Thank you for the kind words :). Reg. simplifying: I heartily agree. Once upon a time (a long time ago now), I had it all down to a single banking institution (bank, credit card, investments), and it was amazing. But then, that didn't work out. Two adults and several employers each across time wrecked that beautiful simplicity.
I show the reasons here <https://reds-rants.netlify.app/personal-finance/how-many-accounts-might-a-person-have/>, which you probably read. That article was originally titled "Simplifying your financial life," and was about how to consolidate and simplify. Which I then changed because when I counted 61 accounts, that didn't fit my dream of simplicity at all :(. Despite all the above, I still make a strong effort to keep things as simple as possible. No day trading for me either, though I still do all the things that I wrote fava_investor <https://github.com/redstreet/fava_investor> for. No point writing software to solve the unnecessary complexity :). On Sunday, April 18, 2021 at 10:22:01 AM UTC-7 cha...@gmail.com wrote: > Very well put-together. I will say that for me the thing that made it easy > to stick with Beancount, and plain text accounting in general, is to > simplify my financial life. > > I have one login for my checking/savings/brokerage/retirement/main credit > card acounts, another couple CCs, my mortgage, and just don't track much > other stuff (like airline miles). > > This simplicity also probably stops me from getting into things that > wouldn't be good for my financial life, like day trading :) > > On Friday, April 16, 2021 at 5:23:16 AM UTC-4 redst...@gmail.com wrote: > >> A few years ago, I found Beancount and very quickly understood how well >> it solved many problems in personal finance software that I'd faced for >> years prior. Beancount's extensibility was a core attraction for me, and it >> was clear the software was worth investing in. I started writing automation >> around it for my needs. Today, a bunch of that automation works >> surprisingly well, though it's taken effort to get here. >> >> I've started writing up some of my Beancount workflows in the hope that >> it saves others tons of time. The first in this series is ledger updates. >> I'd previously posted this in a thread somewhere, but am creating a >> separate thread here, so I can post updates and such. >> >> Link to article series: *The Five-Minute Ledger Update >> <https://reds-rants.netlify.app/personal-finance/the-five-minute-ledger-update/>* >> >> Extract follow: >> * Problem: Updating Your Ledger is a Pain! * >> >> *That’s right, updating your ledger with data from your financial >> institutions is the most laborious and frustrating part of personal >> finance. It doesn’t need to be so with Beancount, which is the point of >> this series of articles.* >> >> *With a little bit of effort upfront, open source tooling can actually be >> way better than commercial solutions, and far more flexible and extensible.* >> >> *Zero Effort Updates* >> >> *The ultimate vision of this set of articles is to have your ledger >> updated automatically with zero effort from you. How close can we get to >> that vision? When I started out, each update would take hours of >> frustrating effort and reconciliation across 60+ accounts at institutions. >> So much so, I only did updates once in a few months. After understanding >> why, and developing solutions, I am now at a point where my ledger updates >> take well less than five minutes.* >> >> *Bringing it down to under five minutes was critical to making personal >> finance productive and fun, because it lets me get away from tinkering, and >> enables me to focus on the actual finances.* >> > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Beancount" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to beancount+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/beancount/95d21680-d52c-4e78-9a88-4130accf2a28n%40googlegroups.com.
