Ask HN: Managing Personal Finances with Git

[lildata]

I just thought that Git could make a lot of sense to manage personal finance. A little bit in the spirit of Ledger CLI https://www.ledger-cli.org/ I searched & it seems nobody have tried. What do you thing & what would be the best approach?

[quantumofalpha]

There's actually wealth of resources on this topic today, see https://plaintextaccounting.org/ for a starting point.

> it seems nobody have tried

Probably because it's too obvious of an idea? And you wouldn't just find people's repos on github with their ledger databases for another obvious reason.

[snickersnee11]

I always had a question for people who do such things. Is it really worth the time to configure such things and get into a habit of it?

It's like a ton of time to get into such framework, much easier to install some app on your phone. What's the point? (Sincere question)

[Jtsummers]

I found it worthwhile to develop a better understanding of where my money was coming from and going to. I also caught a few erroneous charges over the years because of the attention I was paying. It also helps with planning and budgeting. I spent maybe 40 hours total over a few years setting up my workflow, and then 20 minutes a week maintaining the ledger files. I accounted for transactions on my phone as they happened (if out of the house), and then at the end of each week went through each account to see which transactions had cleared or not.

I had a much more thorough understanding of how my investments were doing as I integrated them into the same ledger files and my total net worth. Which gave me confidence (at one point) to quit a job because I knew exactly how far I could go without income, even accounting for having to buy my own health insurance.

The time investment isn't really that great, and that 40 hours or so was mostly me nerding out with tmux + fswatch to create my own dashboard and a couple other automations that I built to pull down investment and currency data (I had money in a couple currencies for a while there, back down to one ignoring the handful of cryptocurrencies I've acquired over the years which I treat more as investments and not cash anyways). It took me about an hour to get started initially with one ledger file and just going through my accounts for that month (I started near the beginning so entered all transactions back to the 1st to have a complete picture of that month).

It actually became more important when I got married because my wife's attitudes on spending and saving are very different than my own. Seeing how things were going I was able to discuss it dispassionately with her, pointing out things like "You spent $x,xxx on clothing and housewares this month, my income is only $y,yyy and we still have to pay rent. We have savings to cover this, but we need to plan it." She's still a freer spirit with spending than I am, but it's toned down and I didn't come off as angry when I raised the issue, having something to show her (here's what we have, here's what we're spending, here's what we will have in 2 weeks and why we can't buy a house if this pattern continues.) helped a ton. And being able to see that she had only set back things by a month or two in our plans kept me from freaking out when I saw some of those numbers.

[lildata]

Building a system & owning it is indeed an investment but often you have much more chance to stick to it long term. Apps often come & go, transitioning from one to another can be very expensive. Also if you want to be in control of the security & privacy DIY is the way to go.

[Jtsummers]

Git + Ledger (or other plaintext accounting tools) actually works pretty well. I did that for several years, though the habit/routine broke for me last year. It let me keep the files in sync between my phone and my computer(s).

I'm not sure it's worth a writeup as anything special, git is (for programmers especially) a conventional way of keeping things synchronized between devices. I also used Dropbox for a time, but I specifically wanted versioning to help keep track of edits and reorgs of my files so I switched to git.