Personal Finance

I feel like I've tried just about everything - YNAB is still the best.

It's frustrating to have to pay for a third-party service to pull in European bank transactions, though. YNAB is expensive enough on its own.

I've been using YNAB (You Need A Budget) and simply love it. I like that it's zero based budgeting, imports transactions with my banks, and allows me to track every dollar coming in and assign it to its proper category. While not the most helpful, I also like the net worth tracker and reports while on desktop.

I wrote my own! https://budgetmyway.com

• Really wanted weekly "reserve" based budgeting. If I am under budget one week, that amount will get added to the reserve. And if I am over budget another week, that will take money away from the reserve. I also have the concept of "reserve expenses", not regular weekly expenses but usually bigger/unplanned that pull directly from the reserve.
• Privacy: no ads, tracking, etc
• No actual banking connections/APIs. Manually enter expenses.
• A project I can improve over time. Been using it for over 10 years now.

Tracking is just looking backwards on what you DID spend your money on, my friend.

Look forward and start planning what you WANT to spend it on. Budgeting is so different from tracking.

I am personally a huge fan of YNAB (You Need A Budget) and I just found there's a (sub-lemmy?) for YNAB as well, here: https://lemmy.world/c/ynab

I just use Excel, but I also don't track my spending at a very detailed level. I have a budget for the month, and I sort of adjust my spending as I go to make sure I meet that budget.

Google Sheets. I have tried moving to a budgeting app on iOS but I realized I use my credit card most of the time so everything I do is almost always tracked already.

I use YNAB throughout the month. At the end of the month I summarize my income and expenses in a spreadsheet so I can see how my spending trends over time.

I'm going to put in a third vote for YNAB.

I tend not to strict budget but just use a tracking app to see my spending at the end of the month/year and make decisions from there. PersonalCapital is my favorite for this as it's more high-level and does decent keeping track of net worth and investments. It's not as good as Mint at learning transaction types, and for my friends that really budget YNAB is the prefered, but PC works best for my needs

Big fun of Toshl https://toshl.com

I like Firefly III (https://www.firefly-iii.org/) as a self hosted option. There are various importer tools, although the developer's general feeling is that you should do it manually. I personally imported a few months of transactions to seed it but have been doing it manually since.

I use Money Manager EX. The GUI may not look appealing and looks like it's been made in the 90s. However, all data is completely local, it is closer to real double entry accounting than Mint and the likes, and the data is stored as SQLite, which is very useful for running scripts to get custom reports.

Been using Simplifi (by Quiken) for a few months now and it's not bad. Their web app is really good, and they just completely rewrote their mobile apps which work much better now.

I seem to have settled on Tiller.

As I read the title I had Tiller in mind. I've only ever tried YNAB and Mint (a long while ago) and Tiller is a good mix of automation but leaves me with control of the data as it's just in a spreadsheet that I own.

YNAB felt a little too restrictive. Maybe that works for those with issues regulating themselves with how they spend but Tiller felt right for me as I really just needed to track what I've spent so I could just keep that in mind as time progresses and I spend from day to day.

lunchmoney.app is really good

big fan of copilot (copilot.money)

Monarch Money can get very granular and you can make your own rules as to what box a line item goes into. https://www.monarchmoney.com/