
Ask HN: How do you manage you money? - ehudla
I&#x27;m interested to hear how people manage their personal finances, and any advice on that score. Do you do it through your bank, do you have a personal broker, online services?<p>I am especially interested in hearing from people outside the US, more so if they have assets in the US that they manage as well.
======
edent
I use GNU Cash [http://www.gnucash.org/](http://www.gnucash.org/)

My bank allows me to export statements in CSV or Quicken(?) format, but it is
often easier just to key them in manually.

I treat credit card spending as a "Black Box" only recording the monthly
payments out. Should probably break that down further so I can see where we're
wasting money.

I _try_ to align Direct Debits (regular monthly payments in the UK) so they
come out on the same day / week. Some companies are more helpful than others
at moving them.

No cheques - thankfully their use is in the way out in the UK. Similarly, I
try not to use cash - far harder to track spending.

I leave investing to professionals. There's no way I can compete on the stock
market with people who do it full time and have billions to play with. So I
let my pension fund do that work for me.

Hardest thing to track is ad hoc payments through PayPal - either to people or
as payment from friends & companies.

Sadly, my bank doesn't offer mobile banking, but I'm happy enough with Web
access. I don't need spending alerts, to make sudden payments etc.

The most important thing - if you're married/living together/in a relationship
- talk to your partner! Explain your priorities, talk about realistic goals,
work out how you'll split bills etc. Money breaks up too many relationships.

~~~
orky56
My partner and I have open communication about finances and just recently set
up some budgets for various spending categories. The main point is getting a
realistic picture of where we stand on it each week & month. Mint is great but
is not accurate enough so it becomes just as much work to categorize expenses.

------
kintamanimatt
I just spend less than I get. I know how much comes in and my spending habits
are fairly predictable, so nothing too fancy.

For obvious reasons I tend to charge everything to my credit cards and then
just pay them off before the due date.

I have an account and a debit card that's only for ATM usage. The account
behind that card has a nil balance unless I'm about to get cash, in which case
I just use a banking app to do a quick transfer. It takes about a minute or so
from app launch to available funds. I have this separate account in case the
card gets skimmed.

In essence, with this separate ATM account and my credit cards, I'm keeping my
cash in cold storage until it's go-time.

Other than this, I don't really do anything magical or fancy. I used to
diligently keep track of every expense but it didn't really add anything to my
life so I stopped doing it. I'm not a fan of wasting time.

As a contingency against losing my wallet (which has happened exactly once!) I
have a second set of bank accounts and credit cards. These backup cards stay
at home. If my wallet disappears and departs from my life I don't have any
downtime; I just switch over the backup while replacements are on their way.

I keep my wallet as empty as possible and only carry the bare minimum I need
for my day to day. Most of the time I don't even get my wallet out and just
use my phone to pay for things. Most places where I go have PayPass enabled
terminals.

~~~
abustamam
It's interesting to see the dichotomy here. Some people meticulously manage
every penny, and others like you and me just make sure we spend less than we
earn.

