Early Retirement Extreme Forums

I meticuosly track every expense through plain text accounting using Beancount along with Fava for some nice graphics and stats at a glance.

I know that kind of thing isn't for everyone. I've been fiddling with Linux for years out of necessity initially (I needed a cheap/free OS for my school laptop), and it has become an ingrained hobby now.

Anyone use the polar opposite route, plain paper and pencil?

I use a small paper diary in which we keep our expenses. Who spend what and roughly on what category. Tallied and divided up every month.

After 6 yrs of that (previously doing on a spreadsheet but mobile life makes the diary more convenient) the most useful part of it is the calculation and monitoring of the long term monthly burn rate, calculated and updated every month.

Does Excel count? I use it to record my expenses and income and calculate my tax expenses.

Freedom_2018 wrote: ↑

Tue Mar 19, 2019 3:13 pm

I use a small paper diary in which we keep our expenses. Who spend what and roughly on what category. Tallied and divided up every month.

After 6 yrs of that (previously doing on a spreadsheet but mobile life makes the diary more convenient) the most useful part of it is the calculation and monitoring of the long term monthly burn rate, calculated and updated every month.

That's respectable, I would say it probably takes more discipline to do it all by hand, but physical portability is a pretty big convenience.

fuyu wrote: ↑

Tue Mar 19, 2019 4:12 pm

Does Excel count? I use it to record my expenses and income and calculate my tax expenses.

Of course Excel counts, that's a classic solution. You can make charts and stuff from within Excel with the data if I remember correctly (it's been a long time since I've fiddled with it).

A double-entry accounting CLI system for UNIX geeks... https://www.ledger-cli.org

GNUCash is another option that has a GUI. My finances are too simple for software to make sense, but I have played around with these for educational purposes.

I use the Open Office version of Excel (Calc), although what I do probably doesn't rise to the level of accounting. Once upon a time I used a little 3X5 notebook I carried around with me to track all my expenses, back when I was using cash much more regularly.

Excel

I use ledger as well, for both personal and business finances. It took a while to figure out a decent system for the business as it's all accrual based accounting and includes VAT (sales tax).

I use a google spreadsheet for personal tracking. I'd prefer Open/LibreOffice Calc (because offline), but automatically getting quotes for stocks etc is too tempting. I've been getting less detailed over time. With both NW and cash flow I've moved from monthly to quarterly to now yearly intervals. Double entry for every transaction seems too cumbersome in the digital age. If you need to "zoom in", the source data is usually there for a one time analysis.

For a company I use for side stuff, I use a local web based accounting service. It's free for the volume of transactions I have to process. My accounting is simple enough to do in a spreadsheet, but I have two reasons to use the software: 1) more and more e-invoices (an e-invoice is sent from system to system without a human interface, not a PDF sent by e-mail); 2) it automatically generates yearly reports in the correct format I need for the authorities.

Does my scoreboard count?

Everything runs through my brokerage account and most of my spending through one credit card. Sometimes I use the "other" credit card to keep them from canceling it on me. Occasionally I do stuff for which I get paid in cash and whose corresponding spending stays off the books.

At the portfolio management level, my annual net worth/spending model is on an Excel spreadsheet which is hard-updated at the start of every year. It's not that complicated; everything fits on one screen in the default font size.