On: Plainbudget: Minimalist Plain Text Budgeting

[nyamada]

are you familiar with this project?

https://www.ledger-cli.org/

[greenleafjacob → nyamada]

Also a fan of ledger. See http://plaintextaccounting.org for some more details on its workflow.

[kqr → greenleafjacob]

I'm a huge fan of double entry accounting, regardless of vessel (I do it in Google Sheets from time to time), even for the simplest things. Very flexible and powerful, yet safe.

[jgalvez → nyamada]

Yup, my intent was to get to a simpler approach.

[msangi → nyamada]

I really like this approach. Currently I'm using Fava, which has all the power of Beancount and a nice web UI https://beancount.github.io/fava/

[ytjohn → msangi]

Also, Fava adds budgeting to Beancount. Beancount itself doesn't really have the concept, but Fava lets you add budget lines and compare your spending against your budget.

[howeyc → nyamada]

This is what I use to budget. I just create a budget transaction at the start of the month with my plan for the month.

I then run a report showing the difference between each budget account and each corresponding expense account on a monthly basis.

[nebgnahz → nyamada]

Just learned (and still learning) ledger two days ago. I found it not intuitive but can see the value.

Any good tutorial/guide?

[Jtsummers → nebgnahz]

http://plaintextaccounting.org

And the links from there are a pretty good start. Start with just basic asset tracking (checking, savings) and liability tracking (debt, CC) and get into the routine of it. Then you can add in your investments and other assets (car, home, stocks, foreign currency holdings, etc.). If you don't care about a slightly inaccurate history, just add the stocks later on at their present value, or go back and find your initial purchase dates and cost basis and let ledger calculate your present gain/loss.