Have you ever caught yourself stressing over budgeting or if you’d have enough money by the next paycheck? I definitely have. Usually if I don’t keep track of my income and expenses I tend to get more and more anxious as the month goes by, and for me this is the key to stressing less: tracking things.

Fortunately for me, the environment I grew taught me a few things about basic accounting, and when I received my first paycheck I immediately opened up a spreadsheet. If I had to guess, more than half of the people who track their expenses uses some form of spreadsheet, probably excel, I used google docs because of cloud sync. The great thing about excel is how much you can do with very little. In less than 10 minutes you setup columns for tracking balance, income, expenses, formulas and graphs and you have a pretty decent workflow.

Just like using Linux, excel can be very customizable at the cost of your time maintaining everything working together. Then a few years later I got a job working on a financial system for a multi-billion dollar business, and besides what I learned technically, I learned a ton of accounting. My spreadsheet grew to accommodate for double bookkeeping, multi bank accounts and more complex types of expenses (such as credit card, which you spend it now but pay it later, or paying in installments).

I used this method for over 2 years. By late 2024 the spreadsheet started slowing me down. Constant need for maintenance along with a high complexity problem meant that I’d go for weeks without tracking expenses. Not tracking expenses made me more anxious, and my method for controlling this anxiety was the main cause of it.

But also by the end of 2024 I already had my homelab. There had to be a better way than what I was doing, so I went searching and found Actual Budget. It’s a self hostable budgeting software, which I have been using ever since. If you struggle to record, budget and manage your financial life, give it a go.

Today’s post was shorter than usual, but I’ve just finished a month long plan for investing into a new mobility solution which will complement my bike (and it’s not a car) and I feel Actual Budget deserved the shoutout