Do you track your expenses monthly? Annually? Do you have an app or do you use an excel spreadsheet? Any suggested tools?
I use a spreadsheet and track monthly.
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You Need A Budget.
Okay, well maybe you don’t but most people benefit from having one. The difference between tracking your expenses and deliberately planning what your money needs to do for you.
There’s a thing called the envelope system, or zero-based budgeting, which basically means helps you assign the moneybags you have now, to the expenses you know you’ll have. “What does this money need to do until I get paid again?” It’s a whole thing, and it works really well.
I don’t know how to link to communities but search for /c/ynab (or if you like, also /r/ynab over on that other site).
I love YNAB but I just can’t stomach the price.
I agree with you on the price. They say it pays for itself, and I believe that is true, but it is still a high price.
Agreed. I wish it was cheaper. Although now with YNAB Together my partner and I can share an account and my sister also agreed to have her budget. (I can technically peek as account manager but I’ve promised I won’t and we’re close enough that it’s not an issue.) But now it’s $30/each!
Controversial take - no budget. Split income into 3 or more buckets - savings, critical bills (rent, utilities, debt, etc), and discretionary. I manage as separate accounts.
Spend discretionary freely and enjoy the peace or mind that your financial future is secured by the first 2 buckets. If you run low, rice and beans til next paycheck.
No need to track coffee expenditures, you’ll realize during rice and beans week that you can make it at home.
Your mileage may vary.
Thanks for the comment. It doesn’t seem to have gained much traction yet but it does look promising.
My wife and I use Goodbudget with a single login. It’s pretty quick to add purchases as they are made and easy to look through the history and see trends.
Ledger or GnuCash. I like Ledger and plain text accounting in general because plain text files work well with version control tools such as Git.
Nothing beats a good old spreadsheet.
Used to use gnucash on Linux desktop for a goooood long while. I wanted nicer reports so I shopped around with homebank (one developer so slow development but very nice project!) and tried money dance (didn’t like it, though I tried really hard). Eventually tried my own spreadsheets and apsire budget but finally settled on YNAB because I need a hands-off approach as I’m so busy.
I reconcile accounts every few days and auto-sync my banks with plaid (YMMV on how much you’re into that) and it works for me. I’m happy paying the subscription but if it ever goes to US$150/yr I’m probably going to quit it.
Heehee yay YNAB!
Ever since YNABs price hike I wanted to have an alternative, but all were not really up there yet. For a few weeks, I am using ActualBudget which has been open-sourced by the developer and is actively maintained, including the „recently“ introduced support for goals :)
Edit fixed url
How do you feel it compares to YNAB?
It‘s mooostly the same, except for the web app not yet being too mobile friendly. It works in horizontal orientation, though :) The sync via nordigen (goCardless now) also works properly.
Its basically like nYNAB when it launched, which was perfect for me. As of now, their [ynab’s] UI is getting more and more cluttered :) I can only recommend giving it a spin.
I had tried a few paid services. I am a business major though and have alot of experience with Excel. I was able to make a expenses tracker in there and now I just enter transactions a few times a week. Helps alot to have a easier way to view what is coming in and what is going out. As well as where the majority of my money is going to. You can YouTube how to make a spreadsheet. Lots of tutorials
Yah I have one but I wanted to benchmark because I’ve been doing the same thing for the past 5 years now and wonder if there’s popularity around a new tool I haven’t heard of. Spreadsheet is still king.
I’ve been a long time You Need A Budget user. It’s really put me on the proper budgeting and goal building path.
However I need to likely make some changes in budgeting process to account for, now that I split expense more often with a partner. We’ve been using Splitwise to track split everyday expenses like groceries. If anyone has recommendations here with YNAB and Splitwise, I’d like to hear them. Right now my reporting in YMAB is all messed up considering the splits we do. When I do get reimbursed by my partner, it’s easier to pull from a single category as opposed to splitting that transaction out from what was recorded in Splitwise.
The recent AMEX issues with their import partners (MX and Plaid) are annoying, but I did manual entry back on V4 so nothing I’m not used to. But still considering there’s a yearly fee with new YNAB and it doesn’t import my main spending card is annoying.
If you are using YNAB, a fun trick is to use a split transaction that contains the total amount as an outflow and then the inflow you would receive from your partner to make the math easy. For example:
Split transaction: -100$ - total bill outflow +50$ - partner’s portion
YNAB transaction that will apply to the category is 50$.
Interesting! I’ll have to try to messing with this.
My partner and I just combined budgets rather than trying to split everything.
Could you try YNAB together (no extra expense to you and you can offer it free) and use YNAB to split things as mentioned in comment? Or if you don’t mind losing some visibility then making a broad “together” expense category to pull from/put into?
Also! Maybe try a different card? Plenty of good cards to try churning! But I agree - it’s frustrating when one doesn’t pull. My credit unions credit card does that.
I was on a spreadsheet for years and recently started selfhosting Actual and importing transactions automatically through email alerts.
Would you mind elaborating on your import pipeline? I was thinking of using email as a trigger as well, but thought it wouldn’t work too well.
No problem. I’ve got every account set to send me an alert on the lowest monetary value it supports (stupid AMEX with its $10 minimum), and I’ve got rules in my email to move those alerts into an Actual folder.
Then, I use my transaction fetcher to import the transactions from the email alerts into Actual. I look at Actual periodically to categorize the transactions.
It works pretty well for me at this point. I haven’t published the image to DockerHub yet, but i think it’s ready for an alpha image. Let me know if you have questions or need help (or want to contribute)!
Thank you, that looks awesome!
Do your institutions send alerts with data in a consumable format? I’m in Canada, land of the shitty bank software and it seems I can only get PDFs from most places. I have one that doesn’t even let you download transactions outside of the monthly statement :(
I mean, for a given level of consumable. You can see in the
TransactionFetcher.Readers.*libraries how I’m parsing the data out of HTML emails, which is less than optimal, but it works, at least until they change email formats and I have to make changes.Your neighbors to the south also have shitty bank software, unfortunately.
I use Tiller, which is a paid service that dumps your transactions into an Excel spreadsheet or Google Sheets. I like being able to have full control, without needing to copy everything into the spreadsheet.
Does your bank not allow you to download your transaction list as a CSV? I used to do this.
I have lots of bank accounts, and doing that every so often is a real PITA. And each is in a different format.
I get far more value from having those separate accounts than I would save by consolidating to 1-2 accounts.
I made a simple budgeting web app: https://github.com/MattMckenzy/Casheesh
My wife and have used it almost every day for the past couple of years to give ourselves and track fun budget money. It’s been working really well!
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