Thursday, 25th January, 2024

My friend is putting all his financial items into hledger file and using Paisa. I’d decided I’d put all mine into a Google Sheets. I’ve had one since 2010 for various money related things , mortgage tracker, pension, investments, utilities, and forecasting and it seems sensible to use it for transactions as well. However, I keep wanting to put it all into hledger.

Hledger (and friends) are all very good and I think beat programs like GNUCash and all the various apps. They are so flexible and can handle pretty much every financial situation. However, they are all backward looking and don’t make it easy to do predictions. At least for me anyway. I’m always in a spreadsheet for doing forward predictions. If I save x then that might be y by the time I’m 50 etc. Or how much tax might I pay if I make a different pension contribution. And my biggest uncertainty, is how much money should I put into a ISA such that I could be FI by 50, but ensure we have enough in the pension as well.

All I want is monthly summaries of what we spend over a decent amount of time so I can get a good average of what we might spend later on. I could still use hledger for that, and save the summary table into the spreadsheet. Which is what I’ve done the past three years.

I’ve used spreadsheets for years and years at work, so I’m very used to them, and Google Sheets just makes it easy to access anywhere. I can generally do things faster in it than a text editor. I should quit debating it and get on with the spreadsheet.

I’m going to get bored of it in a few weeks and move onto something else anyway.

I remember when I used to run dokuwiki and not be constantly looking to switch back and forth between software. I ran it for about 4-5 years, and used to put everything into it. Not masses but quite a lot of lists and notes. I also had a private section where I’d made monthly templates and would write myself a summary of the month. Covering expenses and what I’d been doing. Unfortunately one day I did the update and the wiki never came back. I probably didn’t try very hard but that resulted in the end of it and I fell out of the habit of using it and so never returned. A while later I did reinstall dokuwiki but somehow I couldn’t get back into using it again. I miss dokuwiki but I think I miss that time period more than the software. It could’ve been any software.

Not sure I want to make a new blog. It’s going to be quite a lot of effort, especially if I do everything from scratch. I suppose I can come back to it.

The Intel N100 mini PCs are really good value. Would be ideal for the radio shack PC. I was going to get a used HP/Dell/Lenovo thing from ebay but these are the same price or cheaper and faster.