So I’m considering just using excel to keep track of all my expenses and income, but is there a better solution? What do you use to track how you spend money? I want something from which I can freely export the data if need be so excel is tempting.

  • skoberlink@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    Are you trying to track expenses or budget? The difference is in how you’re using the data. Busgeting is a much more active process of making sure money is going to the right place. The difference is a deep topic that might be beyond the scope of your question so I’ll leave it at that for now.

    For budgeting, the gold standard is still YNAB. There are plenty of valid criticisms to level against it but I’ve done a lot of research and tried out a lot of tools and it’s still the best.

    I am keeping a close eye on ActualBudget. It’s not ready for me yet, personally, but they’re doing fantastic work with that project. If you don’t mind a little extra technical maintenance (barely any with PikaPods as another comment suggested), it can get you a long way. Notably, this is the most private recommendation I can make. Since you run your own instance and it’s open-source software, you can tell exactly what its doing with your data. Automatic bank import is available but not required or pushed on you.

    If you’re interested more in tracking, Mint used to be the easiest tool to get into. Unfortunately with it shut down, I’m not aware of any similar replacements. If I were looking for more of a tracking and reporting tool, I would probably import my bank data into a spreadsheet and go from there. I think there might be a gap in the market here (though I also think there were a lot of Mint users who really needed a budgeting tool and, IMO, it wasn’t very good for that).

    I’ve started looking at PocketGuard which might be a good replacement for Mint and fit your needs. I can’t speak much about it myself yet but it looks interesting.