3d ago

Self-hosted Personal Finance Suggestions

So way back when I used to use Mint.com to help me manage my finances. It worked great until Intuit bought them, ended the app, and redirected their customers to CreditKarma. I hated getting spam messages and haven't used a personal finance app for years. I finally set up ActualBudget and it great for budgeting but I want to keep track of investments, retirement holdings, property, and things outside of the monthly budget. I don't think ActualBudget does that. Are there any self hosted projects that helps me keep track of stocks, property, and other assets?

31 comments

If you want to track all your wealth with one single tool (bank accounts, stocks, bonds, funds, properties...) I would recommend plain text accounting tools suchs as ledger-cli, hledger or beancount. I began with ledger-cli and move later to hledger.
You will learn a lot of double entry accounting and you will keep accounts with plain text files with version control.
It is a rabbit hole...
- Yeah I use software to make my life easier. Not saying it isn't worth learning but time is limited.
  
  Well, PTA basics are quite simple, you can track quite easy your income and expenses. It depends how much things you want to track (cash, banks, mortage, stocks, ...) and the detail you want to achieve (reports, queries, depreciations, budgets, forecasts...).
  The limit is not the tool but your needs or as you said your time.

Actual budget does do that! You can tie it to automatically import transactions via SimpleFIN.
https://actualbudget.org/docs/advanced/bank-sync/simplefin/
Some things you'll need to manually do, like real estate valuations.
- So that actually doesn't do what I want. It will record buying and selling of securities but only as if it were like making purchases or payments in a credit card or bank account. It doesn't keep track of the value of the security or any other asset. For example, I have a Roth account and it has a couple hundred shares of an index fund in it. Actual will only show that I spent several thousand on that index fund (listing it's name in the notes) but not the number of shares I bought and at what price at the time of purchase. I won't be able to track gains or losses for each security, only as a whole of the entire Roth. Actual doesn't do what I want it to do and I don't know enough TypeScript to contribute.
  
  GnuCash will do the sort of security trade accounting you’re talking about. I don’t know how GnuCash compares to the other offerings, but it can be fully offline and has a lot of features.
  
  I think this probably still won’t do what you want, but actual-helpers has a script that will track the balance of an investment account. It won’t track shares or funds separately or anything, but it could maybe be enough if your goal is just net worth tracking?
- Actual Budget is amazing!
- Oh we finally have a way to sync Actual in North America? Might actually start running it again

https://www.portfolio-performance.info/
- Downloading this

I really want this too. Neither Actual nor Firefly III support stocks/funds (open issues for Actual and for Firefly III.
I use GnuCash for my transactions, which I manually export from my accounts as QFX files. Although GnuCash has support for tracking fund values and generating reports, I do this with a custom Python script and Metabase instead.
- Holy shit. This is both awesome and so overkill that I want to try it.
  
  I can share the script on GitHub if anyone is interested. Among other things, it converts funds to their value at the time of the transaction and adds additional transactions to reflect capital gains and losses. This allows Metabase to accurately report net worth over time.

One thats under active development but getting more and more insteresting would be https://maybefinance.com/ – a Rails app. It supports investments and stuff which seems rare. For import they appear to double down on Plaid, which appears to also do a Europe thing which was recently added, however CSV is also supported
- I'll check this one out. I don't see any documentation on it so I don't know if they can sync with my banks.
  
  at least the recent (non-release) docker image should have plaid support for that. It appears to require a few environment variables. Have not yet "plaid" with that but might do so soon.
  Oh and for stocks, it is bound to their Synth thing, 1K request are free per month (not all of my etfs are listed atm tho). The synth api key also goes into the env. (which confuses me right now as it also is an input field in the app, dunno but works)

Since no one has addressed the stocks part yet, give ghostfolio a try:
https://github.com/ghostfolio/ghostfolio
- Ghostfolio looks really neat, thanks! I wonder, can it import data from say Interactive Brokers?

I used to use an app called moneydance several years ago. It was pretty much the only thing that ran on Linux but it was decent.

I use a budget app for tracking income and spending on a transaction basis and then keep the rest of my finances in spreadsheets.

I use Actual and my solution is to just report the differences in investments value at the end of each week as a transaction. It’s not great but it affords me an opportunity to see trends in a different way and make adjustments feeling a little more informed. I even put my car in and just check KBB every year and update it. Helps with the year end net worth evaluation though it’s not the most flexible.

Firefly III constantly drops the previous version of PHP and always needs the current version and of requires PHP 8.4.

I’ve used Gnucash for investment accounting and market valuation. It’s got plenty of features for tracking personal investments.

I spent a lot of time trying to find an open source self hosted tool to replace mint and ended up just moving to Monarch and paying. Honestly it's been a really great experience as if long as you don't mind the annual $50.

firefly iii maybe
- No Firefly doesn't do it. I can't track individual securities or assets only total values of an account. I wouldn't know about any gains or losses nor total shares owned.
- Yes, been using that to track my bank accounts and stuff and it's really helpful, although I had some trouble understanding how to use it since I'm a layperson xd

I haven't used it myself so I'm not entirely sure it's what you're looking for, but paisa might be worth looking into.

Some of the features you're looking for led me to switch to Quicken a few years ago. It's a legacy desktop app (Quicken Online sucks) and it's not very fast but it is still the gold standard for personal accounting software. I've honestly been happier with it than I was with anything else I've tried.
Thankfully Intuit sold it off so they can't enshitify it anymore.

31 comments