Ask HN: How do you manage your personal budget?
I’m a big fan of <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ledger-cli.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ledger-cli.org</a> . All my personal finances are tracked in plaintext, in a git repo, using ledger.<p>That said, making that viable has involved a slowly-evolving ecosystem of supporting tools. For example, I wrote a set of libraries that leverage the free Plaid tier ( <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;plaid.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;plaid.com&#x2F;</a> ) to automatically fetch bank and credit card transactions, and apply them to the ledger journal. I also wrote a script that takes a schedule and projects out future transactions to the journal, so I can define recurring transactions and view their impact on accounts projected into the future.<p>The combination of this means that viewing my current reality is easy, and viewing the impact of known future expenses (largely recurring bills&#x2F;obligations) is easy. That’s been the single largest factor in enabling my long-term money management, because it’s given me confidence in the numbers, which has let me tune things like automatic 401k payments and automatic transfers to savings. I can move the maximum amount of money into long-term-storage because I always have a clear picture of “how much money do I need to keep out to account for my bills&#x2F;expenses”