I use Simplifi Money. Yes, it's Intuit. Yes, Intuit sucks. That's the system though. They have the best bank integration. I've used others like YNAB and a few competitors. They aren't as good.

You cannot get out of manually categorizing everything, but the transactions use regex for auto categories so that reduces some work.

Once I approve all of my expenses, I go into Simplifi's spending plan and I make a plan for large one-off expenses (roof repair, new tires) for the month. These are added to a copy of the spending plan from the previous month. What this does is leave you with the transactions that are "unplanned". I check those and I add anything I missed to planned expenses, or I dispute those charges.

It works extremely well for me, and I balance a large number of accounts.

The only issue is that it doesn't work well with investments. For those accounts I keep a separate spreadsheet with a column for each month. I put balance and returns for that month as well as returns minus Inflation month on month. Every three months, depending on my income stream, I may deduct some money from investments, but the rule I use is I only deduct a positive 3 month return - inflation over that period. That way I only take money out of the market when it's up.

The system works well for me.

I should also say I keep a 3-5 month buffer in stablecoins on Gemini. I earn a relatively nice return 7%-ish on a very liquid asset that I can draw from within 3 days. I also keep 1-2 months of expenses in my checking account.

I'm actually most interested to hear where you're making 7% on such a liquid asset.

I-Bonds are yielding 9% currently with a couple caveats.

https://www.treasurydirect.gov/indiv/products/prod_ibonds_gl...

I use beancount[1] with its web interface fava[2], it does accounting more than budgeting. Having always the financial records as plain text file gives me the peace of mind. I just need a tool to help me understand my financial situation once in a while, so this is enough for me. I can also use Python to build custom importer, which imports records from websites like amazon, apple, venmo, etc.[3], I am familiar with Python so this system works for me. If you are looking for some budgeting feature i heard someone has developed a plug-in for it.

[1]: https://beancount.github.io/docs/ [2]: https://beancount.github.io/fava/ [3]: https://github.com/chazeon/beancount-extra

I use gnucash https://gnucash.org/ plus some custom scripts to convert the different bank statements to a common format that gnucash can import. This takes care of the not having to manually enter data. For cash I send a message with the amount and category to an email address I set up for this. This transaction gets parsed out and saved in a flat file that also gets imported.

Reconciling I do by hand but because I import from the banks, it's usually just a couple of clicks.

I chose to use SQLite as the data store and have run one off SQL to fix some things.

I like that it is quite open to hacking, so if you like that sort of thing, give it a try.

I've tried a lot of stuff over the years, but I always end up back on GnuCash. It's not the prettiest, it doesn't have a bunch of shiny features, and it has some weird bugs[0], but it consistently has gotten the job done for me for almost a decade with no issues.

I don't want exciting technology involved when I'm trying to pay bills.

[0] https://bugs.gnucash.org/show_bug.cgi?id=795804#c10

I speak with my significant other about any large purchases -- > $50, really, except for food/gas.

Huge purchases, I agonize over and research for months anyway.

Food, drink, snacks, etc -- I just try to limit eating out to 2-3 nights a week, and I don't go any place especially fancy.

It helps that most of my hobbies involve some up-front one-time investment, like a bike, but I can take on most of the maintenance tasks myself and basically never spend a penny unless I catch upgraditis.

I use https://www.monarchmoney.com/ and I review my transactions weekly. I like that it lets you roll budgets over month to month. I don't like that changing a forecast item changes all the following months.

For now I just use a phone app, where I enter every piece of expense or income manually. Then, when necessary I can export those as CSV files for further processing in LibreOffice, Python, whatever. That said, if your bank lets you get the data exported, you can also just use that, but personally I use both for validating the validity of the data and keeping mindful of my expenses.

It's one of those cases where a fully automated solution might be better, but seeing the balance mismatch between any given bank account and what's stored locally in the app forces me to trace down that transaction and figure out whether it comes from a service or a subscription of some sort so I can describe and categorize it away.

The data entry also being ever so slightly annoying (e.g. 1 minute per expense/income) is a good thing for me because I can be lazy and it has saved me from making impulse purchasing decisions in the past. So when I want to buy something, I'm also okay with checking my corresponding bank app for the details and to verify the exact amount a second time.

As for the CSV, in its most basic form I can just save it as an OpenDocument Spreadsheet and do some quick graphs etc.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument

It's also that my bank can give me CSV files for any individual cards, so the same workflow can be used there to validate/explore that data as well. That's actually how I graphed my earnings for 2017-2021 in my blog post "On finances and savings": https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/on-finances-and-savings

Disclaimer: this probably wouldn't work with too many family members or a large amount of cards. But for now the approach scales wonderfully, given my circumstances. As long as you can get the CSV files, working with them becomes not too bad.

