How do you track your finances?

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1

Wondering what people’s on PG would use to track their finances privately.

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2

I use Portfolio Performance

EDIT: Added the link to the English website of the software.

3

Self hosted Firefly III instance, here !

4

I’ve been meaning to try this in my TrueNAS but its not a high priority right now. How is it? I think I saw two TrueCharts app, this app and another (with a pig icon?) I will implement it in the future.

I tried GnuCash but it seems to unintuitive and complicated. I’ve previously used Homebank and I love it for simple home finance income/expenses tracking. My significant other was a bit lazy and had a hard time complying with timely entries, so I got drowned in backlogs and stopped using it. I wish there was an associated android and iOS app for this that would remind you to log expenses and income.

5

I just do it in a spreadsheet every other month.

  • money on bank accounts (incl. abroad)
  • money on savings accounts
  • physical cash
  • crypto (XMR, BTC)
  • stocks and other very liquid investments
    = cash
    plus
  • receivables (e.g. vouchers and tax assets)
  • physical assets (jewellery/watches, car, gold etc.)
  • immovable property (i.e. house at estimated valuation)
  • pension savings
    = assets
    less
  • payables (e.g. tax liabilities and short-term debts)
  • remaining mortgage
    = equity

I’m sure there’s an easier way to do it, but I haven’t found it yet. I haven’t even managed to find a decent multi-banking app that properly supports banks from more than one country. So basically I spend 10 minutes every other month to update these numbers and get a nice little chart going back the last 8 years or so.

For day-to-day spending analysis, well this is done by my bank in their app. It shows how much you spent on groceries, transport etc. Of course, that’s not really private because we should all just use physical cash (in person) and Monero (online).

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6

https://actualbudget.com/ works well for how I like to do budgeting (zero-sum).

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7

I am still looking for an alternative to track my finances (using Google Sheets currently). Firefly III and Actual, as mentioned above, seem to be the most promising alternatives.

However, I don’t want to self-host the app even though I have my servers running 24/7 for Chia and Mysterium nodes. It would be too much hassle for me to maintain it. I want an app that is able to run on all of my devices (desktop + mobile). I can even manage the syncing myself.

If Denaro has mobile app (I doubt since it’s a GTK4 app), I would use and recommend it. The UX is very good overall, I love it!

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8

Basic spreadsheets
One for daily expenses for each month.
One for the yearly planned budget, which gets adjusted end of every month to reflect actual expenditures.

9

Did you check how private the two import services of Firefly III, Nordigen and SaltEdge, are?

10

Well, my only complaints with it are:

  1. It’s not as simple as most cloud services (YNAB and Wallet). This means that you can have several types of accounts (e.g.: a company/person who receives some money, is basically an account). For someone who wants basic things, it can be really overkill.
  2. Reports. I have not spent much time with it, but out-of-the-box I don’t like the reports it has. If you want something which plenty of financial apps have, you have to create them.
  3. Lack of bank sync out-of-the-box. While bank sync and privacy is not the best combo, I would still like the choice to have this. While there is an add-on to achieve this, its installation is not as easy as the main app itself, and I don’t like the fact that this add-on is entirely separated from the main app.
    I have installed it, but only for CSV import (which is also not available without this add-on).
  4. Lack of good iOS apps. The app I use (AFAIK it’s the best one) for iOS only allows inserting new expenses/transfers and shows the total amount. And that’s it. It doesn’t have a basic search, which means that for me so search for something, I have to use the browser itself…
    If you use Android, maybe you’ll have more luck with this.

No, I haven’t. But given that most (if not all) services in Portugal which have bank syncing rely on SaltEdge, I don’t think there are better options, if I want to use syncing…
For now, I’m inserting everything manually.

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11

I use Denaro as well on my desktop. It doesn’t really have “management” features, but it’s great for just tracking your income and expenses. Think of it like your bank’s own interface, but you manage it yourself, and it’s always available, even if your bank’s infrastructure goes down.

As for a “mobile” app, it doesn’t have an app for Android or iOS. The app itself though, is able to be used on mobile devices, provided they are running Linux. I’m not sure if it’s possible to compile a GTK4 to run on Android or iOS.

12

I have never tried running a GTK4 app on Android (through Andronix or something similar). But I don’t think the UX will be any good since there’s no hardware acceleration the last time I tried.

I don’t think it’s possible, see 1, 2.

Even though I really like GTK4, if the app is expected to run cross-platform, it’s best to use Flutter. There are many GT4 apps that I think should use Flutter, Denaro included.