"Where did my money go" budgeting has never worked for me. I've been way more successful with planning ahead every $ of income as I get it and then manually tracking expenses. Budgeting had to become an actual activity for me, and not just something done automatically by a webapp. I'm a huge shill for YNAB[0]. The software is really nice but basically it's a glorified (paid) spreadsheet. My fiance and I agree that the methodology it forces you to use, though, has easily saved us thousands so far.<p>[0]<a href="http://youneedabudget.com" rel="nofollow">http://youneedabudget.com</a> - they recently upgraded to a subscription based web app but I'm still using the classic version that's a one time purchase: <a href="http://classic.youneedabudget.com" rel="nofollow">http://classic.youneedabudget.com</a>
The unfortunate thing about apps like these is that if you are wise enough to use it, you are wise enough to not need it.<p>Totally anecdotal, but the people I know who have trouble managing money are just completely unaware of it. Money goes in and money goes out, and they only do something if someone calls them or sends them a letter. As soon as you show these people the numbers, they get it. It clicks for them.<p>Mint and Penny both suffer from the same thing those "hire a maid" apps suffer from; Once I've made the initial contact, I have no reason to continue to use the service, I can just contact the maid directly. Same thing with Mint/Penny; Once I am shown my finances, I have an awareness of my financial situation and don't need the service any more.<p>What will drive me to continually use this service, beyond my initial few weeks? You can only analyze my finances so much before there is nothing left to tell me. And then you will get to the point that Mint is at, where you start offering me credit cards and credit reports and mortgages, because that's the only thing left to do in this space.
"and you hereby appoint Penny as your true and lawful attorney-in-fact and agent, with full power of substitution and resubstitution, for you and in your name, place and stead, in any and all capacities, to access third party internet sites, servers or documents, retrieve information, and use your accounts, passwords, and other information"<p>Lol, no.
Looks useful and neat, but remember kids: if you're not paying for it, you're the product.
Some of their competition: <a href="http://linxo.com" rel="nofollow">http://linxo.com</a> (used it for 5 years now), <a href="http://bankin.com" rel="nofollow">http://bankin.com</a> (used once, preferred linxo).
This looks great, really good UX/UI from a first glance. My bank has a pretty modern banking app, so some of the features (like spending graphs) are familiar to me (though not as pretty as in Penny).<p>Two things that I dislike with my banking app:<p>- No real differentiation between fixed, monthly cost and variable expenses. It would be nice if the automatically separated monthly expenses and one-time expenses.<p>- Lots of "-$100 Cash" transactions whenever I use an ATM. This is my main concern actually. It's really hard to have some sort of insight about my finances without seeing the biggest part of my non-expenditure spending: The stuff I pay for in cash. Especially since it distorts the monthly overviews: If I retrieve $500 from my bank account on July 31st, it's not helpful to add that to my July spending, since 90% of that money will probably be spent in August. This is really a data-entry/UX problem, no API will solve this. One thing that I would suggest: Make an extension that makes it really simple to "scan" receipts. Just one glance of the camera, some OCR and the data is in there. If it's simple enough, it may become part of my "muscle memory" to scan receipts with the app whenever I buy something, so I get meaningful analysis results.<p>(By the way, if you want to build something like that, check out this API: <a href="https://scanbot.io/de/sdk.html" rel="nofollow">https://scanbot.io/de/sdk.html</a> - great product & company, I'm not affiliated in any way)
Does it know what category to put something in if I use cash?<p>From my experience tracking what I spend, it's those transactions that I actually need to keep track of if I'm going to spend money more sensibly. All of the headline, automated bills that get paid monthly are easy to manage. It's the little transactions of a few bucks here and there that add up to that "Where the hell did this month's wages go?!" feeling.<p>If there isn't a good way to track cash transactions then it's not likely to change the way I handle my money, and consequently it wouldn't be very useful for me.
I'm not really into the simulated live chat interface. It'd be a lot easier to click a button that said "Your spending" than to type out "Please show me my monthly spending Mr. Robot" (or to type out anything, especially on a phone).
Are you serious!? Every Paragraph in their Privacy section reads like:
"We totally won't collect your data; and definetly won't store them, BUT we kind of do something similar and you just have to accept that"
Nobody should ever use this BS!
Friendly chat bot facade, data collection/analysis in the background.<p>Aral Balkan couldn't be more spot on : <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upu0gwGi4FE" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upu0gwGi4FE</a>
I tried using the Wallet app from Budget Bakers for a while and failed miserably.<p>The app seemed fine but I could never consistently remember to enter all my puchases into it right away. After a few days or even a week or more of forgetting I would struggle to remember exactly what I spent and where, especially from generic ATM withdrawals listed on my bank statement.<p>The app became useless for me because of that.<p>I really want a budgeting solution that works for me but haven't found one yet, beyond just making an Excel spreadsheet of monthly incomings/outgoings and then using that to work out what my remaining 'fun' money is.
Although it looks great, I still have no idea if it supports different types of accounts (loans, banks, etc.) or even if it supports my bank.<p>Looking around I don't see a list of supported accounts or account types. Is it hidden somewhere?
The utter lack of information about who is behind this ("Industry Veterans" -- who?) makes me exceedingly reluctant to trust this.<p>It's an iPhone app, so there's a minimal level of DUNS/screening/etc., but enh.
Another personal finance app soft-launched by an HN-er last year: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9095519" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9095519</a><p><a href="http://family-fortune.ridgebit.com/" rel="nofollow">http://family-fortune.ridgebit.com/</a>
this was posted not too long ago: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9942202" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9942202</a><p>Though i can't tell if anything has changed since the last posting
I wish all banks would have a read only feed of my data that I could give to apps like this. (Though as I am in the EU there are actually very few that do the integration (if any))
Unfortunate naming. There's also a ledger-like CLI finance app using the name Penny. And I honestly thought that's what the submission was about.<p><a href="http://massysett.github.io/penny/" rel="nofollow">http://massysett.github.io/penny/</a>