I pay for a retired accountant to handle all of my family and business financial matters. Worth every penny. She makes sure bills are paid on time, taxes are accounted for, and has taught us over the years about to budget, save, etc.

I tried YNAB, but I struggled to get it to work with a weekly income cadence and multiple credit cards.

I use Pocketsmith now, it has the automatic transaction import that is mandatory for me to use an app. I find the categorisation loop to be fairly easy, with a good interface for adding new categories on the fly. It can automatically categorise transactions for you, but always lets you check it over before it commits.

I don't think my situation is as complex as yours (2 people 2 mortgages, 3 income streams and an investment), but I can still see it being useful for you.

It's not super techy, but it is easy with a customisable interface. I like it.

We've been on https://www.youneedabudget.com/ for a couple if years now, and it has lowered the stress considerably.

Wife plays it like a video game.

Basically, all manual.

My wife and I have a joint account where all income goes. We then have a monthly stipend that is guilt free, no questions asked. The stipend is a fixed sum and equal between us. We both have to agree to change it. We also agree amounts to go into savings.

Since cash is fungible, we dont have budget pots really.

This system ensures that it is fair, as I out earn my wife by a huge margin and reflects her non-financial work.

YNAB - https://www.youneedabudget.com/

For real though.

It takes a couple of months to 1) get your head wrapped around the core concepts and 2) get budgets and its automatic matching working well, but after that it provides an amazingly good lens into your funds.

Accountability has gone up for me and my wife, and it’s helped us make decisions that, while sometimes hard, actually made an impact. Confidence in our true financial position has also increased.

I categorize all purchases in banking apps/websites that have that built in. I have most of that on a shared account with wife so it's easier. The rest I calculate in a similar way but in the "not-shared" bank app.

As nowadays most of my purchases are card, smartphone or BLIK (widely adopted local payment platform) it's not that hard. Banks also pre-analize each transaction and if they know what kind of business was that, it is pre-categorized as medical/groceries/travel/car/house bills and so on.

Overall result is poor - I spend like madman and only recently started to monitor reports successfully. Usually biggest surprises are SMALL purchases, not large ones. Overpaid yogurt in a small local store is fine, done once. But doing that every day, plus add eating out when working from office - this can can be surprisingly costly.

google sheets for capturing recurring expenses against cash flow (salaried income + rsu vests + royalties). each recurring expense gets a "containerized" debit card from privacy.com (i.e. each card has a spend limit of however much each service costs). these cards pull from a bank account that is only used for auto-pay.

for non-fixed recurring expenses (like water and electricity), i set a high estimated monthly cost and adjust downwards as patterns are established

i don't trade stocks enough to track them with any regularity.

expensify for capturing regular expenses, like groceries and food, which are paid with a credit card that is paid off every two weeks. because all bank alerts route to expensify, i capture every transaction i make. i go through expensify weekly and separate "budgeted" recurring expenses and daily expenses. i also made an API that uses their backend for their frontend to send receipts with iOS Shortcuts.

i aggressively convert repeated transactions into recurring expenses to smoothen free cash forecasting. amazon subscribe and save has been immensely helpful here.

this has been my stack since 2016. it has been amazingly successful for me. i know exactly what i can and can't afford and their % of my net income. i can also track lifestyle inflation with incredibly high granularity.

I use the financial wellness and planning software that I built: https://www.wallet1000.com

Nothing beats the flexibility of a spreadsheet and I have nothing it respect for people who use one for budgeting. I’m general they seem to be more on top of their finances than anyone I come across.

I've spoken highly of the free(mium) Toshl on HN before. I've been using it for 4 years on my own but it seems they have a solid tutorial for household expenses: https://toshl.com/blog/track-family-household-expenses/

We use YNAB, a program run by a small-ish team in (i think?) Utah. It's forward looking budgeting, but with the expectation that you may adjust mid-month. It imports transactions from my banks through a third party, and that "usually" works. It doesn't cover investment accounts, we just use it to manage cash flow and monthly planning.

Joint account for everything that relates to family, e.g. rent, food, utilities etc. 1/3 of each our income goes into that account every month.

We try to keep within that budget, but if needed we pad out for extra expenses. Those times there is excess we go on a trip or have a nice dinner.

Tiller for Google Sheets but it's also available for Excel. Automated data entry, you can then use their budget templates or build your own.

Badly!

Mint.com

Try LunchMoney as an alternative to Intuit. Solo founder, great support, great roadmap and delivery. She uses Plaid so the integration is similar to Mint.

https://lunchmoney.app