Plainbudget: Minimalist Plain Text Budgeting

If you haven’t checked out YNAB.com, it’s my go-to for budgeting. I find it useful because it has auto-import like mint, but with flexible categories.<p>There’s no way I’m going to enter in every transaction (not to mention the dozen automatic subscriptions). To me, automatic import is a must. From there, it does a fantastic job of helping me plan for next month and track spending across time.<p>After 2 years, I have a clear sense of how much we spend on car repairs, vacation, Christmas, etc.<p>Anyway, I’m not affiliated with them, I just enjoy the tool.

Really great project! Good work. Love seeing Nuxt in the wild too.<p>Reminds me of Numi[0], a really beautiful text calculator I&#x27;ve been using on MacOS for a few years now.<p>[0] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;numi.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;numi.io&#x2F;</a>

I have a hard time believing that any technological solution can really help with budgeting. At the end of the day, it&#x27;s about choosing how you want to spend your money.<p>Either you know where your money is going or you don&#x27;t. If you don&#x27;t, then maybe a few months of tracking expenses will tell you, but once you do, it then becomes about the internal struggle of telling yourself not to spend money you really shouldn&#x27;t be spending, and this battle can&#x27;t be fought with an app.<p>Maybe if you made a ton of money and it didn&#x27;t make personal sense to track it all. I can see maybe a personal accounting app that involved actual people logging into your bank accounts and actually looking at what you&#x27;re spending maybe being a thing, but that&#x27;s called hiring an accountant and has been a thing for centuries.<p>Difficult to see this problem yielding to any kind of tech solution. I say this as somebody who maintained his own expense tracking app for months before dumping it. Nowadays I just look at my bank statements if I&#x27;m confused. Doesn&#x27;t take long to find out what I need to know.

For me, none of these budgeting tools attempt to answer the one question I think is the most common amongst people: &quot;Do I have enough budget remaining in this month to afford this purchase?&quot;<p>That&#x27;s harder than it seems. For example, if you&#x27;re debating a purchase on the 10th of the month, there are a bunch of bills and other purchases you&#x27;re going to make the rest of the month (groceries, eating out, etc.) so you don&#x27;t really know how much is remaining that you have to spend.<p>I use a Google Sheet that has taken me years to iterate, which knows the current date, tells me what expenses I&#x27;m going to incur over the rest of the month, along with a column of estimated numbers I guess at (cost of groceries, eating out, etc. for the rest of the month) and then tells me what my true remaining balance is.

This is nice, but for budgets to be effective, they need to be across multiple time periods.<p>Budgeting is like an optimization&#x2F;monitoring problem with 2 objectives:<p>1. monthly cash flow &gt; 0 (don&#x27;t ever let your cash situation go negative e.g. credit-card debt)<p>2. maximize(Year End final balance)<p>I have a Google Sheets doc that I&#x27;ve used for years where I have inflows and outflows by month, and a year-end balance that is automatically calculated. This lets me see what my projected cash status will be at the end of the year.<p>At every month, the cash flow (in - out) is calculated -- this prevents me from going underwater at any given period.<p>Having a dynamically updating spreadsheet helps you to monitor those two objective functions and make course-corrections.<p>It&#x27;s simple, it&#x27;s cloud-based and it&#x27;s available on all devices.

are you familiar with this project?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ledger-cli.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ledger-cli.org&#x2F;</a>

Also in the same vein of plain text (command-line only): GNU `pem` (Personal Expense Manager):<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gnu.org&#x2F;software&#x2F;pem&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gnu.org&#x2F;software&#x2F;pem&#x2F;</a><p>It&#x27;s a single Perl script. Used this for my monthly expenses before I bought a &quot;smart phone&quot; a few years ago. Since then I use a more crude method -- the &#x27;Keep&#x27; utility on Android as an &quot;expense manager&quot;. A note with tick boxes, where each tick box denotes an expense entry, later do the math, I know it&#x27;s super inefficient, but I don&#x27;t want to install yet another application).

You don&#x27;t need a budget, you need to feel in control of your finances and knowing your net worth is the way to do it. Knowing that I spent $312.23 on groceries is not.<p>If&#x2F;when your net worth is too risky for you get more tight and try to improve it every month. If&#x2F;when you feel confortable with your number you can loosen up. I started to track it in a spreadsheet every month. I loosen up to every quarter. This is my new religion.

When I change one of the values in the Expense A group, the top expanse A value doesn&#x27;t change in the top group, which is sort of dissappointing. Is this by design?<p><pre><code> + 1000 Salary - 700 Expense A - 200 Expense B - 100 Expense C = 0 = 800 Expense A - 300 Car payment - 150 Plane ticket x 2 - 200 Utilities bill</code></pre>

Feels like a mini calca. Nice, thanks!

Neat!