i haven’t used zapier + dropbox, but i am using zapier + google drive to track the exact same type of goal. i thought setup was pretty easy, zapier has good documentation and guides you through the process well. they even send me emails every time “there might’ve been an error with your zap,” which is usually google drive 404ing or whatever.
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Actually, I don’t think this would work very well. YNAB does not have
"Dropbox integration" so much as just “it uses Dropbox to store all its
data”. So at the very least this would require reverse-engineering the
format it uses and writing a program to parse it and look for whatever
changes you want to track. (It appears to use JSON so this would
definitely be possible, but not at all easy unless you have certain
programmer/hacker skills, and even then it’s hard for me to say how well it
would work without actually trying it).
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I’m interested in this. Happen to have an example of that spreadsheet?
You do not have to do anything seperate to set this up and it is fairly easy to do. If your already using dropbox to save your ynab data then its a breeze. Just find that location where it is saving and then look for a *.ynab file. A good way to determine which one you are using if there are multiple is just to make a change to your budget and save, go back to dropbox and check the date.
@byorgey Have you used ynab? It uses dropbox to save your files. You are not correct and it requires no reverse engineering to set this up.
I have had this setup for a good 5-6 months now and it has worked fantastic to change my habits. When I first started using it I would just import my bank transactions a couple times a week and that would be it. Now I have taken to making sure to enter in everything because I want all those data points. Now that I am consistently using ynab it is having good effects in my life as my money habits are much better now. YNAB + beeminder has been one of my most effective goal to date in terms of positively influencing behavior. I am excited to see where it takes me 1-2 years from now with steady consistency.
Give it a shot I believe it is easy to setup and worth it for the positive habit that it will provide you with.
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Glad I’m not the only YNAB/Beeminder lover. The YNAB system puts you in a complete mindset shift. You’re planning ahead and then doing those things. It’s so nice to see all the plans come to fruition! Saving for a wedding weekend and then just relaxing and having fun without worrying about money is what sold us on it. Our friends complained about how much money they spent and we ended up being $100 under budget! Beeminder seems like it’s a great complement to it.
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FWIW, I’ve just started a very simple beeminding of finances. I have a “fun money” do less goal in which I manually count everything in a small category of expenditures. Current list is anything where I’m doing something out rather than in (buying a coffee rather than coffee beans, drinks at a bar, etc), any purchase of alcohol, desserts or snacks, fiction books. Essentially things that are obviously luxuries or things I should be doing a bit less of anyway. I then just manually enter them into a goal on the android app and have a weekly budget.
It’s low-tech but is very in keeping with my use of beeminder as primarily a behaviour change rather than life tracking tool, and so far it seems to be working pretty well.
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This has been attempted: GitHub - aldanor/pynab: A minimalistic library designed to provide native access to YNAB data from Python
Some discussion about the interface from the author: Reddit - Dive into anything
I haven’t tried any of it.
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I’m pretty intrigued by the “fun money” Do Less goal idea but worried that I won’t have a clean enough definition for what counts as discretionary. Maybe starting with your out-rather-than-in criterion and adding to a list of things that count as you encounter them? I’m just worried about paying insufficient attention…
@j11 Thanks for finding pynab! That’s awesome, though I’d feel more reassured if YNAB officially supported it. Still it looks well done enough that I may want to use it.
I’ve basically got two lists in my fine print: Things that definitely do count and things that definitely don’t
FWIW, here is the current fine print (the goal is secret so I can’t link to it):
Rules: This tracks money spent purely on luxuries.
Things that definitely count:
- Fiction books.
- Eating or drinking out.
- Bottles of booze.
- Computer games.
- Snacks, desserts, etc.
Things that definitely don’t count:
- Travel.
- Grocery shopping for actual meals.
- Work related expenses.
Everything else is discretionary but should err in the direction of it probably counts.
I expect both lists will grow over time, but between what’s currently on there I think most of my variable spending (e.g. not rent, bills) is accounted for.
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Event report: I don’t necessarily consider this a major flaw, or even necessary a bad event in its own right, but we talked a while back about cases where beeminder can anchor you to doing worse than you otherwise would, and I experienced a partial instance of that with this goal earlier.
The fun money goal caused me to get an ice cream earlier, because I was walking past, went “Hmm. It’s quite hot and I’m hungry and I’ve got plenty of budget in the fun money goal so I actually could just spend 2.50 on an ice cream and it probably is worth that much to me”.
I’m not saying I definitely wouldn’t have done this without the goal, but it was explicitly the goal that changed my mind from “I’ll just go home and eat something” to “Yes I will get an ice cream”.
This isn’t intrinsically a problem. If the result of the goal is that I meet my spending targets but buy myself a lot more little treats rather than eating and drinking out a lot, I’d consider that a positive change, but it was interesting.
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But you’re doing worse than you otherwise would on a goal you do not have 
?
Exactly, It sounds like you’re doing great on your spending goal nice work.
How many little treats you have would be a separate goal. (Or you could multiply the price so an ice cream cost you $25 from your budget, but I’d rather beemind it separately.)
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Well the goal is “spend less money on luxuries” which is intrinsically a sum of many smaller goals “spend less money on this particular luxury”. It is a weird side effect that the overall goal causes me to do worse on many of these sub-goals, even if the aggregate effect is that over all I do better.
