I am curious, what do people use for budgeting?

Mint seems like the most feature rich, but not only do I not want to support their parent company because of their Tax lobbying... but I don't trust them from a privacy standpoint (Considering its free).

YNAB and Monarch both seem like really good options. But I have not looked into them much yet.

I currently use Copilot (iOS only... really just iPhone, no iPad app). I have found it really nice but the lack of a web or iPad app makes doing some tasks more of a pain.

I am curious if anyone has found any that work well for couples that don't have joint finances but do obviously share some expenses. My partner and me struggle with figuring this out and inevitably loose track of certain small things. Rent and standard expenses are easy. But going out, groceries, etc. those are the complicated ones.

I know there is an app you can use that you can mark transactions as shared, but I don't want to use that for privacy reasons. I would love if there was an app that had some functionality like that built in without making it so we have one account that just has all of our accounts in it.

I use a home-grown system[1] that does not require sharing credentials with a third party, has partial/fully automated (depending on financial institution) fetching of transactions, auto-categorization learned from your previously categorized transactions, and the possibility to create pretty dashboards that can be shared with others.

It's surprisingly simple (just a few lines of code) for personal use.

[1]: https://sagar.se/blog/where-is-the-money/

Thanks for the post Sagar, I'm the maintainer of reckon [1], a tool to help categorize transactions, which I used in ledger. There are a lot of interesting tools for doing plain text accounting [2] and I'm always interested in learning about new ones.

Reckon uses TF/IDF with cosine similarity, but I would be interested to see how you use Random Forest. Please post your code somewhere, I'd love to see it and learn something new!

[1] https://github.com/cantino/reckon [2] https://plaintextaccounting.org/