What do you host for your finances and why!
from ComradeMiao@lemmy.world to selfhosted@lemmy.world on 03 Dec 05:48
https://lemmy.world/post/22708704
from ComradeMiao@lemmy.world to selfhosted@lemmy.world on 03 Dec 05:48
https://lemmy.world/post/22708704
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.
threaded - newest
Actual budget with simple fin for bank links. Currently hosted on pikapods, will move to self hosting on prem at some point.
I use Actual. How it works is very similar to YNAB (you budget the money you currently have) but it’s open source and privacy focused. I started using it a few months ago and I really like it so far!
I love Actual. So, so good. I cancelled YNAB in favor and can’t ever think of going back. Aside from not having to pay $100 a year you’re also not supporting the Mormon Church (YNAB is a Mormon-run company).
Do you just use a limit set of YNAB features? It seems like Actual only has a tiny fraction of the features YNAB has. For example, it’s currently missing category targets.
It’s like YNAB4. For those of us in that vintage it’s perfect. If you’re using the newer YNAB it might have missing features.
Category targets are available and are more flexible than YNAB, but it’s still in an experimental phase so it’s not fully integrated into the GUI. Check here: actualbudget.org/docs/…/goal-templates/ I’ve had zero problems so far though.
I use hledger mostly because of the plain text format. I came from YNAB as well but I just hated how you couldn’t easily undo changes or see when you made a change, etc. This is so easily to track changes and you can add comments explaining your reasoning around things and you can keep everything in source control so you have all the power of that as well. Not for everyone but if you’re a programmer or just comfortable on the command line it’s great.
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.
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.
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:
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:
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.
Not selfhost but I use Hibiscus www.willuhn.de/products/hibiscus/
Actual has been working fine for me. Supports all the family’s banks and credit cards I import manually.
Id love to find a #creditunion that supported #openbanking and offered API access to my data so I could easily download it and use it with Actual or FireflyIII. I think working with a credit union to build this feature would be a great open source project.
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.
Since most budgeting tools I found didn’t satisfy my need (no cloud, automatic categorization of transactions etc.) I tried to create my own tool to categorize my transactions using camt.053 and csv files which I downloaded from my banks. Got bugged down with the presentation via bokeh, so it was pretty crude.
I recently found beancount in combination with fava, which solved most of my problems I had with my own tool. And the good thing: I was able to re-use most of my ‘auto-categorization’ code with only small changes. Not sure how universal my importer is, but with a bit of python know-how it should be quite easy to create an importer for your specific bank export.
From my experience, the csvs I got from my bank was insufficient for automatic mapping, which is why I’m using camt.053 where possible. As the camt.053 is not very common in many countries you could go for OFX files.
I have Firefly III and am really quiet happy with it. I might write a companion program to scan bill though, since doing everything by hand is rather time consuming.
I just drooled a little at the thought of integration with Paperless.
Well shit shen.hong.io/guide-to-workflow-automation-using-n…
I didn’t read the whole article, just a cursory glance really, but it seems like that is the exact other way around that I would want it.
I’m thinking of scanning a paper bill with my phone, extracting the text and matching parts of the text to firefly fields, like transaction description, source account, destination account, amount and maybe categories/tags.
Is there a mobile app that syncs with self hosted?
Yes, but it’s incompatible with the way I handle access control. I think I did it with Remote User authentication, which breaks all the login mechanisms of diverse apps, even though it’s officially supported by the projects. That’s why I only choose projects where the frontend is a PWA or they support oidc.
So I just installed the PWA, which works great.
I’m waiting for Actual to support multiple currencies. Until then, as an Apple user, I’m using iFinance which works on all my platforms.
I host my own Monero node
Moneydance 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.
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.
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
as POST data, and responses like
plus 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.
I don’t understand why isn’t crypto banned yet.
Its a dumb drain on world resources and only facilitates of untraceable payments for drug sales and tax avoidance.
Because the rich people of the world are at the top of that pump and dump pyramid and stand to extract a lot of money from the suckers of the world.
What makes you say this
I’m old enough to know that governments should care about taxes and payment traceability.
