Net worth is easy: assets - liabilities

You get the figures from your financial institutions and counting up your cash on hand.

The purpose of double-entry bookkeeping is to track the flow of money and to make sure nothing was missed.

But for net worth, you only need the end result, which you don't need any computation for.

The only thing that this solves is tracking money in flight, because during a transfer it disappears from your view of the accounts. There are simpler solutions to this problem than tracking absolutely everything.

The automatic import of expenses is so valuable for my family and keeping track of how much we've spent and how much we have left for the month.

We used the fixed-cost version for years beyond when it was officially supported, and it didn't have the automated import, and I don't think I could ever go back to a system that didn't. There were always a few days a month, at least, when I wasn't exactly sure where we were in our expenses.

I find value in tracking everything, tracking it by hand, and tracking it with precision (our household budget has 68 categories).

When I've tried easing up in the past (e.g., with Mint's lightweight approach) I was left with a budgetary black box where I felt like I never had enough information to make big purchasing decisions. I knew what I had in the bank account, but I didn't know if it was earmarked for anything, or whether the next surprise expense was going to wreck my plans. I felt afraid and paralyzed.

Earning more didn't make the problem go away. Like the financial equivalent of Parkinson's Law, more income just meant more spending. I couldn't out-earn unrestrained consumption. I had to monitor & manage it.

For peace of mind, I found YNAB's philosophy helpful: one-off expenses often repeat predictably on a long-enough time horizon, and can be amortized accordingly. If I itemize all predictable expenses and save a little each month, I know everything is taken care of, and what I really have left over. I never get blindsided because several big expenses hit at once.

I know not everyone has these problems. But I like to talk about my experiences because people don't all need the same things from their finances. It's okay and normal to want control and visibility. Budget apps exist because people find them useful, not because the whole userbase has failed to reach enlightenment and transcend budgeting.

How do you think it compares time-wise to using existing accounting software? Was the time investment worth it to get the control and visibility you now have?

I appreciate the level of detail in this post. I think there's often confusion that plaintext == easy/simple. The real takeaway is: "if you're going to go through all of the trouble of managing your economy, you may as well make sure you control your data and own your system."

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46463644

    env FAVA_PORT=5050 \
        PATH="/opt/homebrew/opt/bison/bin:$PATH" \
    ./scripts/quickstart.sh [args]

Anyone found a better way to keep on top of downloading statements?

Some are easy like the size of your bank balance. Others are much harder.

For example, one asset we have is our home and there are many websites out there that tell you how much it's worth but they each vary an awful lot and change dramatically - so much so sometimes that any savings you've made in the same period are eclipsed.

Similarly, the 401k I've been building up for years seems like a decent amount but trying to calculate what it's worth after taxes and therefore how much you'll have to spend each month seems unknowable.

I think the same is true of investment accounts. If we seeded one with $500 and it's now worth $250, it's easy to think your net worth has risen by $250 but it really hasn't when taxes, fees and who knows what else is taken into account.

So I decided to try this out with my bank who's export options are (one of the mentioned slightly silly multi-line format) XLSX or PDF only, and it appears they've done some "encryption" (really a simple substitution cipher and an embedded font with the characters jumbled up so it renders correctly) to the PDF to prevent this. All the marketing text and headers are in the pdftotext output fine but the actual data is all accented and non-printable characters (also if you copy/paste out).

The substitution cipher does seem stable across a few statements, but still seems like less work to work off the XLSX

This was the cheapest and easiest way to account for stuff for me