I'm curious to see the financial status of everyone writing in this thread now
though. As a person just entering the work force, I don't have much in the way
of wealth so I know I'm not a good example here.

~~~
nicolas_t
I've found that the best way to save money is not to manage every penny but
manage your own expectation of what is expensive and what is cheap.

A lot of people increase their spendings proportionally to their income so
when they get more money, they acquire more expensive tastes, go to more
expensive restaurants, buy more expensive cars and so on.

It's an easy trap to fall into especially with peer pressure but if you can
avoid it, then it becomes easy to spend less than what you earn without
tracking every penny (or at least it's easy for most people here who tend to
earn more than the median salary).

------
nicolas_t
I do it through a bank + spreadsheets. Even though I live in France currently,
I mostly keep my money in JPY and USD since this is the money I get from
customers. I used to have more Euros but got scared before the Brexit vote and
decided not to have too much liquidity in Euros for now. I do own an apartment
in a EU country so I'm still invested in the EU going well.

In term of investments, I tend to prefer long term investments rather than
short terms one. I've bought some apple shares which I don't touch and I have
invested in some index funds.

I do have an accountant to keep my company's book.

I do not expect to be able to get pension from my country by the time I retire
so I save and make sure that I'll have enough to live by that time. To that
end, I live well below my means and try to save 60% of my income each months.

This does mean that I have a relatively small apartment, that I do not splurge
on restaurants and that I tend to not want to buy stuff (this is connected to
the fact that I like not having much clutter in my life). I strongly believe
that it's easier to continue having the same lifestyle as you did when you
started working than returning to a cheaper lifestyle after having had a taste
of luxury. So I avoid luxury for now.

In term of spreadsheets, I maintain two spreadsheets.

1\. Recurring income and expenses. This allows me to track recurring expenses
and decide or not to cut them. I make sure to review it every 2 months

2\. Investment spreadsheets, this is a spreadsheet I use to track the
different investments I do and the monthly return I get on them. I only review
them once a month because I do not want to make impulsive decisions regarding
my investments. I've found that it's too easy to panic and make bad decisions
and it's also healthier not to worry constantly about one's investment. I
probably leave money on the table because of this but it's the choice for me
(and then again I have less risk of losing everything).

In term of credit card spending, I set a limit as to what I spend every month
and will only really analyze my spendings if I near that limit.

EDIT: Quick hint for people who need to deal with multiple currencies, it's
worth looking at a specialized service like Currencies Direct (but there are
many others), they tend to give much better rates than banks. I've saved over
$1000 this year by doing this.

~~~
Cerium
On the topic of currency exchanges: recently I had to send a five figure sum
to China. Banks in the U.S. offered me 6.245 on the same say as banks in China
offered me 6.55. Safe to say I was very vocal about the fact that I was
sending US dollars and had no interest in foreign exchange services.

~~~
nicolas_t
Yes, it's been my experience to always transfer the foreign currency to China
and do the exchange there. But that's something to always check with any
countries... It's very easy to assume and lose a substantial amount of money.

------
whamlastxmas
You might like this:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvZSpET11ZY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvZSpET11ZY)

My personal method is to have a standard of living high enough that I don't
have to really think about it much. A small amount of discomfort, but not
much. I'm a naturally frugal person so it's not so bad.

I have a single credit card, a single debit card, and various Vanguard
accounts (IRA, Roth IRA, Brokerage). I keep a few months of cash liquid in the
bank account, whenever it gets a couple thousand over that I transfer it to my
Vanguard accounts.

Vanguard is very easy to manage. About an 80/20 mix between US and
international, and an 80/20 mix between stock index and bond index for both US
and international. So only 4 index symbols to deal with and rebalance every 6
months or so. Increase the size of your bond holdings as you get older.

I log into my bank's website to pay my balance every month, and to view my
transactions for that month to make sure there's no fraud/stolen card. I look
at my net worth in Mint every few months just out of curiosity. I used to use
Mint for tracking budgets for stuff like food, but I found that my happiness
went down drastically if I tried to artificially limit my spending because I
feel like I'm already really frugal.

This is enough for 95%+ of people assuming they're saving enough and making
enough to save enough.

------
thesumofall
Simple Excel spreadsheet where I keep track of any regular expenses
(subscriptions, rent, ...) and my investments.

I'm based in Europe but have most of my investments in the US largely due to
my phenomenal broker there:
[https://www.interactivebrokers.com/](https://www.interactivebrokers.com/)

Interactive Brokers allows you to exchange currency basically without fees and
at real market rates.

In terms of investments I keep it simple and split the money in fixed
percentages between cash, bonds, index ETFs, and gold. This saves a lot of
time and fees.

------
jaboutboul
I highly recommend Ramit Sethi's
[http://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com](http://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com).
It's a great book for those clueless about personal finance and managing their
money and he gives you lots of common sense advice based on psychology/human
behavior. Ramit is one of the smartest people of our time in general and I
take you will love his other content as well (I definitely do.)

Once you're up to speed on that and want to get really fancy you should check
out [https://www.youneedabudget.com](https://www.youneedabudget.com).

Good luck on your journey.

