method does.
I have been thinking, if I were to create a budget tracker, my hot take would be to make an imperfect one, aimed at people who don't need to budget "to survive" and so can make a mistake, overspend and then reign it in next month.
This software would just track the major source of discretionary spend: your credit card, and auto allocate to buckets using AI mostly, and maybe email you an alert if overspending (like the battery alerts from Ring!).
Any non credit-card account tends to be used for essentials like bills, mortgage and so on. Since I am not going to not pay those, it doesn't matter.
The idea is to say "can spend $10,000/m on credit card" or whatever, and go from there.
MVP: download credit card CSV, run some local python code to auto allocate and fire off email if there is an issue (there was an API to email thing posted on HN a while back).
I use beancount, it is a great fit for a specific type of user who can put up with double entry and who wants to run sql-ish queries on their transactions and who doesn't need a GUI. It probably won't work if you are not all those things but if you are it is great.
Conceptually, I would suggest looking into books that do a basic job of explaining accounting- balance sheet, income statement, cash flow. While it is a much bigger space than the world of personal finance, personal finance itself has gotten very complex, with lots of seemingly indistinguishable places/apps to put money. The indistinguishable becomes just crisply defined if one has the basics of accounting.
I'm from India and I use Fold¹ for this. They make money tracking easier using the account aggregator framework², which is provided by an RBI³ regulated entity. They are currently in invite-only for both iOS (beta) and Android (alpha).
They are very feature-rich and implement those with utmost care to design, UX and engineering. The team is small and everyone is committed to the goal of making finance easier and seen. All amazing people!
Highly recommended for people in India.
2. https://sahamati.org.in/what-is-account-aggregator/
3: Reserve Bank of India
I now use monarch money[0] which has a much broader focus and offers better investment tracking, forecasting etc. They have a cash flow view which is particularly insightful.
A lot of the finance related subreddits are helpful (like personalfinance, bogleheads etc) for advice, planning, ideas etc. Also a fan of The Money Guy on YouTube[1].
Other than that, I don't do anything more than watching my "total assets" value move up and down. If I ever need to retroactively assess things, I can do it in Excel again.
It was initially meant to replace a spreadsheet I created based on the budgeting advice given on the r/personalfinance subreddits. It can
help you figure out where your money went, plan your budget ahead of time and analyze past expenditures.
source code @ https://github.com/rare-magma/guitos
I used to use MoneyWiz but it couldn't handle both American, Irish, and Swedish bank or investment accounts. So I outgrew it quickly.
Then I did it manually in Excel, and Later Moneydance that is really a great product. That said it didn't really work for me due to my undiagnosed ADHD brain. There is some automation in Monedance but I never got forex exchange rates or Stocks to work like I wanted automatically. I know you can get it working but for some reason I never got it to. THey later got some automation for a 2 euro subscription fee, but it cant handle my Irish or Swedish banks only American banks.
If you are in to privacy then Moneydance is the software for you, they are really big on not wanting your data which is refreshing. It really is a great software, Im just not Neurotypical enough to use it though. https://moneydance.com/
Now I am using Banktivity that handles all European and American banks, with automatic updates. https://www.banktivity.com/
I love it. It just handles stuff for me, and my ADHD brain feels in control of economy again...
Joint account is only used for bills, and barring some terrible emergency I don't plan to cash out my investments.
I also have an autosave set up on my bank account that each paycheck it shifts $400 into my savings.
Whatever is left, I just pretend that's my paycheck and work with that for the next couple of weeks. Sometimes I stretch myself a bit too thin, and then I dip into my savings account to get me by until the next paycheck, but I try not to make a habit of it (it's not our primary savings, that gets taken out of the joint account, I mainly use my personal savings account as a buffer now).
And in addition to that I have a 401k that gets taken out of my paycheck right away as well.
I'll get to see the numbers go up each paycheck, and then I don't really have to think about it outside of that. Investing and paying my loan and shifting money over takes about 20 minutes of my time, then I'm done for two weeks.
I'm definitely not as efficient with the rest of the money as I'd like (we eat out too often and get too many toys), but at least I'm still saving/investing a respectable amount each paycheck anyway.
I didn't really start having this habit until my 30s, though, and never worked at a place that gave out RSUs, so I'm way behind a lot of people on this site that are younger than me, I'm sure.
I've never been great at tracking spending - what worked for me was just being strict about separating "spending money" from "savings money". I'd get paid $X into a savings account every month, my rent $Y would be drawn from that, and I'd transfer a $Z "monthly allowance" into a separate checking account. Credit card and everything else would come out of the checking account. I know I'm spending $Z every month. I know each month I'm accumulating $X - $Y - $Z in savings. I can adjust $Z however I like, make emergency transfers from savings to checking if I have to, and the transaction history for the savings account is easy to understand.
There are lots of ways to do it and it's important to find something that works for you. I know people who have big mortgages, with an expected windfall when they retire and trade their huge house for a smaller one, because they know it's the only way they'll save enough!
