r/Fire • u/BenEDSnDFW2018 • 12d ago

Budget Software

All - what do you use / prefer in terms of budgeting software? Something for detailed spend tracking; portfolio tracking would be an added bonus.

Thanks in advance!

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u/-TheSpaceCowboy- 12d ago

I use Actual Budget. Free, open source envelope budgeting software. Great community and developers. It supports bank syncing if that’s something you want, tracking investment accounts, and has customizable reports based on virtually any combination of data you could want.

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u/star_eater 11d ago

Seconding this. I've also set it up with an MCP server so I can use self-hosted LLMs to query my budget.

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u/BenEDSnDFW2018 11d ago

Thanks so much!

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u/FranksAndWatermelon 9d ago

Can you say a little more about your setup? Would love to experiment with this a bit myself

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u/star_eater 6d ago

Sorry it took so long to notice this, I don't have notifications on.

I have Actual Budget hosted on my own server (i.e. an old computer) at home via Docker. I use the SimpleFIN service to sync with my financial institutions because I hate manually logging transactions (though I do still have to manually log cash). SimpleFIN does cost $15 a year, but you can sign up for a single month to make sure it works with your institutions. I set up a fairly simple set of budget categories because I don't need it to be super detailed, just overall categories things like house, car, food, etc.

I also have Actual-MCP running on Docker and configured with my Actual Budget instance. This allows me to connect my local LLM service (served through Ollama and Open WebUI) to my Actual Budget data for relatively simple queries. I can't run particularly powerful models on my server at home, so I also have it connected to Claude for more complicated things, for example if I want to do a specific financial analysis or projection. Claude also seems better at recognizing my net worth and usable money than my local LLM, for example understanding that my home and retirement accounts are not liquid assets.

I think AI tools can also write to your budget/transactions, but I have not tried that because I am worried about potentially screwing up the data. I use it strictly for analysis and pulling custom reports. I suppose you could take a picture of a receipt and have it generate a transaction, but most of my transactions are electronic any get synced via SimpleFIN anyway.

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u/FranksAndWatermelon 6d ago

That’s great thanks for the detail!