~~~
imaginenore
Be careful with the advice that tells you how to get rich by saving a bit of
your income and not buying the things you can't afford. The only person it
will make rich is the author of the book. Your average person in the US makes
$29K/year. Subtract taxes, rent, insurance, transportation, food, utility
bills, medical bills, and you're usually left with close to nothing. Even if
you're a developer who makes $150K, you can probably save up $50-60K/year, if
you live extremely frugally. So it will take you 17-20 years just to get to
$1M, assuming you can inflation-proof your savings. And I don't consider $1M
in savings "rich" \- it's not enough to retire without worrying (medical bills
will go up as you age).

~~~
icedchai
Most people don't have the self control to follow that advice anyway. It won't
get you filthy rich but it will get you ahead of roughly 90% of the
population.

------
fluder
[http://ledger-cli.org](http://ledger-cli.org)

~~~
howeyc
I also use this. I liked it so much that I wrote my own parser, importer and
web application to view a bunch of different reports.

[https://github.com/howeyc/ledger](https://github.com/howeyc/ledger)

~~~
zrail
Neat! I'm pretty tied to the ledger format but I'm not confident that C++
ledger will be around forever, so the more implementations the better.

Do you have any plans to support automated transactions? I use them quite
extensively.

~~~
howeyc
No, I do not. I have never used them.

------
skaushik92
I use [https://www.mint.com/](https://www.mint.com/) for managing my finances;
it allows me to aggregate my information across banks and manage
budgets/alarms as well.

------
zingar
Here in South Africa there is an excellent service called 22seven.com which
tracks my spending and income on various bank accounts (everything can be done
with bank cards and bank to back transfers, cheques are not a thing).

I pay an accountant / financial advisor to help me with taxes on payments from
multiple freelance clients and she's also recently advised me what savings
accounts to use:

1\. 3 month emergency tax fund 2\. Unit trust with 50-50 shares / bonds
composition 3\. Pension 4\. Cash saving for property

------
happyslobro
Poorly :/ I'm fairly nomadic, and it's a struggle to even keep a debit card
that works globally, let alone optimize banking fees and exchange margins. My
bills are in 3 different currencies. My backpack is cluttered with change, in
currencies that I am unlikely to use anytime soon, but in quantities that make
exchanging them pointless.

I really can't wait for digital currencies to penetrate further into
mainstream.

Thanks for asking, hopefully I'll spot some good tips here.

~~~
egwor
Have you seen Revolut? It allows you to spend money/convert between currencies
very easily and the charges are minimal

~~~
happyslobro
Not available in the Middle East yet, bummer. Financial tech is basically in
the dark ages here.

------
jnord
I have 15 years of transactions in Microsoft Money, a Windows application. I
choose it at a time when the only other alternative was Quicken, and I hanged
on to it ever since for its clean and simple UI, ease of use, and its
reporting and forecasting features.

Unfortunately, Microsoft retired this product about five years ago but still
makes it available as Money Plus Sunset Deluxe edition, available as a free
download.

~~~
kerrsclyde
Agree with this. When I managed my finances with Microsoft Money I felt in
control of everything - the temptation was to spend too much time managing it.

I've never found a application / app / web site which works so well for me.

------
lieut_data
I've been using No Thirst's MoneyWell for OSX to manage our family finances
over the past six years:
[http://nothirst.com/moneywell/](http://nothirst.com/moneywell/)

The idea of mapping the balances in my accounts (cash, bank account and
credit) to a set of buckets ("digital envelopes") really resonates with me.
Every paycheque gets assigned to the Salary bucket, and I have a set of fill
rules defined to move money from income buckets to expense buckets such as the
mortgage, consumables (my version of groceries), kids savings, etc. No money
actually moves when the fill rules execute: it's just bucketing. I'm free to
"move" the money around manually too.

I don't care about the physical mechanism to spend money anymore: cash, credit
and debit all have to be assigned to a bucket in the end. (Though I do prefer
the credit card for the rewards, and have it automatically paid off in full
each month.)

Some buckets go negative: when we redid our floors, I "paid" out of the
projects bucket, and then "repaid" that amount to myself over the next few
months. I didn't borrow any money externally, and kept the overall bank
balance well above zero by maintaining a "minimum balance bucket", along with
the regular funds in all the other buckets.

My wife and I have "personal" buckets - money to spend, or more crucially, to
save over a few fill cycles. It's very freeing for both of us.

I haven't been terribly successful at getting non-technical folk to use it,
because it really requires you to buy into the "bucket" (e.g. digital
envelope) system. It also changed ownership a few years back, and development
has slowed, though not stalled.

------
visakanv
My wife and I use
[https://www.youneedabudget.com/](https://www.youneedabudget.com/)

