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How do you keep track of expenses/budget?
I used to be happy paying $45/year for YNAB (grandfathered plan). But then "lol no, $90/year" happened and I started looking into alternatives. I tried out a bunch but none felt the same. Eventually I found Actual (open-source). I've been using it for ~6 months now and it offers everything I want/need. I self-host the container on my PC (no sync/etc.).
This isn’t an app solution, but it’s what works for me. I have my direct deposit from work split between two bank accounts.
The first bank account is for all of my fixed, regular, monthly bills. I added them all up, added a “savings” amount, and have that amount divided by two and deposited into that account every pay cycle. All of my monthly bills are set on auto-pay out of that account. I don’t use it for any food, gas, entertainment, etc. It’s just the regular monthly bills that I don’t have much control over. If I see the balance goes above a certain threshold, I move the excess into a brokerage account. I do occasionally look through the bank activity for any surprises- bill increases and so on. Most of my money goes here, but it’s relatively few transactions.
The second bank account is where my variable spending comes from. It’s the rest of my paycheck. This is what buys the groceries. Pays for entertainment. Pays for gas. If I want to buy clothes, a book, haircut, it needs to come from there. I check the balance basically daily. If I don’t have enough for whatever it is I want, I have to wait until next payday.
Segregating it like that is kind of like a simplified “envelope system.” It’s forcing me to live within the budget of whatever is in bank 2. I use two totally different banks and I’ve intentionally made it difficult to transfer between the two- reducers the tendency to just take from savings.
After years of trying YNAB and other programs, this is where I ended up as well, but slightly more complicated. My wife and I have 4 accounts:
It works well for us. Most of our daily spending is from the discretionary account, and we keep track of the balance. When it's low, we just...stop spending money on things until payday, if we can.
I really like this because we can actually stick with it, and it requires very little overhead in terms of maintenance.
I use an Excel spreadsheet for budgeting. I've been using it for years and years and years, and I've adapted it to my various needs whenever those needs have changed. For example, I've added graphs to track my actuals and show my forecast.
It doesn't cost me anything, it keeps my Excel skills exercised, and it suits me.
I was using Excel and have been for over 20 years. Recently I had to get a new computer and couldnt load my old copy so I switched to LibreOffice which an open source free version of MS Office. There are a few commands that are different but it does what I need it to do.
What I like about them is the flexibility and basic simplicity. I can still go back and open my file from 20 years ago and track how our finances have changed over time.
I also manually do my budgeting in a spreadsheet. I use google sheets.
I do a review of my income and expenses at the end of every month and input my expenses in manually. Can sound tedious for some, but I haven't had much issue with it. I do value the actual process of reviewing my own purchases and it only takes maybe less than 30min to go through all my accounts. I actually enjoy that time at the end of the month to see how I did with my expenses lol.
I only have to account for my personal expenses as an individual and am not a heavy spender in general so I suppose I don't have many transactions to input. I can see my whole year in one page, I have a column for each month and each row a spending category. And for each transaction I disregard date/store and only account for category and total, so eg. for groceries I just input each transaction within a cell = $23+$36+$31 to display a total.
EXPENSES
My spreadsheet's more well designed/complicated than this, colors, conditional formatting etc :) but this is the basic template.
I also have a table for income, and total savings/investments that I also input on the side. And then a couple graphs for fun maybe.
I have tried apps like Mint before, but I had issues with it categorizing certain expenses wrong and not connecting to my account properly so I just went with the most simple route, figured out my own system, and haven't looked back.
Mine's similar, but different. Given that dates are never-ending, but expense categories are limited, I prefer to put the dates in rows and the expenses in columns.
And, of course, there's a graph showing dates on the X-axis and funds remaining on the Y-axis.
(Remember, those numbers are budgets, not actuals. People in this thread are talking about importing bank transactions to track their budgets, but those are actuals, not budgets.)
I also track my actual funds remaining, to see how far off target I am.
Yes, I might have studied accounting/finance in one of my previous careers... ;)
Are you manually inputting transactions into Excel? Using Tiller?
I could probably do something like this, but figuring out how to manage getting the raw data in efficiently seems like the biggest hurdle.