I used to use YNAB and tried Mint, but I don’t want to pay a monthly fee. YNAB is cheap ($5/month) but it was just a spreadsheet with categories and I expect I’ll need this info forever so $60/year x 50 years adds up.
I have 13 years of data and it’s useful for taxes, business disputes, planning, long term budgeting, and backup/restore.
What do you want to achieve? balance at the end of each month, or "can I afford another latte today"?
For the first a spreadsheet can work great, preferably with some system to arrange your budget, but that's not about tooling but simply being disciplined. For the second I don't think anything will last- writing every expense is not scalable.
I just put everything on my credit card that I can. From my bill every month I know my expenses. Then I just pay it off. If I get really curious I can export the statement transactions and break it down more. I also get rewards.
Idk simple and caveman like? Maybe. it works for me though
Imagine a Google sheet where 1 tab pulls in all your transactions from each of your banks / credit cards / investment accounts and the other tabs are... Whatever you can imagine.
I am a huge fan, after I graduated from mint.com I've never looked back after finding Tiller.
You can customize to your hearts content (it's Google Sheets, after all), plus they have handy template sheets to get started with.
I personally have sheets to track my monthly spending (by category), my networth, my checking account balance vs sum of all credit card bills, my progress on credit card signup bonus minimum spend challenges are more.
If you want a referral link: https://lunchmoney.app/?refer=3xlamc3c
Link: https://www.monarchmoney.com/ Referral link: https://www.monarchmoney.com/referral/chszg37bgv
However, financial institutions in the USA are making it harder to pull transactions via an API without involving third parties. So I’ll soon need to resort to scraping via selenium to automatically fetch transaction data.
A key thing to understand is - finance is the consequence, rather than the source. The practical sequence is productivity -> performance -> wealth.
And as a habit, I tend to be quite frugal, and always ensure I spend way less than I earn.
And whatever "spends" I do, 80% of them are of investment type:
1. Building businesses
2. Building teams
3. Acquiring new skills
4. Helping others
5. Serving customer better
6. New projects
As long as I remain highly productive, remain frugal, and keep investing time/energy/efforts into useful things, there haven't been any big financial troubles.
I find having a bit of UI is better than some of the plain text systems (ledger, et al).
I think one of the biggest challenges is creating a chart of accounts as that is the structure for how things are recorded.
I'm an accountant, and I still feel that it is hard to understand what it means when looking at ones finances. But having it recorded at least allows you to make a start.
[1] This functionality always costs money or a crazy amount of ads/spyware (like mint.com), but it's always worth it unless you just pay for everything with cash.
I track my balances across various sources, updating once a month. I also set my outgoings.
Funnily enough I don't really use the buckets feature too much, simply the graph over time of savings, and ability to set goals / monthly costs for review is enough.
Here’s my referral code if you’re interested: https://lunchmoney.app/?refer=igqb31gn
The advantage of using a general purpose no-code tool like Airtable is that all of the UI features of a database like views, filtering, groups, automations, API etc. come built-in for those who think like data-scientist/programmer, not an accountant.
Give. I give away about a tenth of my income to my church and other projects.
Save. Put some money in stocks and shares monthly (I use a fund)
If money is tight during the month use cash, not cards.
Don't check your finances too often. Establish a fixed routine and stick to it. Mine is monthly.
Last year, I got in touch with the City's public service, where they have debt counselors and financial experts who help people get control of their finances. And I sat down for a couple unproductive sessions where I recited my budget items from memory, the guy plugged the numbers into a spreadsheet, and then I compared it to bank statements. They were unproductive because there was no possibility of information sharing between me and his office. We couldn't even match our calendars for an appointment, or transfer a simple file.
Another resource that has helped is a 2" binder full of consumer finance information, published by the US Federal Government. I think it's the CFPB: https://www.consumerfinance.gov/ and I'm sure there are online resources now to match. They can really help you with solid facts and education about basic financial literacy and getting out of debt.
I also signed up to Mint a few years ago, after a recommendation by a friend. I found Mint to be no more helpful than when I started. Also, it was spamming me with special offers, which is how they monetize the free service, of course. I canceled Mint and I also shut down my whole Intuit account. I use H&R Block's software now, for tax preparation.
So these days, in terms of managing my finances day-to-day, I use little else besides my two online banking apps. And, I'm happy to say that their limited automation features have finally come together for me. I've got a flow going where all my bills will be paid, necessary transfers and credit card payments go through, and of course, all deposits are direct and electronic. So barring something unexpected, all my bills should be paid without intervention, even if I were to be incarcerated or go to the hospital, or be incapacitated in some way.
My bank apps are still inept at categorizing things. I mean, like, if I buy a Subway Sandwich, it might get categorized as Public Transit! So I still don't rely on that stuff for figuring out how my expenses are distributed, but thankfully I don't really need to know, and my discretionary/entertainment expenses are minimal already.
I'd still really like a master budgeting app that's capable of ingesting machine-readable files from both of my banks, and visualizing stuff on a monthly/annual basis, with colors and stuff. I suppose I could whip something up with Google Sheets. I don't own any other spreadsheet application anyway.