Fellow hackers,
What do you use to track expenses and budgeting? Something that is smart enough to categorize and learn from changes to categories. Has good charts and reporting.
I tried Mint a while back and it was littered with ads.
Personal capital doesn’t allow me to upload historical data so no comparison of trends for a while.
Have not tried anything else.
Edit: forgot to mention that I dont mind paying a reasonable monthly fee.
Thank you
I use Toshl.com, $36/yr
Depends how you want to budget. If you are looking for zero based. IE every dollar is accounted for and itemized then Every Dollar was the best however I just stopped using them as they dropped support for Amex. I have since been on an extensive search to replace and and have settled on Pocket Guard. it is extremely powerful and has a great UI check it out.
I use the good old spreadsheet.
Otherwise, I use Expensify to track certain expenses by category. I would still need to manually export and import the csv file for some of my accounts though.
Mint to track daily new expenses. But then export the CSV to custom coded Excel spreadsheet for end of month summary
In addition, I would also recommend (if you haven’t already) finding something handy to track your net worth over time (list of assets, totaled, and a list of everything you owe, summed and subtracted from that).
Excel or Google Sheets works fine, and it takes very little time to maintain (updating quarterly is probably sufficient).
This was the single most useful stratagem that helped me establish (and hit / exceed) long-term financial objectives.
Also, now I’m less hesitant to splurge on something, because I can see how little it matters in the bigger picture (we aren’t extravagant spenders by nature, which is why this mattered).
nerdwallet!
A homeless Porsche Panamera Turbo has entered the chat…
Good suggestion though about tracking your assets in one place, over time. It’s also helpful when you eventually get to estate planning, and you need to provide a list of such things to a stranger.
It’ll work itself out. While I’ve been dragging my feet on cars, I’ve been shitting money on plane tickets this year.
Good suggestions, will give it a try.
I’m trying to avoid manual work of spreadsheets. Ideally a system that learns previous categorization automatically and applies instead of having me do every time.
Also trying to avoid free as I do not want my data to be the product. Hence avoiding mint.
Interesting, I was looking at that but didn’t feel easy to use and felt more focused for business than personal use.
I am trying a few right now. Will see what works best
Or just make a load of money and not budget at all.
I just use an excel sheet and shake my head at my monthly bone head expenses.
That doesn’t work - life inflation will get you to living paycheck to paycheck, irrelevant of how much you making unless it is soo much you just can’t keep up spending it 
I’m still on the oldie Quicken Money. My wife being CPA, loves the ability to edit every part of the transaction if needed to.
You just need to download data periodically. Helped me catch a few credit card renewal fees as they love to add them at the end of the month and close the monthly statement to show you next month’s transaction, and you never see that annual fee unless you dig on their site.
Pocket guard does all that and lets you create hashtags to track additional items or categories.