Not the guy you replied to, but I also used spreadsheets for years. My bank website displays transaction history in a table format, so it's just highlight, copy, paste. I didn't want all that information, so I just deleted some of the columns. I'm just realizing now that I probably could have had some hidden columns, and pasted directly into those, and I'd never have to do anything extra there.
I also wanted to do some analysis later, so I came up with a broad set of categories that suited my needs (e.g. food/groceries, food/eating out, car/gas, car/maintenance, paycheque, etc.) and manually filled out that information row by row. I did this (roughly) at the end of every month, but there's no reason I could do it every week or daily if I wanted to. It took about 15 minutes to do this - sometimes longer if I couldn't figure out what a specific charge was for.
Aside from that process, I had some other spreadsheets that pulled data from my "master" list of transactions and aggregated it month by month and year by year, both as a total and for each of the categories I set up. This took some tweaking to get right, but I was happy with the end result.
No, I don't manually input transactions into Excel. That would be a grossly inefficient use of my time! :)
Like I said, I use my spreadsheet for budgeting, not for tracking my actual spending. It's for checking whether my income is enough to cover my planned expenses. It's not for tracking what I actually spent money on.
At the end of every pay cycle, I tot up how much money I have left, and compare that to my budget, and see whether I'm tracking to my budget or not.
I suppose I could import my transactions into Excel if I wanted to... using the "download" feature on my bank's website. That downloads banking transactions as a .csv file, which I could import into Excel. If I wanted to.
I don't. I pay the bills, basically buy whatever I want, and try to live life with an abundance mentality. But I also don't have a ton of physical desires. I like clothing, and curating my wardrobe with high-quality items. And I like computer stuff, but in a very low-profile, small form factor kind of way. While there are still a few more pieces of clothing I'd like, I'm pretty much content in my possessions right now. I like downsizing stuff I don't want or need anymore.
If I feel like I would like more money to live my life, which I currently do, I focus on earning more money, rather than tracking my money. The reality is, I could die today or tomorrow, or at any moment. I know too many young dead people. So I just don't worry. There's abundance in the world and I know I'm fortunate to feel that and I am grateful for it. I'm just trying to be happy and have a good time, like most everyone else.
That's an interesting mindset. I wonder if it's cultural. What part of the world are you in/from? I'm in the US and I think about long-term instead of the "present". Can't tell if this is learned behavior or something inherent.
I'm in the US. I grew up working class. My parents worked hard, had struggles, but took good care of my sibling and I, making sure we both focused on education. Personally, I think I've done a lot of inner work on appreciating the present. Maybe to a fault. But I just don't see the future as a given. I think the best investment you can make in the future is your health--which I've actually faltered on lately, to be honest. So I should probably do better there. I also believe that everything will fall into place as long as I focus on and appreciate present me. That's not an invitation to hedonism, though a little hedonism is okay. It's more about realizing that this moment is all I've got, so it's worthwhile to be happy in it.
I feel a similar way. I have tried fancy systems and have lusted after the degree of organization people achieve, but I cannot abide the tedium. Planning and tracking makes sense in some cases, but like you I think I just try to make more money or spend less if I need more. I don't invest and probably never will. We have a mortgage, but that is not a moving target. We save up for things and cut back when we overdo it. I think after all my attempts I decided I don't get much out of seeing exactly where all my money is and has gone. I don't have enough time for all the things I want and need to do as it is already! :b
I'm looking for a YNAB alternative myself and hadn't heard of Actual yet, so thanks for sharing. Another good alternative that I've found that's very similar to YNAB is Buckets. But it's just a hobby project from a single guy and sadly not Open Source. Therefore, there's no feature parity with YNAB yet and I'm missing a couple of features :/ And progress is very slow. He's very transparent and has a survey each year where you can tell him what's important so he can prioritize the features. But progress is still rather slow :/
+1 for YNAB. I was in a rut of ~10k of credit card debt for a few years. I would spend money on my credit card, then pay too much on it, meaning I would have to use it again later in the month for essentials.
