Understanding Nothing

Personal finance software universally sucks. I have two theories for why this is:

Firstly, there actually is no personal finance software. It’s all just dumbed down versions of corporate accounting software. No matter how it’s dressed up to be ‘user friendly’, at the heart of it all is the core underlying assumption that you want to run your personal life like an accountant runs a business. Many people have been sucked into this way of thinking, in large part because it’s the mindset that using such software foists upon you, but really it’s a poor model.

The second reason is that it’s almost all created by Americans. By itself, of course, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. But it becomes a bad thing when it reflects their view of the world, which, particularly in matters of personal finance, doesn’t really hold true in other countries. And I’m not just talking here about the assumptions that are generally built into how relatively complex things like mortgages, or sharedealing, or taxes, or retirement accounts, etc work in different countries. Mostly I’m talking about the really simple things like not assuming everything is in US dollars! Sure, there’s generally a token nod to other currencies, but most finance software cope can’t even cope with simple multi-currency transactions (like all the times in Switzerland when I got a bill in Swiss Francs but paid in Euros), never mind the more complicated ones (like the time I bought my bus ticket from Bulgaria to Macedonia using my last remaining levs and made up the difference in Euros). And because most people who write finance software have never lived somewhere like New Zealand where the smallest coin is the ten cent piece, they tend not to cope very well with things like Swedish Rounding, where your total is rounded if you’re paying by cash (but not if by card).

Of course it’s possible to do these things in most software, but only if, under theory #1, you can think like an accountant and do the equivalent of lots of complex ledger entries. But lots of things that are deliberately really complex in business accounting are commonplace in people’s personal lives – like asking your friend if they have eighty cents to avoid needing to break another €10 note.

Most people get round all this by just ignoring it. Who really wants to have to record that their shopping bill was €14.80 but eighty cents of that came from Steve anyway? Well, me. I’m a firm believer in the “track every penny” school of thought. And I hate how hard it is for me to do so. In the 5 months of this year so far, I’ve been in 9 different countries. I keep every receipt, and record every item from every one of them. And it’s much too much hassle. I’ve tried numerous different software packages, and they’re all terrible for me. There’s a lot of innovation in the area recently with sites like Mint and Wesabe springing up and giving the old faithfuls of Quicken and Microsoft Money a serious run for their money. But there’s increasingly an assumption that most of your spending detail can be automatically obtained from your bank records so you don’t need to type it in. It makes sense for them to concentrate there, as having to painstakingly enter all your spending is the thing that puts most people off ever actually keeping track of where their money is going. But the more that part gets automated away, the less these companies work on making it really easy to enter transactions manually — which leaves me worse off, as I do the vast majority of my spending using cash, and my bank records thus tell me next to nothing. Even on the rare occasion where I pay for my groceries on my debit card, I don’t just want a total spend entered—I want a full breakdown of every line item. I want to know at the end of the year just how much I spent on milk or eggs, not just on “groceries”.

So I want software that works for me. That assumes I’ll be travelling a lot and working with multiple currencies. That makes it easy for me to enter detailed records rather than a chore. That deals with all the little details I raised last time I ranted about this.

It may be that I’m the only person in the world that actually wants this software, but I suspect I’m not. In the current economic climate people are watching their pennies carefully. Almost every personal finance book suggest that people literally track every cent they spend for at least a month. I think lots of people would like to know much more about where their money goes, but the pain of keeping track currently outweighs the benefits for a lot of people. So I want to make that easy.

I have a detailed vision of how that software would work, but I can’t build it by myself. Anyone want to help?

All my playing with end-of-year travel plans has given me itchy feet. I’d like to go somewhere interesting for a few days sometime soon, but I don’t really care so much where. This is something the internets are meant to help with, but though the US is well served with any number of useful quirky travel sites, Europe doesn’t have so many of the “Just show me good deals” versions if you don’t live in certain key cities. So, in the DIY spirit, I wrote my own. I gathered a list of all the commercial airports I could find in Europe, grouped them by country, and wrote a script that searched on ITA in turn for all flights from Tallinn to any airport in that country over the next 30 days, and tell me the cheapest date to travel there. It’s a slightly nasty site to screen-scrape (and I’m pretty sure they don’t have any alternatives that you don’t have to pay for, as some of the puzzles they set job applicants involve scraping the site), and the code certainly isn’t pretty, but, thanks to Google Charts, the results are:

(Green is the cheapest, red the most expensive, yellow somewhere inbetween.)

My plan is to widen this beyond Europe, have it run every day, set some threshholds and have it email me any time something interesting appears. I suspect, however, that I’m much better served from Riga:

Thankfully there’s a comfortable bus to there!