Personal Finance with Beancount — Part 2

I Failed

Well… that didn’t last long.

After writing about my plan to move my personal finances to Beancount, I started setting things up.

And I failed.

Not because Beancount is bad. In fact, it’s a really elegant system. The idea of describing your entire financial life in plain text files is still incredibly appealing to me.

But once I started modeling my real finances, reality kicked in.

Setting up the accounts, modeling investments, dealing with imports, thinking about how to structure everything… it quickly turned into a lot of work. Much more than I had anticipated.

I love the idea of tracking everything down to the last cent. I really do. I’ve done it before with GnuCash and I enjoyed the precision.

But this time the cost-benefit analysis just didn’t work out.

The amount of effort required to get everything running — and to keep it running — was simply too high for the value I would get out of it.

Sometimes the elegant technical solution isn’t the practical one.

So for now I’m sticking with Actual Budget.

It works.
It’s simple enough.
And most importantly: I actually use it.

A Small Lesson

One thing I’m slowly learning about personal finance tools is this:

The best system is not the most powerful one.

It’s the one you actually maintain.