YNAB helped me realize I didn't have an overall view of where my money was going. Paycheck came in, spent it in a few days, then hurting until the next one rolled through. I started YNAB mid May and was able to pay off all my CC debt this month. I absolutely love it so much, well worth the money, I would be lost without it today,
YNAB left a very bad taste after pricing changes. But I can't imagine not tracking expenses / budgeting any other way. So I'll give them props for teaching me how to manage money.
Yep, YNAB teaching you how to budget and actually enforcing it via the software is 70% of its value. Really great tool and I've recommended it endless times to budget beginners. I was still using YNAB4 and was slowly but surely getting scared of bugs appearing, sync not working etc., so I wanted to phase it out but wasn't happy with any alternative I've tried.
I just tried out actual, hosted it and set up my budget. Really awesome tool. I can totally see myself using it. Glad you recommended it and I found it. Finally my search has ended haha
Happy to have been of help! I also was using YNAB4 but wanted something more modern + supported without breaking the bank.
This probably doesn't work if you're on a tight budget, but I have a reverse strategy for budgeting. I don't budget my expenses, I budget my savings.
Every month, when I get my salary, I transfer out the part which I want to save/invest to a different account immediately. I'm then left with only the amount I can spend. Since I don't have more money, I can't overspend.
This approach does require a bit of discipline, especially if you use credit card for all your spends. You need to ensure that your credit card bill doesn't exceed the amount in your bank account.
This is the best way I've found. I arrange my bill payments and savings transfers to happen within a day or two of my pay coming in, so I'm not guessing how much I'm gaining/losing each month.
I set my savings such that I have enough in my current account for normal groceries +£100 disposable income, which I'll probably spend on new hiking boots this month because I've worn through the rubber and wearing down the foam on my current ones.
I don't track my expenses to the cent. What I do is when I get paid, I follow these steps:
After that, I consider my money being "free". I can do whatever I want with it, and some months will result in more savings, some in less. For example, I have a large monthly expense for the next three months, so I'll probably spend less money going out and waiting until that clears before moving money into savings.
That's my approach as well, though I am admittedly privileged with a STEM job that more or less pays for transport and food expenses. Maxing out the contributions so I only interact with the post-retirement funds is a major help in curbing unwanted spending.
https://www.gnucash.org/ is one OP may consider that is free software in both terms that could help them with expense counting.
I use Monarch. Some of the developers behind Mint before Inuit bought it out started it a few years ago. It's $90/year but I like the way it works.
Actual looks pretty good, Monarch just renewed last month but next year might have to look into switching. Do think having an automated bank import is pretty necessary for me.
Monarch looks pretty good to me. Why are you thinking of switching?
Free vs not free. Mostly curious about the self hosted option, not sure if I'd switch or not.
Open Source / free can be great but there's a lot to be said about a paid for product with accountability / someone to ask for help instead of hoping to get an answer on a forum. Personally I think the $90/yr is probably worth it for me but doesn't hurt to try out the competition.
I was in a similar boat with YNAB. I was willing to pay $90/year, but the way they came about made me not want to support them. It doesn't hurt to look at alternatives either. A competitor might offer something you haven't thought about before.
Like a lot here, I tend to reverse budget. After knowing my rough cash flow and fixed expenses, I can usually eyeball a purchase and see if it's within my "disposable band" or if I need to crunch hard numbers.
I'm using YNAB and Co-pilot, which I like for auto import for over 30 accounts and to see the breakdown EOY. I suppose Excel could be done as well, it's just not something I've made time for.
So you pay for both ynab and copilot ? Are they complementary? What does copilot add that ynab doesn’t have?
I've adopted the YNAB approach using hledger, as explained in this. Never used YNAB before, though, just found this envelope budgeting the easiest way to track my moneyflow and maintaining a budget to actually save something at the end of the month. Plus adding entries using the terminal is just so easy and pratical.
I guess it takes time to get used to data-entry via terminal, but I'm too lazy and want a button haha. YNAB introduced me to this type of budgeting and I can't imagine using any other method. It's just very easy to visualize your spending and answers the question of "how much do I have to spend on things".
