Inspired by a comment on my last post.
I feel like I never have a solution that allows me to control it while also being automated to such a degree that I don’t have a huge confusing backup if I don’t do finances for days or weeks.
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Actual Budget all the way
I switched over to Actual last month, and am not looking back. I will miss the native android app, but it is an otherwise direct replacement. I was using YNAB4, and had forever.
Is there some tutorial you’d recommend to get started? I didn’t find the docs or demo helpful and a lot of videos seem to be focused on background or setup. I can install the app fine, but like how does one actually use this?
I’ve never used budgeting apps. I’d like to learn more about them and why they’re useful. My current budgeting is: positive balance=good; negative balance=bad
They have an excelent documentation for new starters. https://actualbudget.org/docs/getting-started/roadmap-for-new-users
That link kinda showcases exactly my point… It’s pretty useless to me. I know how to install the app. I don’t know what the daily workflow looks like.
Compare that to the tutorials YNAB has on YouTube. Those talk more about how to use the app to budget.
Anyway, it’s fine. I understand I’m not the target audience for Actual. It seems like it’s for people who already have prior experience with finance apps.
I have a excel sheet on my laptop
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I just drooled a little at the thought of integration with Paperless.
Is there a mobile app that syncs with self hosted?
Gnucash books split for personal, joint, and business with a mysql backend. I wrote a read-only web frontend for wife and OTG access. Sadly no automation so I just stay on top of it.
I use ledger. I have not automated so much outside of autocomplete macros in my text editor, but it doesnt’t take too much time and forces me to look over my spend, so I like it. I will eventually attempt to build some kind of Dash-application for visualisation of the output, but have only started on the parsers so far.
Ledger is awesome.
I use GnuCash. I typically update every couple weeks up to a month. Beyond that it can be hard to remember what specific transactions were.
It’s double ledger and I really like that it forces strict accounting. That sounds cumbersome but once you’re set up (it may take some trial and error), for me my workflow is essentially:
- Copy prior paycheck splits & update them to reflect new paychecks.
- export QFX files from credit cards
- import QFX, check / set transaction accounts
- any small manual updates (interest payments in accounts, etc)
It’s not automated but my data always remains local, and I can use the Linux or android application. I don’t bother daily tracking on my phone, else it might be cumbersome. I’ve never used any of the budget features, just tracking where my money comes and goes.
Weird question, but what does GnuCash do that you wouldn’t get easily from excel? I haven’t used any of these apps and wondering what I’m missing out on.
Under the hood its mostly tables and reports, so ultimately not much, if you were dedicated enough to using Excel to rebuild GnuCash’s views. It’s more streamlined than excel would be because you won’t have to worry about implementation, overhead of adding a new account, etc. Some things like auto-recommending accounts during import (and import itself) could be arduous in excel if not supported natively. Split transactions could be a headache (think your paycheck, which might be split into 401k contributions, several taxes, money into your bank, etc).
But fully recreating it in excel when it already exists would be a headache. More than likely you will have a more limited view in Excel if you’re just creating a handful of tables to represent all of your many accounts.
I don’t understand why isn’t crypto banned yet.
Its a dumb drain on world resources and only facilitates of untraceable payments for drug sales and tax avoidance.
What makes you say this
I’m old enough to know that governments should care about taxes and payment traceability.
This is what funds the social programs such as healthcare and education.And if government doesn’t give a fuck - there is only one explanation, it’s beholden to the corporate overloads that want to capitalize on the crypto action - which is not in my best interests as a private citizen.
Also - all it does it raises energy prices for me and makes GPUs more expensive for me.
Why should I support that?
Fuck crypto and fuck the government that’s doesn’t do anything about it.
I’m old enough to know that governments should care about taxes and payment traceability.
And cryptocurrencies (esp. the bigger ones) are perhaps the most traceable store of value and is highly regulated. At least in the US, cryptocurrencies are regulated like stocks, so any transaction needs to be properly reported as either a capital gain or loss or you’ll run afoul of the IRS.
Also - all it does it raises energy prices for me and makes GPUs more expensive for me.
