
Show HN: BudgetDuo – Easily determine your share of household expenses - hursey013
https://budgetduo.com
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jsumrall
I’m curious about how many people use each method. The 50/50 split seemed like
the clear choice for me. Can anyone share their reasons for doing the
proportional split? My expenses are things where we both agree about it and
decide on our own about if we could individually budget it. Certain things
that are more “for” someone become proportional, but those are always one-off
purchases.

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mattsears
I make way more money than my partner and doing a 50/50 split would be really
hard for them to swing each month.

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true_religion
You could always just live to the standard of the least income, and save
money. It's what I do and has proved to be great since no matter whom is
working, the finances are covered.

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hursey013
I would love to do this, but in areas with a high cost of living it's not
always possible.

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mattsears
Simple, easy to use, and useful. Nice work. It would be very interesting to
see stats on how couples choose how their bills are divided.

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hursey013
Thanks, and I agree, being able to gather some high level insights would be
pretty interesting - perhaps something I can look into once the sample size is
large enough.

Just in some of the initial feedback I've received it's been surprising to
hear how passionate folks are about the different approaches - it is
definitely not a one-size-fits-all type of situation. Ultimately folks should
do what works best for them, my hope is the BudgetDuo will provide a bit of
insight to help make some decisions.

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jadbox
Simple idea, and yet useful for those that need a dashboard to manage the day
to day expenses that people generally not find the time to do otherwise.

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hursey013
Thanks for the kind words!

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mlthoughts2018
Wouldn’t a spreadsheet program be easier and would not require trusting a
third party with data about your income and your expenses?

Especially since you might want to revisit the same sheet over time to add or
remove people, add or remove expenses, or change the weighting, specifically
without needing to store that data with a third party or maintain a separate
sign-in credential to access a history of data.

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kohanz
You're thinking about this from the perspective of a developer, rather than
the population at large. Suggest building a spreadsheet to one of your non-
technical friends or family for something like this and you'll get a blank
stare.

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mlthoughts2018
My non-technical grandparents use Excel for tracking expenses. Yeah, they
couldn’t do complex formulas or macros, but that’s irrelevant.

Using basic spreadsheet software is at least as ubiquitous as owning a home PC
in the US. You can assume pretty much everyone can work their way through it,
maybe with some help.

Meanwhile, you could easily argue that filling in the same data in a web form
via a browser would be less intuitive for many people.

And regardless of which is easier, keeping the data private is clearly a
priority.

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kohanz
Yet despite all of those arguments, there are many budgeting or expense
tracking "apps" (of the non-spreadsheet variety) out there that are popular,
some of them massively.

Analogy: with a little time and some equipment, practically anyone could learn
to DIY their own oil changes, yet very few do.

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mlthoughts2018
I doubt the existence of apps has much relationship to whether people are
capable with a spreadsheet, and it also doesn’t control for whether a person
who finds spreadsheets difficult would also find an app or a web form
difficult. If someone is just trying to avoid tech generally, apps vs web
forms vs spreadsheets aren’t going to matter, and to anyone else, decades of
ubiquity of using spreadsheet software for badic things would favor
spreadsheets. Heck, even a lot of high schools teach basic personal finance
using Excel and have been since the 90s (my extremely poor rural public high
school was doing this in 1995 for example).

Also the top expense tracking app by number of users appears to be Mint (which
claims somewhere near only 20MM users), which involves a great deal of data
sharing and privacy questions. If we require a solution that keeps expense
data private, it would shift a lot of favor to spreadsheets.

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anotheryou
Why taking the numbers before taxes?

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hursey013
Mostly for simplicity. Most folks can quickly tell you their annual salary, it
would likely be more difficult to calculate their post-tax income. There is
also the possibility that individuals may prefer to withhold more or less
throughout the year depending on how they approach taxes, so that could
potentially skew the numbers.

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anotheryou
Ah alright. I pay nearly 50% taxes here in germany and it gets deducted from
my loan before I get it, so it's probably a bigger deal here then elsewhere.

comparison of income taxes:
[https://www.csmonitor.com/var/ezflow_site/storage/images/med...](https://www.csmonitor.com/var/ezflow_site/storage/images/media/images/chart-
income-tax-rates-how-the-us-stacks-up/7715608-1-eng-US/Chart-Income-tax-rates-
how-the-US-stacks-up_full_600.jpg)