~~~
djhworld
I use this too, although I use the "classic" desktop application instead of
the new web based subscription service they have now.

The desktop application has served me well for 2 years now and I can see that
going forward.

A good thing about it is it supports importing transactions from Quicken
format, which my bank offers, so keeping up to date is a fairly quick process.

------
thisone
I'm probably not what you mean by being both outside the US and with US
assets, but...

I live in the UK, have to pay my US student loans, which is a bitch.

I used to have a US bank account registered to my parent's address over which
my mother had Power of Attorney. I'd transfer a decent sum of money using a
forex 2-3 times a year and pay the student loans monthly out of that

However, the bank account kept going dormant because of there being no
personal type contact. So I ended up closing that account out of fear I'd lose
access to it.

That left me with two ways to pay my student loans, forex and paypal (looking
at you Discover, only allowing paypal is terrible).

So I paid off the loan that required me to use paypal by socking all the saved
money I had at it, and now use a low-fee, good exchange rate forex to pay the
other loan monthly.

Everything is handled completely online, and I only keep one set of UK bank
accounts.

Personal savings into a stocks and shares ISA happens automatically every
month, plus a work pension that I manage online.

------
kecebongsoft
I hope it's okay for a shameless plug here. I use YNAB before but have been
creating my own solution for about a year or so. It's here:
[https://www.everypocket.com](https://www.everypocket.com). I'm outside the US
and the online banking systems are not very good at personal finance, plus I
have about 3 accounts in different banks for different purposes, so I can't
use bank's solutions.

I'm a big supporter of manual entry for the extra clarity on what I've been
(and will) spending on, I know many people find it cumbersome.

------
lowmagnet
Credit union with a savings and checking account, mint for tracking,
betterment for IRAs and emergency fund with their recommendations for
allocation. I used both lending club and prosper but I am winding those down.

------
abustamam
As I am just entering the work force, I'm curious to hear about the financial
status of the people replying to this thread. I understand if you're reluctant
to share that here, but I think it would make a big difference. For example,
if a lot of high-income earners/high wealth-owners in this thread tend to do
X, I might be more disciplined to do X.

~~~
weirdkid
I would probably be considered high income/moderate wealth. I started tracking
everything with Quicken back in the 90's when I realized I was just pissing it
all away. I switched to MoneyDance when intuit started screwing with the Mac
version of Quicken, and it does what I need. I track and categorize every
expenditure and every account: cash, asset, liability, retirement, college,
investment. I learned to do this from the book, "The Millionaire Next Door".
They had results from a study they did that showed people who spend more time
watching their money tend to have more of it over time (i.e. even if they
started with little). After a while it becomes routine. I spend collectively
1-2 hours per month working on my finances.

~~~
abustamam
Thanks for the book recommendation! I'll have to take a look at it.

------
nfriedly
My wife and I have accounts at Fidelity and my local credit union. My wife
manages the CU and handles stuff like groceries and gas. She mostly gets a wad
of cash each week, and spends that. Nothing comes out of the CU account
automatically, so no "surprises".

I "manage" Fidelity account in the exact opposite manner - almost 100%
automatically - paying all the bills and such. Fidelity knows of the biller
and can pay the exact amount each month for many of my bills. The others, such
as my electric bill are mostly on payment plans that make it the same each
month and re-adjust once or twice a year, so Fidelity just sends a check to an
address with the account number in the memmo. It also automatically sends
money to the credit union, retirement accounts, etc.

Oh, and we have a separate account for giving, both to causes that we support
and people in need. Some of its automated, some of it changes each month.

