[Waterluvian]

There’s so many ways to do personal finances but I found most of them to either be too tedious or require doing stupid things like letting third parties log into your bank account.

For me I simply had a spreadsheet with rows for each month and columns for each account: chequing, mortgage, RRSP, RESP, etc. I’d spend 10 mins a month logging in and typing out each balance. I’d chart the over-time trend and that’s all I needed to detect any changes in habit or ugly trajectories. 90% of what signal I needed with 10% of the effort.

If you don’t need to micromanage all your flavours of spending or other details, consider keeping it dead simple.

[Arainach]

I agree that this works at the income level of most of the HN audience. If you're living paycheck to paycheck, you may have more need to closely track exactly what your money is going to (of course, you'll also likely have the least spare time to spend on such tracking). At the income level of most tech workers/the HN audience, however, I agree with your system. My spreadsheet is similar to what you describe - savings/checking accounts, investment accounts, and balance of all credit cards/mortgate/loans that give me a single number of "net worth". So long as its trending significantly positive, I don't care about the details.

[Waterluvian]

Yup. And at the per-theme level if I notice an anomaly I just check it. “Oh my chequing took a $1500 dip in its usual pattern… let’s skim the account… ah yea there it is, we bought that sectional for the patio.”

[lotsofpulp]

>So long as its trending significantly positive, I don't care about the details.

I find that once I normalize against the price movements of my goals, the significantly positive trend becomes much less significant. Since I am relatively young with likely a couple decades or more work left in me, I like to benchmark against a low cost broad market equity index ETF.

[berkut]

Yeah, I wrote my own open source app to do basic personal finance accounting 12 years ago after getting annoyed at the propriatary OS X solutions (iBank, in particular), and KMyMoney / GNUCash not supporting split transactions at the time (they do now), and have been using that for the past 12 years. It's not double-entry (I recognise the benefits of that, but don't like it), and it's a manual process, but it works for me, and I can graph stuff easily to provide some indication of where money is going.

I ported it to Qt for Linux last year and still use it, but to be honest, I don't really know why I track my finances that religously - although it has helped me a few times with accounting / tax purposes given I'm a contractor now.

I suspect one of the reasons there are so many different solutions is everyone wants to do things differently, and integration with the banks for automated transaction import/download is quite complicated.

[webmobdev]

Try GNU Cash - https://gnucash.org/