
Ask HN: How do you track your expenses? - guildmaster
What&#x27;s your process for tracking your expenses? Do you use an app? How sophisticated are the apps that you use? Do you know any terminal based app for expense tracking?
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jnfr
I used to track everything in a spreadsheet manually and early last year
finally found time to turn it into an app which pulls in my credit card
transactions automatically. I still input lots of expenses manually since I'm
living in a primarily cash-based society and it works great for my needs.

Not sure what your idea of "sophisticated" is, but it's definitely the
opposite of a terminal-based app. It's built on a modern web stack and it's
called Lunch Money ([https://lunchmoney.app](https://lunchmoney.app))!

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matt_the_bass
Looks great! I’ve checked it out before. The primary limitation for me vs YNAB
is iphone support.

I’m currently a YNAB user and I love it. There are a lot of YNAB users. They
already understand the value of this type of tool. If you want to try and
convert YNAB users you might want to consider a way for YNAB users to migrate
to your tool.

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iends
For personal expenses, YNAB has literally changed my life. It’s also helped my
wife and I’s relationship with money and forced us to plan each month. When my
wife was furloughed due to COVID19 a month ago, we knew we’d be ok because we
have been planning our finances for 5+ years.

~~~
frompdx
Also happy with YNAB. I've used it for almost a year now. To be honest, I
don't really budget down to the dollar like YNAB recommends. For example, a
lot of stuff still ends up in the "stuff I forgot to budget for" bucket.
However, I find it useful for general expense tracking and understanding
trends in my spending. I also find it useful as a way to confirm that bills
were paid, etc.

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nicbou
I have to comb through my monthly transactions for business income and
expenses. I also get a notification for every transaction with N26.

I used to have a homemade tool that graphed my net worth across several bank
accounts. It proved very difficult to maintain, but it was super useful. I
could easily see my savings rate, and catch unexpected dips.

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verganileonardo
I have a budget on Excel (with 12-15 months planned) and download the data
from my bank/credit card every month to assess how I'm doing vs the plan.

If I'm on a cash-tight period, I increase the assessment frequency
accordingly. Typically, my biggest expenses are rent and groceries, so I pay
closer attention to those.

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blaser-waffle
I used You Need A Budget (YNAB) for a while, but supplemented with a google
doc/spreadsheet. Eventually moved to a gDoc entirely, but I may move back to
YNAB as I try to de-googlify.

I would call them reasonably sophisticated, but ultimately something I did by
hand. Mint.com and some of the automated tracking solutions are attractive,
but I don't like giving access to sensitive things to random companies, plus I
don't need deep, regular breakdowns, just broad trends; if I miss a couple of
lunches out, or forgot to add an oil change it won't impact my overall
financial picture.

I don't know any terminal-based apps, though I did have a basic python script
that hits the Yahoo Finance API to track my stocks. It doesn't work now
because I think Yahoo shutdown the API to the public. See also:
[https://pypi.org/project/yahoo-finance/](https://pypi.org/project/yahoo-
finance/)

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2rsf
An Excel file, manually updated from the bank when needed.

We are trying to avoid credit and loans which makes budgeting quite trivial,
many times downloading bank transactions of the last months/years and putting
them on a graph is enough

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donnanorton
I do it in an old-fashioned way - in a notebook. For example, you can find
lots of different expense trackers on Amazon. I prefer paper planners instead
of digital ones in general.

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Chetane
I manually track expenses in a spreadsheet. I'm using tillerhq.com to pull
transactions to the spreadsheet automatically.

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rochak
I use Spendee. It has a nice interface and doesn’t get in the way.

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catacombs
ledger-mode in Emacs.

~~~
guildmaster
[https://www.ledger-cli.org/3.0/doc/ledger-
mode.html#Introduc...](https://www.ledger-cli.org/3.0/doc/ledger-
mode.html#Introduction-to-Ledger_002dmode)

This?

I prefer vim, will try this out though.

