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.
Firefly III
Amazing, really hit’s the spot of fully featured but a tool and not a new system you need to learn
I have a excel sheet on my laptop
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.
This won’t help you, but I want to brag. I started using Quicken to track my finances at the turn of the century, back when it was all local storage. Quicken 2012 was the last iteration that used http (not https) to update stock prices. When they discontinued support, I captured the interaction and deciphered the formats. Wrote a proxy to intercept the request, look up the security info, and send back the data.
So, I self-host quicken.com. It’s saved me having to update Quicken or submit to their subscription model.
That’s really cool! How did you do that?
Super easy, as it turns out. I run my own DNS and web servers, so I pointed quicken.com at my web server to capture the request, then used curl to capture the response. Both turned out to be plain ASCII, request like
stk.1=SMCI;.2=NVDA;.3=INTC;
as POST data, and responses like
qwin.quotes.ASTM.symbol 4 ASTM
.last 7 18.7400
.time 10 1573074000
.time.str 5 16:00
.change 6 0.4000plus a whole slew of other optional fields for fundamentals, dividends, etc. It was a simpler time on the internet, when no one cared about leaking data and companies didn’t care if a handful of geeks reversed engineered their data structures.
He mentioned it used http, so the traffic is not encrypted. You can easily monitor http traffic with wireshark.
easily
It is pretty easy. There’s tons of tutorials and walkthroughs for doing it, but anyone familiar with UIs will be able to work it out pretty quickly I think. Maybe a friction point in using the filter query, but again there’s tons of walkthroughs and guides for using it online.
If you can’t conceptualize a packet, or sockets, or network flows, even with the help of online guides/manuals, I guess it wouldn’t be easy. In that case I’d be wondering why someone would want to use those tools in the first place though, as then they probably wouldn’t have the skills necessary to leverage the information gleaned from the tool in any useful way.
Edit - As we’re in the self-hosted community, I’d argue that anyone who is self-hosting anything would probably be able to easily install wireshark and view http requests, both individual packets and the stream as a whole.
Thank you
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.
Actual Budget all the way
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
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.
GnuCash running locally on my PC. Had worked for me for about 25 years.
Moneydance https://moneydance.com/
Started using it close to twenty years ago and keep using it because it seems fine.
I’ve never seen this recommended before and I’ve looked for years for self hosted alternatives to YNAB.
It’s so old it’s not called self-hosted.
Damn. You’ve given me a vision of a future where people call applications that are installed locally and don’t leverage any cloud/server backend for any functionality “self-hosted” programs and I hate it.
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).
I have Firefly III and am really quiet happy with it. I might write a companion program to scan bill though, since doing everything by hand is rather time consuming.
I just drooled a little at the thought of integration with Paperless.
I didn’t read the whole article, just a cursory glance really, but it seems like that is the exact other way around that I would want it.
I’m thinking of scanning a paper bill with my phone, extracting the text and matching parts of the text to firefly fields, like transaction description, source account, destination account, amount and maybe categories/tags.
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’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.
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.
My bank does this for me, but I do like self hosting things. Where’s the benefit in this apart from a fun project?
If you only have one Bank (Account) it is maybe fine.
But if you have multiple accounts (I have 4 Bank accounts for savings and another one for my shares), you would like to have one software/application to handle it. Like the one email client for your different email accounts.
Ah that makes sense. Right now I have one account, but it has multiple cards and pools of money under it (for lack of a better word).
So for me this is still easily managed, even with four bank accounts and about nine sub-pools under them collectively.
I guess I just got very lucky with the bank I’ve kinda stuck with just because it’s what my mom got me over a decade ago.
Yup, I have a ridiculous amount (like 8? bank accounts and 15? credit cards), so having something that automatically pulls in transactions is nice.
That said, my main “bank” is a Fidelity brokerage, so I don’t really need those other bank accounts to sync since they mostly exist for temporary transactions, such as Zelle and cash transactions (Fidelity doesn’t support those) and transfers for bank account bonuses (I net a >$2k/year on that). And for credit cards, I mostly use 1-2 credit cards these days, the rest are mostly for signup bonuses.
So for me, the $1.50/month is totally worth it to keep track of all that nonsense. If I only had 3-4 accounts, I’d probably use something like GNUCash instead, but I have >20, and I will for the foreseeable future.
Why so many accounts and especially credit cards?
I mentioned it, but mostly signups bonuses.
For example, here are a few checking accounts I did recently:
- US Bank - $450
- Citi - $325
- Wells Fargo - $325
I’ve closed Citi, but I’m keeping the others open for a bit before closing (branches are convenient for depositing checks around the holidays).
Likewise for credit cards, here are some I’ve done recently:
- Bank of America Premium Rewards - ~$500 net after the annual fee - this is straight cash
- US Bank Altitude Reserve - ~$650 net after annual fee; a little more complicated because i need to redeem for travel
- Wells Fargo Active Cash - $200 straight cash
I actually use 2 banks (Fidelity brokerage for main, and US Bank for cash and zelle) and usually two credit cards (US Bank Altitude Reserve and some 2% card; was my Costco card and Citi double cash before I got the US Bank card). However, I have some category bonus cards I rotate in every so often, such as my Discover card, which is 5% at Amazon and Target through the end of the year.
Anyway, since I have so many accounts, I need something to keep track of them so I don’t pay maintenance fees or miss a payment or something.
It sounds complicated, but I’ve automated pretty much everything, so I just check in every couple months or so. And I think it’s worth the hassle because I make thousands every year on it.
Indeed. My bank surely does this better than I could ever do. But if it’s “for fun”, then it’s fine.
Yez, I will be trying it out for fun. It just looks cool.
