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How do you track your personal budget? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 year ago by Hexadecimalkink@lemmy.ml to c/personalfinance@lemmy.ml

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Do you track your expenses monthly? Annually? Do you have an app or do you use an excel spreadsheet? Any suggested tools?

I use a spreadsheet and track monthly.

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[–] TheButtonJustSpins@infosec.pub 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I was on a spreadsheet for years and recently started selfhosting Actual and importing transactions automatically through email alerts.

[–] ahal@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Would you mind elaborating on your import pipeline? I was thinking of using email as a trigger as well, but thought it wouldn't work too well.

[–] TheButtonJustSpins@infosec.pub 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

No problem. I've got every account set to send me an alert on the lowest monetary value it supports (stupid AMEX with its $10 minimum), and I've got rules in my email to move those alerts into an Actual folder.

Then, I use my transaction fetcher to import the transactions from the email alerts into Actual. I look at Actual periodically to categorize the transactions.

It works pretty well for me at this point. I haven't published the image to DockerHub yet, but i think it's ready for an alpha image. Let me know if you have questions or need help (or want to contribute)!

[–] ahal@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thank you, that looks awesome!

Do your institutions send alerts with data in a consumable format? I'm in Canada, land of the shitty bank software and it seems I can only get PDFs from most places. I have one that doesn't even let you download transactions outside of the monthly statement :(

[–] TheButtonJustSpins@infosec.pub 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I mean, for a given level of consumable. You can see in the TransactionFetcher.Readers.* libraries how I'm parsing the data out of HTML emails, which is less than optimal, but it works, at least until they change email formats and I have to make changes.

Your neighbors to the south also have shitty bank software, unfortunately.