------
sundarurfriend
I sidestep the whole issue by now having any.

~~~
sundarurfriend
On a slightly more serious note though, I manage the data about what little I
do have - money inflow, outflow, categories of spending, etc. - using
Perfios[1], which is sorta like Mint for Indians.

[1] [https://www.perfios.com/](https://www.perfios.com/)

------
omegaham
Bank only, but I'm also only 25 years old and have nothing but a house, a car,
(which I bought with cash) a savings account, a checking account, and a mutual
fund.

That might change once things start getting more complicated, (Kids!) but for
now, it's very easy to keep track of everything.

------
sambf
After months of research, and not wanting an online software, I ended up on
[http://www.mybudgetview.com](http://www.mybudgetview.com)

It's a free cross-platform GUI like Quicken (I guess). Developers make money
by selling addons.

------
dagw
First I make sure I ~2 month pay available in 'cash' in a separate bank
account, and top that up if I had to take anything out of it over the past
month. Then I move 20% of my after tax income into index funds as soon as I
get paid. Then I pay my bills and just spend whatever I feel like spending for
the rest of the month and then before my next paycheck I move whatever I have
left into index funds. I've found that I have a pretty good 'feel' for how
much money I have and what I can afford to spend so I've never felt a need to
track my spending.

------
jacquesm
Simple spreadsheet with liquidity planning about one year out, business and
private in different tabs and a third which pulls all that together plus a
list of major assets.

I do this because I do not expect to be able to depend on anything outside of
myself for my later days.

I don't use any outside advisors but I do have someone keeping the books and
occasionally they will inform me of some detail that might be worth pursuing.
(One of these for instance is that in NL income from rental property is nearly
tax free if you own the property privately.)

------
amboar
I maintain some Python scripts that graph my spending from CSV transaction
exports: [https://github.com/amboar/fpos/](https://github.com/amboar/fpos/)

It does a few nice things like automatically determining your recurring income
and expense patterns, which allows it to do a bit of forecasting. I'm working
on expanding that capability at the moment to summarise savings progress for
recurring expenses with multi-month periods. Contributions welcome!

------
kowdermeister
It's in a nice little wooden box on my desk. I pick a large bill when my
wallets looks to be emptied. If I need to buy something online, I fill my bank
account a little.

I don't see the need for management, I know in my head how much I have. I
tried to set up spreadsheets, apps or other fancy things to keep track of my
spendings, but I abandoned all of them in a few days due to lack of
motivation.

I wish I had your problem :)

------
wingerlang
I made an app for myself to track every transaction, but I stopped after
realising that I don't really need to. I am quite frugal so I simply don't
spend enough that I feel I need to know every little detail.

I might check the total every now and then out of interest. I also don't have
any investments or a lot of recurring things.

------
mightybyte
I used to use GnuCash to track everything, all credit card purchases, mortgage
principle and interest...literally everything about my finances. But now I
have reduced my footprint to the point where I spend substantially less than I
make, so tracking everything like I used to do seems pointless. Using
something like mint.com can be a way to get something almost as good as
GnuCash with much less effort. But I never felt comfortable giving them all my
online banking passwords, so I stayed away from that.

As far as spending goes, I buy just about everything with my Citi Double Cash
credit card which pays 2% cash back on all purchases. I have an automatic
transfer that pays the balance in full every month, so I never have to worry
about late fees or interest payments. Any other bills, deposits, etc that
can't be put on the card are set up as automatic deposits/withdrawals, so
managing everything takes essentially zero effort. Almost all of this stuff
happens via my CapitalOne 360 (formerly ING Direct) high interest savings
account. They give me instant transfers between that and my 360 checking
account as well as have a feature where overdraft on the checking account gets
handled with no fees from the savings account. This means that I am able to
keep the vast majority of my cash on hand in a savings account, so I maximize
the returns of that money too.

Since my spending habits are now naturally restrained and I'm not concerned
about tracking where my money goes what I do now is my own simplified take on
a cash flow report. Every month I record in a spreadsheet the balances of all
my cash accounts (two checking and one savings account). I also record the sum
total of any deposits I make to investment accounts. I don't record the actual
value of the investment account because then there would be lots of
fluctuation due to the market. All this takes me like 5-10 minutes every
month. From these four numbers I can derive a very accurate picture of exactly
how much money I am saving every month, and when I subtract this from my
actual after-tax paycheck amounts, I know exactly how much I'm spending.

The information I get from this report tells me the only number that really
matters for early retirement: your savings rate, as a percentage of your take-
home pay. From this you can get a really good idea of how long it will be
before you can retire
([https://networthify.com/calculator/earlyretirement](https://networthify.com/calculator/earlyretirement)).

------
rollinDyno
Does anyone fully account for their physical assets and use depreciation
methods to follow their value accordingly? I took an accounting module very
recently and am about to implement personal balance sheets and income
statements for my personal aid. I'm trying to decide what's through enough and
not overdoing it.

------
AH4oFVbPT4f8
I use YNAB, the money I make this month will go towards expenses next month.
It more or less follows Dave Ramsey's philosophy of "give every dollar a job".
This allows us to know how much we have to spent in each category and to make
sure that we don't forget to save for insurance, hoa fees, etc.

------
NicoJuicy
I work fulltime + have a side business ( freelancing and actually the same as
my fulltime job)

I save all my extra money ( most of my expenses are in the weekend), have some
recurring income ( in the form of hosting + some subscriptions on ledenboek.be
) and now starting a ecommerce for additional funds in a niche market

------
bash-j
I've been using Budget Calendar www.mishell.ca for 6 years and I highly
recommend you try it. The calendar interface is intuitive and easy to
understand. The android version uses the same file format as the desktop
version so you can keep your file synced in dropbox, google drive, etc.

------
kome
> I am especially interested in hearing from people outside the US

I don't have a credit card. To be fair, nobody here has a credit card. I just
spend less than I get, and I try to save something every month. I put my
savings on a saving account.

That's all.

