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Controversial take - no budget. Split income into 3 or more buckets - savings, critical bills (rent, utilities, debt, etc), and discretionary. I manage as separate accounts.
Spend discretionary freely and enjoy the peace or mind that your financial future is secured by the first 2 buckets. If you run low, rice and beans til next paycheck.
No need to track coffee expenditures, you'll realize during rice and beans week that you can make it at home.
Your mileage may vary.
I was on a spreadsheet for years and recently started selfhosting Actual and importing transactions automatically through email alerts.
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.
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)!
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 :(
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.
I made a simple budgeting web app: https://github.com/MattMckenzy/Casheesh
My wife and have used it almost every day for the past couple of years to give ourselves and track fun budget money. It's been working really well!