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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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
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!
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
As a note for people new to budgeting apps, YNAB has a toooonnn of tutorials and videos about how to create a budget and what the end-to-end workflow looks like in their apps.
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.
Hehehe hold on. Just try it and fins your own way to use it. You never know what you can find out. I can give you my experience, my only past experience was with Excel files to control my spending. It was pretty enough to be honest , at first when tried this app I was like ok why I need to do all this job of put every spending … Then after two month I realized that mechanical doing so made more aware of my day by day spending and my month budget became better. It’s just that, helps to be aware of what you are doing every months and it feels good filling it every 2 or 3 days. And also having all visualized and granular of were are doing it wrong or what can be adjusted is excellent .
I have a excel sheet on my laptop
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.
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.
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.
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.
Actual budget with simple fin for bank links. Currently hosted on pikapods, will move to self hosting on prem at some point.
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.
Actual has been working fine for me. Supports all the family’s banks and credit cards I import manually.
Firefly III
Amazing, really hit’s the spot of fully featured but a tool and not a new system you need to learn
Since most budgeting tools I found didn’t satisfy my need (no cloud, automatic categorization of transactions etc.) I tried to create my own tool to categorize my transactions using camt.053 and csv files which I downloaded from my banks. Got bugged down with the presentation via bokeh, so it was pretty crude.
I recently found beancount in combination with fava, which solved most of my problems I had with my own tool. And the good thing: I was able to re-use most of my ‘auto-categorization’ code with only small changes. Not sure how universal my importer is, but with a bit of python know-how it should be quite easy to create an importer for your specific bank export.
From my experience, the csvs I got from my bank was insufficient for automatic mapping, which is why I’m using camt.053 where possible. As the camt.053 is not very common in many countries you could go for OFX files.
I like Maybe Finance. Perhaps a bit basic but it does the trick for me. And the interface is quite nice too. No automation or bank imports though so it probably won’t fit your purposes perfectly.
I host my own Monero node