~~~
abustamam
I was surprised to hear recently that _most_ non-Americans don't have credit
cards. I'm totally against spending money you don't have, but I only use my CC
to build my credit rating (and to get those nice reward points :) ).

~~~
kome
Also "credit rating" is not a thing...

------
rstormsf
online banking :-) +bitcoin. It's not that hard, just make more than you
spend. Invest in stocks, crypto, real estate, ETFs, index funds. Don't forget
to join angelist if you are an accredited investor.

~~~
abustamam
I like this: "make more than you spend."

Most people say it the other way: "spend less than you earn."

But one gives an emphasis on earning more income (more income === more money
to save), the other simply limits how much you can spend.

I found that by focusing on _earning_ more, I had to worry less and less about
spending less.

~~~
DanBC
Many people find that their spending increases with earnings, and that even if
they're earning above average they don't have any savings or pension sorted
out.

~~~
abustamam
I agree with this too. Saving/"not-spending" is important, but I still think
that earning is more important.

A tip I once read that made sense to me:

\- Every raise you get (of predictable income), save 50% of it (so if I get a
$10k/yr pay increase, I should increase savings by $5k/yr).

\- Every bonus you get (unpredictable income), save 90% of it

My savings and lifestyle would increase together as I begin to earn more, and
all it takes is the discipline to follow those two rules.

------
webbdev
I have used EveryDollar (everydollar.com) for the past year and it really
helps me track spending. They have a plus version that only works with US
banks but I have used the free version for a while now.

------
a2tech
Poorly.

------
ehudla
Those of you who said they use a financial advisor -- where/how did you find a
reliable person/firm?

~~~
jkmcf
My financial advisor was a friend (he suffered an undiagnosed heart attack a
little over a year ago). I trusted him, with skepticism given his profession,
but I was never really sure if I was getting the best advice.

\- The advice for college financing in colorado is great assuming laws don't
change in the next 15 years. You can move money between one account and a
college account for a few days before cashing it out.

\- The rest of our money is scattered between a number of funds I've never
heard of.

I still think the best advice I've ignored is from my brother's FIL: put your
money in a vanguard fund and forget about it;

------
mathiasrw
Using the danish overlay banking service www.spiir.dk

