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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Actual has been working fine for me. Supports all the family’s banks and credit cards I import manually.
My bank does this for me, but I do like self hosting things. Where’s the benefit in this apart from a fun project?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
He mentioned it used http, so the traffic is not encrypted. You can easily monitor http traffic with wireshark.
easily
It is pretty easy. There’s tons of tutorials and walkthroughs for doing it, but anyone familiar with UIs will be able to work it out pretty quickly I think. Maybe a friction point in using the filter query, but again there’s tons of walkthroughs and guides for using it online.
If you can’t conceptualize a packet, or sockets, or network flows, even with the help of online guides/manuals, I guess it wouldn’t be easy. In that case I’d be wondering why someone would want to use those tools in the first place though, as then they probably wouldn’t have the skills necessary to leverage the information gleaned from the tool in any useful way.
Edit - As we’re in the self-hosted community, I’d argue that anyone who is self-hosting anything would probably be able to easily install wireshark and view http requests, both individual packets and the stream as a whole.
Thank you
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.
Not selfhost but I use Hibiscus https://www.willuhn.de/products/hibiscus/
GnuCash running locally on my PC. Had worked for me for about 25 years.
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 .
Firefly III
Amazing, really hit’s the spot of fully featured but a tool and not a new system you need to learn
We do excel roughly but invest our surplus.
I have a bunch of we scrapers that check for items on sale and for certain ones trigger purchase and others send me an alert.
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.
Damn. You’ve given me a vision of a future where people call applications that are installed locally and don’t leverage any cloud/server backend for any functionality “self-hosted” programs and I hate it.
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.
Actual budget with simple fin for bank links. Currently hosted on pikapods, will move to self hosting on prem at some point.
I use GnuCash. I typically update every couple weeks up to a month. Beyond that it can be hard to remember what specific transactions were.
It’s double ledger and I really like that it forces strict accounting. That sounds cumbersome but once you’re set up (it may take some trial and error), for me my workflow is essentially:
- Copy prior paycheck splits & update them to reflect new paychecks.
- export QFX files from credit cards
- import QFX, check / set transaction accounts
- any small manual updates (interest payments in accounts, etc)
It’s not automated but my data always remains local, and I can use the Linux or android application. I don’t bother daily tracking on my phone, else it might be cumbersome. I’ve never used any of the budget features, just tracking where my money comes and goes.
Weird question, but what does GnuCash do that you wouldn’t get easily from excel? I haven’t used any of these apps and wondering what I’m missing out on.
Under the hood its mostly tables and reports, so ultimately not much, if you were dedicated enough to using Excel to rebuild GnuCash’s views. It’s more streamlined than excel would be because you won’t have to worry about implementation, overhead of adding a new account, etc. Some things like auto-recommending accounts during import (and import itself) could be arduous in excel if not supported natively. Split transactions could be a headache (think your paycheck, which might be split into 401k contributions, several taxes, money into your bank, etc).
But fully recreating it in excel when it already exists would be a headache. More than likely you will have a more limited view in Excel if you’re just creating a handful of tables to represent all of your many accounts.
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.
