Personal Finances With Ledger

Where my money went this time? That is always my question every time I take a look to my monthly bank statements. Over the years I have tried several apps and methods to reduce the panic we get when we have no idea how we acquired that credit card debt, Although all the options have its pros & cons, commonly they share the same problem of locking your data to their chooses proprietary format, giving you the risk of not being able to read when the online service disappears or the app no longer run on newer OS or devises. plain text accounting uses simple text files with a human readable format to store your data, for sure it will win the test of time.

The blog post baking with Emacs motivated me to give plain text accounting a try. In general It felt awesome but complicated, until I got into how he handled financial book-keeping. He was using an Emacs/org-mode “plugin” for [ledger]

My setup

After I run the normal brew dance to install it

brew install ledger

I added some handy stuff to my dot files

alias l.go="cd ~/dev/repos/ledger"
alias l.edit="vim ~/dev/repos/ledger/main.ledger"
alias l.watch="l.go && watch -n 1 ledger bal Assets Liabilities"
alias l.save="l.go && scripts/commit_and_push.sh"

To edit the files I first tried as an opportunity to enhance my VIM skills so I used vim-ledger but it was too much, and I ended procrastinating the task so I switched to Microsoft code with the plugin ledger