It really doesn’t. Crypto mining is only profitable if energy prices are very low, especially if you do it at any kind of scale. Crypto mining in the US is estimated at 0.6-2.3% of total energy use, which is a drop in the bucket.
And mining on GPUs isn’t very profitable, with profitability timelines at ~3 years assuming a very low energy cost of $0.10/kWh. So it’s not really a good option. The big miners have pretty much all moved to ASICs, which won’t impact your GPU prices at all, so the only ones buying GPUs for mining are hobbyists, which are a pretty small market.
Why should I support that?
There are a lot of good reasons to support cryptocurrencies, such as:
- low cost international transactions - sending to my neighbor and sending across the world costs exactly the same
- essential for people like journalists and minorities in repressive areas - this is also why you should support Tor
- many parts of the world don’t have stable money, and crypto is easier to access and store than foreign currencies (like USD or Euro)
- not impacted by inflation, so theoretically they can be a cash alternative to other inflation hedges like gold; fluctuation is a bit of a problem ATM though
- sidesteps the massive payment networks like Mastercard and Visa, who charge something like 3% of every transaction; many cryptocurrencies have lower transaction costs
I think there are a lot of good reasons to support cryptocurrencies for everyday transactions, I don’t see much point in supporting it as an investment option. So if a vendor supports transactions in cryptocurrencies, I’ll go out of my way to pay w/ crypto, but I’m not interested in trading cryptocurrencies as an investment.
I mean why did you bring it up? I didn’t.
Because the rich people of the world are at the top of that pump and dump pyramid and stand to extract a lot of money from the suckers of the world.
Crypto cannot be banned. It can only be made illegal, if countries want to remove themselves from the digital currency revolution. The derivatives market is $730T. Stocks are about $110T. Real estate is around $380T. If you’re concerned about the minuscule amount of illegal activities that occur within the 3.5T crypto market, your fears are misguided. Crypto is mostly traceable. Fiat currencies are highly preferred for drug sales and tax avoidance.
Make it illegal, drive it underground where it belongs.
I’m concerned about traceability and tax avoidance. I’m concerned about energy consumption I’m concerned about gpu prices
It’s the only way to get to Capitalism 2.0.
Not selfhost but I use Hibiscus https://www.willuhn.de/products/hibiscus/
I’m saying this as someone who used Mint for years due to how it integrated with banks so easily.
I’m currently using Money Manager EX, which is open source. I “self-host” the database file on my NAS, and simply open the file through MM EX’ Windows program.
Since it’s just a simple database (encrypted, of course), it’s easy to back up.
Now, I lost the ability to automatically sync with my bank. This was a blessing in disguise, since it forced me to go over each transaction carefully.
Granted, Mint had me doing the same, but because I spent a lot of time removing duplicates and fixing errors in their sync system. LOL
MM Ex has been very easy to use, and I don’t see a need to self-host the software itself.
GnuCash running locally on my PC. Had worked for me for about 25 years.
Same here but now struggling to keep on top of it. I wish there was a mobile solution that would just nicely integrate with selfhosted
Actual Budget, because it supports SimpleFIN to import my transactions.
It’s still not “automated,” but I have a lot of rules now so it’s getting there.
I’m not super happy w/ how it works, but I’m too lazy to do anything about it. Maybe I’ll end up adding SimpleFIN to something else, idk.
I use Actual. How it works is very similar to YNAB (you budget the money you currently have) but it’s open source and privacy focused. I started using it a few months ago and I really like it so far!
I love Actual. So, so good. I cancelled YNAB in favor and can’t ever think of going back. Aside from not having to pay $100 a year you’re also not supporting the Mormon Church (YNAB is a Mormon-run company).
Do you just use a limit set of YNAB features? It seems like Actual only has a tiny fraction of the features YNAB has. For example, it’s currently missing category targets.
Actual budget with simple fin for bank links. Currently hosted on pikapods, will move to self hosting on prem at some point.
I use hledger mostly because of the plain text format. I came from YNAB as well but I just hated how you couldn’t easily undo changes or see when you made a change, etc. This is so easily to track changes and you can add comments explaining your reasoning around things and you can keep everything in source control so you have all the power of that as well. Not for everyone but if you’re a programmer or just comfortable on the command line it’s great.
