HN

Comments (59)

• callumprentice
  I agree with an earlier post that asserted "net worth = assets - liabilities" but I'd like to do better at understanding what that really means.Some are easy like the size of your bank balance. Others are much harder.For example, one asset we have is our home and there are many websites out there that tell you how much it's worth but they each vary an awful lot and change dramatically - so much so sometimes that any savings you've made in the same period are eclipsed.Similarly, the 401k I've been building up for years seems like a decent amount but trying to calculate what it's worth after taxes and therefore how much you'll have to spend each month seems unknowable.I think the same is true of investment accounts. If we seeded one with $500 and it's now worth $250, it's easy to think your net worth has risen by $250 but it really hasn't when taxes, fees and who knows what else is taken into account.
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  tantalor
  You don't need accounting or double-entry bookkeeping to compute net worth.Net worth is easy: assets - liabilitiesYou get the figures from your financial institutions and counting up your cash on hand.The purpose of double-entry bookkeeping is to track the flow of money and to make sure nothing was missed.But for net worth, you only need the end result, which you don't need any computation for.The only thing that this solves is tracking money in flight, because during a transfer it disappears from your view of the accounts. There are simpler solutions to this problem than tracking absolutely everything.
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  symbogra
  I used to do this during my first real job and was tracking every sandwich I bought, then one of the senior engineers told me to stop wasting time with it and make more money, and then I was enlightened.
• spiffytech
  I used Ledger for a while, then some other tools. Now I'm on Actual Budget, a nice FOSS envelope budget app that can import transactions from my bank.I find value in tracking everything, tracking it by hand, and tracking it with precision (our household budget has 68 categories).When I've tried easing up in the past (e.g., with Mint's lightweight approach) I was left with a budgetary black box where I felt like I never had enough information to make big purchasing decisions. I knew what I had in the bank account, but I didn't know if it was earmarked for anything, or whether the next surprise expense was going to wreck my plans. I felt afraid and paralyzed.Earning more didn't make the problem go away. Like the financial equivalent of Parkinson's Law, more income just meant more spending. I couldn't out-earn unrestrained consumption. I had to monitor & manage it.For peace of mind, I found YNAB's philosophy helpful: one-off expenses often repeat predictably on a long-enough time horizon, and can be amortized accordingly. If I itemize all predictable expenses and save a little each month, I know everything is taken care of, and what I really have left over. I never get blindsided because several big expenses hit at once.I know not everyone has these problems. But I like to talk about my experiences because people don't all need the same things from their finances. It's okay and normal to want control and visibility. Budget apps exist because people find them useful, not because the whole userbase has failed to reach enlightenment and transcend budgeting.
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  huhkerrf
  I get that people on here don't like subscriptions, and I understand why, but I've been using You Need a Budget for well over a decade, and it is probably the last subscription I'd ever give up.The automatic import of expenses is so valuable for my family and keeping track of how much we've spent and how much we have left for the month.We used the fixed-cost version for years beyond when it was officially supported, and it didn't have the automated import, and I don't think I could ever go back to a system that didn't. There were always a few days a month, at least, when I wasn't exactly sure where we were in our expenses.
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  Etheryte
  This is neat, but I'm not really convinced this level of granularity makes sense for personal finances? Or at least it does not for me personally. I find that simply entering all my accounts into one big excel once a month more than suffices to keep track of everything. Maybe I make a typo here and there but it doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things cuz I'm gonna type a new number next month anyway.
• thomascountz
  As being discussed in another thread about plain-text accounting[1], what I've found most difficult about these tools is the learning curve between "Assets = Liabilities + Equity" and the realities of modeling a household economy.I appreciate the level of detail in this post. I think there's often confusion that plaintext == easy/simple. The real takeaway is: "if you're going to go through all of the trouble of managing your economy, you may as well make sure you control your data and own your system."[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46463644
• pimlottc
  I like having an archive of PDF statements but the downside is that it’s usually a tedious manual process to download them. There’s so many to track - bank accounts, credit cards, investments, utilities, doctor bills… Every website is different, and they are rarely batch-downloadable. So I tend to be a few months behind at any given moment until I get around to it.Anyone found a better way to keep on top of downloading statements?
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  Macha
  > The key insight is that bank statement PDFs are almost always columnar. Of course, this relies on the PDF having a proper text layer; if your bank sends you scanned images, you’re out of luck (though I’ve yet to encounter one that does). When you convert them to text while preserving the layout, you get something that looks like this:So I decided to try this out with my bank who's export options are (one of the mentioned slightly silly multi-line format) XLSX or PDF only, and it appears they've done some "encryption" (really a simple substitution cipher and an embedded font with the characters jumbled up so it renders correctly) to the PDF to prevent this. All the marketing text and headers are in the pdftotext output fine but the actual data is all accented and non-printable characters (also if you copy/paste out).The substitution cipher does seem stable across a few statements, but still seems like less work to work off the XLSX
• mfro
  I have looked at beancount and a few other double entry systems several times over the years. None of the applications I've found except for Microsoft My Money (Sunset Deluxe) has felt intuitive and not wasted my time. One of my accounts can't be imported via csv but other than that it is painless. I recommend it to people who just want a quick, free program for simple reporting.
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  phil-martin
  I really enjoyed reading this, and it is inspirational as it is something I have wanted to do for a long time. And as a software developer, it really appeals to me.How do you think it compares time-wise to using existing accounting software? Was the time investment worth it to get the control and visibility you now have?
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  nubg
  Can somebody explain to me the advantage of double-entry bookkeeping? Is it basically just a "checksum" so it's easier to notice when something is off?
• whattheheckheck
  https://simplifi.quicken.com/This was the cheapest and easiest way to account for stuff for me