[j_lev]

Hi - thanks for sharing and congratulations - sounds like you've made things work.

> I spent Fridays working on a cool idea my brother and I had. That idea proved useful enough to pay the bills so I quit my job.

Regarding this, it sounds like you already had a good idea of what your expenses were, and I think people underestimate how important this is.

I recently quit my job and have jumped into the unknown. Firstly knowing where all my money was going, and secondly spending about 12 months trimming off all the fat was an important part of the process to give me the confidence to try this. These days I live in one of the most expensive cities in the world with my wife for about $2000/month (and over half of that is rent). We want for little. Several years ago this figure was closer to $4000/month.

[boothead]

Interesting. What did/do you use to ascertain where all your money goes?

[j_lev]

YNAB.

The developers are a bit accounting-nerdy, and it has lots of graphs/etc which I think would appeal to the HN crowd.

It's also very flexible. One example I can think of, my friend installed it on his wife's smartphone so she could record spending on groceries wherever she was. But my wife doesn't like this level of monitoring so I just give her a wad of cash each month and enter that as a general "cash for groceries" entry.

I've also seen people in the US say good things about Mint.com, which was not available to me here in Japan.

Normally this would be a good place to put my own 10%-off referral link. Instead I'm going to give a link to a forum thread where you can get 10% off AND someone else will then use your link:

http://forum.mrmoneymustache.com/reader-recommendations/43-d...