I’m writing this as I go through the process of determining a personal finance/accounting system that I’m happy with. If you know me or my relationship with neovim then this journey might seem pretty common for me, but I thought it would be a good indication of how I handle my life.
How We Got Here
I’m just about two four months out of college life and have been met with a wave of
products I have to use as an adult that have made me want to pay taxes
towards a program purely focused on improvement of the UX of websites. Just go
through the top 1000 most visited websites of all time and offer to overhaul
their UI/UX by experts.
One such task has been managing my money. Now, I have a few different bank accounts, investment accounts, credit cards, and money sharing apps like venmo. A lot of what I have had to rely on for managing my money has been looking at the individual trackers in each service. Some credit cards would have spending reports that broke things down great, but not all of my accounts would and they would always be in isolation of each other. If I saw money going in or out of an account I couldn’t easily correlate it to spending on a card or sharing money with a friend for groceries.
I’ve tried a few times to track all of them in a spreadsheet, but keeping it in sync and having good views for everything was something I never once kept up with. Every time was a completely new table or graph. I’ve tried notion and made a decent dashboard, but still couldn’t manage a good way of syncing the data. I’ve also tried it out with tools like mint mobile, personal capital, and sofi, but often times whatever api their using to access my accounts (like Plaid) would become unconnected or they still didn’t really have the right UI I wanted with enough views.
So, I had two distinct problems. I wanted easy access to my financial data and I wanted a good UI to explain my situation to me. So while trying to find a solution and reading more about lifelogging I decided to make my own personal system.
Research
There were a few concepts I encountered while browsing the internet that inspired this. The first was that I realized that every financial app just uses the Plaid API and I can get access to that API too. The other learning was the existence of command line accounting tools like ledger-cli and the whole plaintextaccounting.com idea. I wanted to do more lifelogging anyways so I thought this is something I can do.
Getting the data doesn’t seem so much like an issue since I have some confidence that Plaid will work fine, so instead I first wanted to look into how to process and display the data. Besides ledger-cli, I also found that there was hledger, and beancount. All of them started talking about this idea of double-entry accounting so I figured I should read up on that a bit more first.
Double-entry Accounting
So, according to investopedia.
Double entry, a fundamental concept underlying present-day bookkeeping and accounting, states that every financial transaction has equal and opposite effects in at least two different accounts.
This makes sense, and I think it’s the kind of view I’ve been missing for a while. I want to be able to see the context of my transactions and the impact on my overall assets. At least as one of my views. I like being able to see a transaction’s effect on one account, but I also like the option of seeing the full impact.
Ok, so back to the data processing tools. I know that I definitely want to use something to process the data instead of just taking the Plaid data and trying to process it with numpy…or at least try it out before resorting to that. So obviously there’s been a lot of work done in this space so I want to do some research before picking one to try.
I like to use GitHub awesome-lists when researching stuff like this. So let’s look at awesome-ledger. That took me to the plaintextaccounting website, which had a really useful table. Looks like the 3 platforms I mentioned before were the ones to compare the most. The things I’m looking for are: a good community, a lot of control and composability with the tool, a good ecosystem of plugins and “prior art.”
Now I know karlikoss uses hledger,
and they’ve got cool content. From what I can tell, a lot of the features of hledger
and ledger-cli seem to be identical, while beancount seems to be quite different. So I decided to
go with the ledger ecosystem and just explore hledger more.
hledger
I did some initial research, and it looks the like the following are some of the best tutorials for how to set up a ledger journal.
Most of the examples and gotchas, I was able to troubleshoot using these two sources. Otherwise, for one off, questions I usually found a reddit or hacker news thread that covered my use case. Both of these sources do a fantastic job explaining how to use hledger so I don’t want to attempt to rehash their content, I just recommend checking them out for a comprehensive tutorial.
Instead, I just want to assert some mental models that helped me in getting used to double-entry accounting and some “gotchas” that I encountered.
Mental Model & Account Setup
The main idea I had to wrap my head around was the concept that all money comes from somewhere. You can kind of think of it as a law of conservation. No money is created or destroyed, just moved (unless you have access to a mint I guess).
So what does that mean? Well usually when you’re looking at your accounts you can see a transaction and think ok I’ve lost (spent) some money, or maybe you get paid from your job and the balance goes up. In this model, you’re really only looking at your accounts in a vacuum when in reality they exist alongside all the other money in circulation. So when you spend money, you’re actually moving money to someone else’s account and similarly when you get paid you move money from someone else’s account to yours.
So how does this apply to double-entry accounting? I can’t keep track of every account in the world that money is moving between, I really only care about my money. Sure, but it’s a helpful concept when organizing your accounts in ledger. The ledger documentation recommends splitting up accounts into the following categories:
The first two types are accounts you control.
- Assets - Essentially the money you hold. Often a bank or maybe some kind of investment
- Liabilities - Think of this like debts. In my case, I used this for credit cards and their current balances. These accounts usually have a 0 or negative value.
The next two accounts are external to you.
- Income - Think of these as accounts that move money into yours. You can set up an account for a job or maybe peer-to-peer payments.
- Expenses - And then these are accounts that you move money too when you buy things.
You can have an unlimited number of accounts, but it helps to categorize them the above taxonomy. An example setup might look like so.
assets:bank1
assets:bank2
assets:investments
liabilities:credit-card-one
liabilities:credit-card-two
income:job
income:misc
expenses:groceries
expenses:rent
expenses:subscriptions
expenses:miscYou don’t need to have multiple income or expense accounts. You could generalize and just have one for each type of money movement, but ledger gives you the flexibility of being as specific or vague as you want. In my example, I set up a few accounts for typical expenses, but then also added one for miscellaneous expenses that don’t really warrant a whole other category.
Gotcha: Transfers
Now the main gotcha I encountered when going through my transactions was the concept of transfers. For example, If I have both a checking and a savings account I may want to transfer from my savings to my checking for whatever reason. Now in double entry accounting for every transaction you enter two accounts the source and destination. But, if you try to import transactions from your accounts you’ll see transactions in both accounts involved. This will lead to the transfer being double counted.
The solution to this is to introduce an intermediary account for transfers whose balance should always functionally be 0. When it isn’t 0 that is usually an indication of an accounting error.
This idea is explained in detail in the fully fledged hledger
This post is getting pretty long, and I want to talk about some other concepts like how to get data from my banks into ledger and how to automatically sync it. So I’m going to break it out into another post. Look out for a part 2!