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Comment on Ask HN: Spending Tracking Tools

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YNAB was often recommended, although I cannot personally understand "budgeting" as a concept and how YNAB helps you achieve your financial goal.

(When I was a graduate student with $20k income, I spent a lot of time thinking about how to save money. Then, one day, all of a sudden, I realized that I should use that time thinking about how to earn more money instead. These days, I earn more than 10x that number, and the only rule I try to abide by is do not buy things I don't need, as I already have a good spending habit. I never felt as financially constraint as when I living on ~$2000/month.)

I'm in the same boat, but have decided one day to take a closer look at my spending and trends over time, but it appears all the apps are budget-first. YNAB is one of the better ones though, you can install a browser extension for better reports and completely ignore the budgeting parts and use it mostly for the bank sync part, and it works. For US banks I suppose it will work like a charm. I'm in the EU and due to specificity of my bank there were issues, so ultimately I ended up with a custom solution processing .csv files exported from the bank.

Where you have enough money an expenses tracker is more useful than budgeting applications

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