I’ve been trying to get my finances in order for a while. I’ve been looking up different software to help me budget, but I can’t find privacy respecting software besides Firefly III, which is self hosted. I usually try to find a few options then evaluate from there, but was wondering if you guys had any recommendations to throw in the mix!
I’ve seen a bunch of these kinda apps on F-Droid, etc.
But I can only remember this one called Minus
I actually have a whole chart for this! To be fair, it’s based on how similar things are to YNAB (you need a budget). Theres a fair amount of single Dev vibe coded bull shit in there so check the section that has the year it was founded and how many Devs it has to verify if you’re concerned about that.
I personally use Actual Budget, open source software, free if you self host and don’t want automatic import.
Do you currently have a budget?
What is your process?
Not to detract from the recommendations and finding what works for you, I do recommend starting with a simple spreadsheet first. You don’t have to stick with it, but it’s a good start.
Benefits are you get use to logging your transactions, and you can do this manually or by CSV import. Not only can it do the math for you, but you can use multiple formulas to summarize various things.
For instance I enter all my recurring bills into the sheet per month, and it calculates my money both on what has posted (how much do I have today) and end of month (how much is left at the end).
I also categorize the transactions then table it. How much have I spent on groceries vs dining out? What percentage of my income is that? That’s where you really start seeing where your money is going and you can start making educated decisions on where you spend.
As long as you are fine with self hosted, another option is Actual.
Seconding Actual. I’ve been self-hosting it for a while. You can also just use it as a standalone application on Windows and Linux. I update every week or so manually(you can also set up bank autosync or upload files exported from your bank), then I export a copy and back that up on an external HDD and upload to Filen.
Thirding Actual, I will admit I was using Mint for way longer than I should have for convenience, and moved to Actual after Mint shut down. If you only have a few accounts, it’s not that terrible to download transactions as QFX files and import them once a month when paying the bills. I haven’t tried SimpleFin or anything automated, but that would get you even closer to the experience of Mint.
Fourthing Actual. I download OFX files from my credit card and bank and import them and it’s all pretty easy. Never tried paying for the banksync option.
Fifthing Actual - I’ve been using it for a year now. I started with manual imports and then slowly added accounts to SimpleFin for syncing. Now all of my accounts are syncing with SimpleFin and it works great.
Another vote for Actual.
Mint was amazing, and that’s probably why it died. Credit Karma gives you basically no useful tools for getting a handle on things. And then they advertise services that are like “hey are you bad at your money? give us some of it and we’ll help you!”
Regarding Mint, If I’m remembering correctly, it seemed like they were doing a redesign of the site and then decided to shut it down. I’d have to imagine after they got purchased, all the original devs left and maintaining each connection with each bank was a huge hassle. They probably spent so much modernizing the site and still had to maintain connections, that the operational costs outweighed the income from advertising.
No disrespect, you honestly first need to understand the theory of budgeting and then you can practice.
Trying to find a program to assist you is really just something to distract you.
All you need is a free excel type program.
The physical action of looking at your bank statements and transcribing that data into your excel budget by hand enforces spending discipline and spending awareness.
Once you have everything in order and you are able to prove to yourself that you are financially stable, then integrating program assistance makes sense.
I use hledger (strict mode) + ledger-mode (Doom Emacs) + Simplefin Bridge for personal accounting. It supports budgeting features as well, and you don’t need to self-host anything since you just commit everything to a Git repo. Also hledger’s documentation is very thorough.
i want to stsrt with firefly and paperless and some kind of automation for my invoices and bills from the supermarket… after paperless v3 came out maybe i start looking into it.
some related communities I came across:
I just posted the chart from the YNAB alts 🤣
This reminds me I need to have another look at Ledger, Beancount, et al. More info at https://plaintextaccounting.org
Haven’t tried myself but you could glance at,
You could use that… Having used it I would not recommend it though. I used to use it for contracting. It was fun learning double entry accounting but there are much better platforms and approaches for personal finance and budgeting these days.
A notepad
Why does something like that have to be network connected? If you need software at all, I thought that was what spreadsheets were for. Otherwise the basic idea is to be frugal with expenditures and have some mental awareness and preparation for any big upcoming ones. Of course the hope is that if you’re slightly careful, you can keep your expenses lower than your income. That’s become harder in recent years.
If you’re dealing all in cash this makes sense, but for those with multiple bank accounts, keeping track of everything without software is burdensome. I can’t imagine copy/pasting each transaction from my banks website into a spreadsheet. Computers are better at math than humans, they should be doing the calculations, not me.
Hmm, you mean the budgeting software somehow connects to the bank to get the transactions? That’s interesting and I didn’t know they did that.
In principle I like the idea of a bank with an API (mercury.co has one), but as I explained to my bank’s rep who was encouraging me to install an app, I’m a programmer and nobody distrusts computers more than programmers.
All banks I’ve done business supported exporting CSV or OVX files of transactions so you don’t need a third party connection into your bank account, although that is an option. It depends on region, but banks are only required to retain data for certain periods of time, and keeping a history of each transaction can be useful for budgeting or investing.
Ok, so you want to be able to import CSV’s to the budget program. I thought spreadsheets can do that though. Maybe it gets too complicated.
Spreadsheets can do that and you can set them up to automate a lot of the work. You need to be very good with your software though - it’s too complex for the majority of users.
You also risk that someone is either discouraged / overwhelmed and gives up, or spends all their time learning to automate data manipulation instead of budgeting, or that they make an error and don’t realise.
Automating that data manipulation is very valuable and the main benefit I find to budgeting software.
That said, I’ve set up my budgeting in excel because I do know what I’m doing and I haven’t found software that is flexible enough for my needs yet 🤣