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I recently figured out a problem with my reverse odometer “food spending” goal. I’d originally clicked “no mercy recommits”, because if I went over my budget, I didn’t necessarily want a hefty week-long buffer slapped on top of my graph – too tempting to spend right up to it. But then I took my wife and friend out for a big fancy restaurant meal at a pricey bar and grill that was hosting one of our favorite bands, an evening we’d looked forward to for months. Needless to say the bill was pretty steep, and I went over my food budget for that portion of the month. Then I realized that, due to the nature of reverse odometer goals, once I’d gone over I’d literally have no ability to affect my graph for the better; I’d just have to keep derailing every day until my graph caught up with my previously projected budget, potentially compounding my overspending mistake by hundreds of dollars. I reclassified that meal as “gift” in YNAB ('cause it was part of my wife’s birthday present), which took it out of my “food spending” category, and my graph got back into the green. But I quickly turned “no mercy” recommits off, in case that happened again. Being forced to derail for multiple days running with no ability to fix it is no fun. Just a peril of the reverse odometer format that I’d never realized before.
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Most derailments, even no-mercy ones, cause the road to jump to where the data actually is, i.e. to include the overspend and carry on from there. If you’ve specified the road slope in terms of N dollars per week [[1]]( “(as opposed to having set a goal value of spending no more than N dollars by a particular date)”) then it should be fine.
Or my mental model is buggy and I’d welcome a patch!
PS: I do like the reclassification of this particular item as ‘gift’, not least because it fits that pattern of spend better than the pattern of grocery purchases.
Interestingly, reclassification the exact same trick that marketers use to persuade you to eat more cake: they label it as a ‘treat’ to disguise the true category. Conversely, your reclassification exposes the true category.
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I beemind my finances too, but not spending. Student loans.
My student loans are broken into 5 separate accounts and I created my own auto-data agent to visit the loan servicer’s website every day and scrape the table they update about 60% of days with their interest calculation. (github.com/yebyen/mohela-bzzbzz)
This has worked out great for me, for one I am able to stop reading statements, because I’m so far ahead (8 months now) that every month they mail me a paper that says all of my loans have $0 due for the month. I have basically begun to disregard the loan servicer’s “minimum payment” requirement as a recommendation that will earn them the most interest.
I use a combination of my Beeminder graph(s), my Mint goal, and my monthly statement to keep an eye on how I’m doing. I changed my payment strategy to making a weekly payment, one that I know is large enough so it will cover at least the interest on all 5 loans, and then once a month picking the loan that is the least “ahead” on payments and the highest interest rate, and making a bigger payment on it.
They compound interest daily, so this strategy actually saves me some money on interest, and it has the effect of actually making my balance amount on the graphs appear to be consistently going down every week; that makes me feel good about pouring my money in to pay down the loans.
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seven months later…
- i gave up on goal #2 cause it never really worked for me.
- i archived #1 for awhile because it had really become a habit. but i found that when i wasn’t actively beeminding it, i only updated once a week or so instead of at least every 3 days. this made the whole process take longer, plus i was less aware of exactly how much was coming in and out. (which has been slightly NOT ideal since i’ve been living in NYC this summer, so much more goes out than before…) i restarted this goal a couple days ago to get back on the horse, so to speak!
i also realized during today’s update that i started this goal 13 months ago, so my crappy little google doc now holds more than a year of ALL my transactions and details about them! i wish i’d kept historical balance details - i’ve just been updating them in place. will definitely start doing so this year. but it’s still cool to easily see that i’ve made exactly 784 transactions since starting. (is that too high? weirdly low? i have no idea, but it’s fun.) maybe i should try to beemind doing fewer in the next 13 months…
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If you’re committing to doing this long term, it can be good to use an app that is designed for this sort of thing, which will keep track of balances and make sure that your transactions are consistent.
I use Money Manager EX (free, open-source, cross-platform, easy-to-use personal finance software)
I’d say it’s in the Goldilocks transaction range.
It’s about 2 a day, definitely not too high, or weirdly low.
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I think I found the issue. This should have been budgeted as a separate, one time event. We do this for weddings (budgeting $10 a month for a year before the night of the wedding). This way, we don’t feel guilty about spending money that night at all!
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I’m living somewhere where I can mostly rely on spending with my card rather than cash, so I have a goal setup to make sure to import my card statement into YNAB every 4 or 5 days and make sure I’m still on target with my budget. The tricky thing always is to remember to check in with my budget before I spend money – esp for higher-priced one-time-only electronics purchases or web services (apparently, my achilles heel). I have yet to figure out a useful BM goal to help me work against that tendency. Having a ‘do more’ goal to check YNAB before spending would seem too punishing if I was having trouble forgetting – sort of too many layers of systems to check for that to be practically manageable.
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Hmm, my method for this is to save up for those services. I don’t know if I have an Achilles heel.
Habits we have:
calculate net worth every Saturday morning (manual but I love doing it)
Every two weeks -compare to all of my accounts. Maybe this is the difference. I’ve never imported transactions. YNAB definitely works well.without the automatic part. Maybe your setup is too automatic?
Plus we have kids so I don’t buy anything anymore unless I’m planning on selling it on eBay!
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