Hi, I am not very tech savvy but I’m also not able to afford YNAB, so the fact that Actual is free is very appealing to me, but I’m a little lost on how to actually set it up. And I don’t mean setting up my bank info I mean like how do I start using Actual? I don’t know what GitHub or repos or self-hosting or any of that actually means, so anyone that can give me the How To Install Actual For Complete and Utter Morons and Luddites I would greatly appreciate it.
Unfortunately getting Actual running isn't user-friendly at this point. I read somewhere they're working on that, but I don't expect that to be ready any time soon.
You have several options to install Actual on your computer. But I'm biased and opinionated, so feel free to use your own judgement.
I used Docker (Podman) to run Actual. You still have to install a tool before running Actual, but I feel this is a more "self-contained" option instead of installing NPM+Yarn while allowing easier updates to new versions. Also, I'll try to keep terminology to a minimum. I'm assuming you're using Windows:
podmancommands from the Windows Command Prompt. Run this command:podman run --pull=always --restart=unless-stopped -d -p 5006:5006 --name actual_budget -v C:\Users\youruserhere\Documents\actual_budget:/data ghcr.io/actualbudget/actual-server:latestyouruserherewith your user (it's a folder)-vpart. Without going into too much detail, we're telling Actual to save data to this location. It's very important, otherwise the data will be saved on the "container" (think Actual server), but these containers are meant to be transitory (temporary). Running new versions/etc. means a new container is started and the old one discarded.http://localhost:5006/a. Open Podman Desktop, click Containers, you should see
actual_budgethere, click the "Play" (start container) option.b. Run
podman start actual_budgetthe Windows Command Prompt.I use GNUCash and I feel like it's made a huge difference for me. It's a lot more work but it's made me a lot more in-tune with my finances and I'm able to create the reports I want through Excel. Highly recommend if you're willing to put an hour or so of work a week into it.
I've been using My Budget Book for about 10 years now. It's nothing fancy but gets the job done for me. I don't trust apps where I need to link my financial accounts and excel is too raw of a format for me, so this app is a good middle ground.
I use an app called Bluecoins which is available on the play store. Fits my needs. The initial setup does take a while and there is a small learning curve but after that it's great.
Winging it until the week before the morgtage is due, collecting myself, become fiscally smart, paying it and bills, then repeat.
MoneyWiz
I use an app called 1Money, I bought the lifetime version. I really like the interface, it's similar to a weight lifting app where you just set up a bunch of circles you can then tap to quickly enter data. Example. As you enter expenses the large ring chart fills up with the color of each expense so you can quickly see the percentage of your spending that each one takes up. There are day, week, month, year, and range views.
You start by setting up all your accounts, income sources, and expense types, and you get the main screen where you can quickly enter daily expenses that pull from one of the selected accounts. It then kinda does all the math for you in the background.
If you enter a recurring salary income it can project savings for the whole year. You can also set up a budget with recurring expenses and savings for how much you want to save that come out automatically, and it will tell you how much you have remaining for spending.
You can also export your data to csv, although I haven't used that feature.
I stumbled into some pretty neat phone only apps, but I prefer desktop because I enter payments manually (preference) and it's just easier/faster for that sort of thing.
I'm a very visual person, so I really like how the interface looks. With those graphs you might even spot "behaviors" that you haven't noticed. The budgeting app I use doesn't have much (anything really) in terms of reports/graphs (yet).
I use a pretty old version of YNAB4. I hate my expenses auto-syncing so this was a perfect solution for me. There's even still a phone app that still works (although I believe it's maybe one that was patched by someone in /r/YNAB) with Dropbox Sync.
I was using YNAB4 before spending $45/year on nYNAB, then they raised their prices. I moved back to YNAB4, until settling on Actual. YNAB4 is definitely showing it's age and no idea how long it'll work with "modern" systems.
Yeah I'm dreading the day it no longer works, but I've got 5 years worth of budget sitting in this thing.
edit: I've just noticed it looks like Actual might support importing from just YNAB4 so I may have to check it out...
I let my wife handle it otherwise it's an argument. I just show up to work, go home, and there is no eviction notice and food on the table then we are good to go!