This is what funds the social programs such as healthcare and education.
And if government doesn’t give a fuck - there is only one explanation, it’s beholden to the corporate overloads that want to capitalize on the crypto action - which is not in my best interests as a private citizen.
Also - all it does it raises energy prices for me and makes GPUs more expensive for me.
Why should I support that?
Fuck crypto and fuck the government that’s doesn’t do anything about it.
I mean why did you bring it up? I didn’t.
And cryptocurrencies (esp. the bigger ones) are perhaps the most traceable store of value and is highly regulated. At least in the US, cryptocurrencies are regulated like stocks, so any transaction needs to be properly reported as either a capital gain or loss or you’ll run afoul of the IRS.
It really doesn’t. Crypto mining is only profitable if energy prices are very low, especially if you do it at any kind of scale. Crypto mining in the US is estimated at 0.6-2.3% of total energy use, which is a drop in the bucket.
And mining on GPUs isn’t very profitable, with profitability timelines at ~3 years assuming a very low energy cost of $0.10/kWh. So it’s not really a good option. The big miners have pretty much all moved to ASICs, which won’t impact your GPU prices at all, so the only ones buying GPUs for mining are hobbyists, which are a pretty small market.
There are a lot of good reasons to support cryptocurrencies, such as:
I think there are a lot of good reasons to support cryptocurrencies for everyday transactions, I don’t see much point in supporting it as an investment option. So if a vendor supports transactions in cryptocurrencies, I’ll go out of my way to pay w/ crypto, but I’m not interested in trading cryptocurrencies as an investment.
Crypto cannot be banned. It can only be made illegal, if countries want to remove themselves from the digital currency revolution. The derivatives market is $730T. Stocks are about $110T. Real estate is around $380T. If you’re concerned about the minuscule amount of illegal activities that occur within the 3.5T crypto market, your fears are misguided. Crypto is mostly traceable. Fiat currencies are highly preferred for drug sales and tax avoidance.
Make it illegal, drive it underground where it belongs.
I’m concerned about traceability and tax avoidance. I’m concerned about energy consumption I’m concerned about gpu prices
Are you just as concerned that cash is not traceable and that some is exchanged tax free? I don’t see how any GPU miners are profitable at this point. Outside of gaming: AI must have a larger GPU demand? Most miners are using ASICs. You’re absolutely right that mining energy should come from plants that have underutilized capacity and (obviously) renewable sources. The cat’s out of the bag on cryptocurrency and unjust laws don’t deserve to be followed. All government printed currencies eventually become worthless.
It’s the only way to get to Capitalism 2.0.
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. actualbudget.org/docs/…/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 .
Gnucash books split for personal, joint, and business with a mysql backend. I wrote a read-only web frontend for wife and OTG access. Sadly no automation so I just stay on top of it.
I use ledger. I have not automated so much outside of autocomplete macros in my text editor, but it doesnt’t take too much time and forces me to look over my spend, so I like it. I will eventually attempt to build some kind of Dash-application for visualisation of the output, but have only started on the parsers so far.
Ledger is awesome.
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.
I’m saying this as someone who used Mint for years due to how it integrated with banks so easily.
I’m currently using Money Manager EX, which is open source. I “self-host” the database file on my NAS, and simply open the file through MM EX’ Windows program.
Since it’s just a simple database (encrypted, of course), it’s easy to back up.
Now, I lost the ability to automatically sync with my bank. This was a blessing in disguise, since it forced me to go over each transaction carefully.
Granted, Mint had me doing the same, but because I spent a lot of time removing duplicates and fixing errors in their sync system. LOL
MM Ex has been very easy to use, and I don’t see a need to self-host the software itself.
homebank (desktop app) + weekly import of new transactions using woob/bank and a basic shell script. Homebank database synced via Nextcloud.
I have a excel sheet on my laptop
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:
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.
GnuCash running locally on my PC. Had worked for me for about 25 years.
Same here but now struggling to keep on top of it. I wish there was a mobile solution that would just nicely integrate with selfhosted
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.