Plain Text Accounting
I can really recommend doing this for your personal finances! Tools like ledger are really powerful, and properly accounting is a great way to save on money. I can very easily go into my personal ledger and (say) get a report on &quot;How much money did i spend daily on groceries last month&quot; or &quot;List all subscription services i pay for and how much they cost each month&quot; or whatever. It gives you a great view into where your money is going and helps you plan for the future. It&#x27;s very satisfying to run the command &quot;ledger reg -Mn Assets Liabilities&quot;, which is &quot;show me my net wealth (i.e. the sum of Assets and Liabilities) for every month in the ledger&quot;, and see your personal wealth grow over time.<p>But almost more importantly: if you&#x27;re a programmer, it&#x27;s really very fun! Like, i have my own system where I download my bank statement as a CSV and process it in AWK together with an org-mode table of payees that map each line on the bank statement to an account, which then generates a ledger file. Since it&#x27;s just you using it, you can make it so it works however you like, and it quite satisfying to see it all come together.<p>It&#x27;s also a great way to learn about accounting. Turns out, I really kinda like accounting! It has many of the same pleasures of programming or math, and seeing everything balance is very satisfying. In short: if you&#x27;re a programmer who feels like they haven&#x27;t quite got a handle on their finances, I can&#x27;t recommend plain text accounting highly enough.