I use YNAB. I thought about building my own now that AI coding make this feasible. But the moat that I can't cross is the integration with my bank accounts. Plaid and the like are too expensive and don't cater to one-off users like me.
Has anyone been able to find a personal financial data provider that has a reasonable price?
As a few others have said Plaid is actually rather cheap if you only have a handful of accounts. I created my own personal finance tracker when Intuit Mint shut down and Plaid costs me $1.80 per month for all my linked accounts which feels very reasonable to me
Check out Lunch Flow, that's the exact reason I built this :) we Aggregate multiple providers behind a simple api for global coverage, and with a pricing friendly to individuals not businesses.
Plaid has a pay-as-you-go option that's only about $2/month for this use case. (I believe the current rack rate PAYG pricing is 30 cents per month per connected bank login).
I think GoCardless stopped accepting new accounts recently, which makes it a bit harder to rely on now.
Feels like the options for EU/SEPA are still pretty limited. I’ve been looking into alternatives as well, curious if you’ve found anything that works well also?
Otherwise, with the scraping approach Woob https://woob.tech/ (FLOSS) works well enough on some banks... It's damn absurd that banks and even supermarkets do not offer authenticated feeds for data export but that's is unfortunately...
Me personally I think banks do their best to push people toward cryptos only because of their crappy services... Even the worst CEx offer better data access the banks...
While I applaud this effort for flagging AI slop generators, I would caution users to not always ignore your "foes".
Reading opposing viewpoints is so important and is becoming a lost art in our society. I encourage you to understand and empathize with people you don't agree with. It will help all of us in the long run.
The second half of that argument was not in this article. The author was just relating his experience.
For what it is worth, I have also gone from a "this looks interesting" to "this is a regular part of my daily workflow" in the same 6 month time period.
AWS Amplify was supposed to solve this. It is built on the AWS CDK. But I found it too clunky and slow and gave up on it.
These days I use SST (https://sst.dev) which is built on top of Pulumi. I find this to be a manageable infrastructure-as-code solution for AWS deployments.
Sybil attacks are very difficult to mitigate while maintaining privacy and decentralization. I see a nod to anti-gaming in this proposal, but it does fully address this.
Why did you choose Bitcoin for this? Other blockchains can have significantly lower fees and allow the distribution of application-specific reward or governance tokens.
An important feature of (some) crypto stablecoins is that they function like cash.
Cash is fungible. And cash in my wallet is not subject to being frozen like a bank account.
One can argue the merits of a digital cash for society. But a crypto-based digital cash is fundamentally different from a digital bank-based payment system.
I did find myself without barely any cash during Spain's blackout and that made it really stressful. It made me value physical currency a lot more.
Now I wish digital payments didn't require a server/ledger connection at all, but I understand that would risk double-spend attacks unless all the computation could be fully trusted, which we can't even guarantee for existing card payments.
I would imagine that the modern definition of gender is less important for healthcare then the biological sex of the patient.
I feel it is one of the unfortunate consequences of "sex" being a noun and a verb, as well as a somewhat prudish desinclination to asking "has external genitalia" and use "gender" instead that lead us to the logomachy we have today.
(Of course the label should not have been gender or sex in either case because all one can determine at birth is whether they see a penis or not, and for less than 1% of humans that's not sufficient to determine their genetic makeup)
This is an interesting example of an AI system effecting a change in the physical world.
Some people express concerns about AGI creating swarms of robots to conquer the earth and make humans do its bidding. I think market forces are a much more straightforward tool that AI systems will use to shape the world.
Cryptocurrency transfers are irreversible, publicly verifiable and pseudonymous. For a privacy focused application, these attributes make crypto a better choice than USD and the traditional banking system.
Only pseudonymous so far as you never accidentally link yourself to a wallet then everyone can know your entire transfer/spending history. It gets people all the time just look at the investigations into various alt coin rug pulls or other fraud.
Irreversible is also not a good thing just ask anyone who had their NFTs stolen during that craze. If someone hacks my bank account or skims my card and transfers the money out the bank can reverse a lot of those transactions. Irreversibility wipes out decades of consumer protection advances.
That's not enough to get people to actually use Monero though given it's got 1/10th the transaction volume of BTC and that's just counting the directly on chain transactions for BTC not those happening on the lightning network. Being off most of the exchanges also makes it difficult for most people to consider using since it's disconnected from the normal market precisely because it's impossible to do KYC to the satisfaction of regulators.
> For a privacy focused application, these attributes make crypto a better choice than USD and the traditional banking system.
So is cash. What we really need are ways of scanning a piece of fiat currency that instantly transfers that money to an account while then disabling the physical copy from the registry as valid. That's how silly I see crypto for anything other than illicit transactions
USPS will happily exchange your cash for a money order without an ID as long as it’s under a certain amount, if you’re willing to take the risk you can mail the money order and transfer reasonably sized checks fully anonymously, there are good reasons large transfers of cash probably shouldn’t be anonymous
If you’re really paranoid, you can mail cash directly if you’re willing that risk. I’m guessing the number of grandparents sending $5 for birthdays is getting smaller, but I’ve seen first hand the number of people willing to send cash to avoid having checks/credit card charges for specific places. There is no more anonymous method of payment than cash regardless of what cryptoBros tell you. This isn’t X-files where wanting to believe is enough
> I lost ~$1,000 in a bad transfer because of a typo.
Was the option of doing a much smaller amount available to validate the account before following up with the full transfer? I've never understood not doing a test transfer first.
Advice: next time pay attention before sending, all wallets ask for confirmation prior to sending, for what is it worth. Always double check, or triple check.
I just got sent real estate documents because the sender used my uncommon firstNameLastName@ gmail, but because they had a typo of the last name it landed in my inbox.
Are we talking about cryptocurrencies? Because they are not based on e-mail.
In fact, I have no idea how your comment is relevant to losing money.
You accidentally got someone else's document. How is that relevant to losing money?
As a reminder, you said: "I lost ~$1,000 in a bad transfer because of a typo.". How can you lose ~$1,000 because of someone else's typo in which an e-mail landed in your inbox?
Handing someone a $1 is irreversible if they won't give it back. All transactions are anonymous and private when using a physical dollar. Crypto has the primary advantage of allowing you to launder money by converting the "Coin" in criminal friendly countries to a fiat currency (dollars) that actually buys stuff. Especially useful when hackers hold your data ransom. Usually what people mean by not like "traditional banking system" is unregulated/lawless.
People who don't like traditional banking system just want a system where they have more money. If they actually wanted to fix fairness etc creating a new system is not a way, you can make the old system fairer like you can make a new unfair one
The old system is a centralized one where there is one entity in charge which gets to set the level of fairness, unless you mean the meta-system whereby anyone can create a new system where they will be the dictator.
Nobody ever addresses the money laundering issue or wash trading that goes on that gives Bitcoin the illusion of liquidity.
>".... one entity in charge which gets to set the level of fairness"
Exactly what is unfair about the current system? The way we insure fairness is with laws and regulation. A system without those will suffer - well - lawlessness.
How is it centralized? The vast majority of dollars only exist as bits in computers in multiple banks all over the world. Doesn't get more distributed than that. Not only that - if you don't like dollars trade it for Euro's or Yen - you can pay your rent, mortgage and buy things with them also.
Other benefits of the current system. If someone steals my credit card I'm only on the hook for $50. My transactions are confirmed in a matter seconds pretty much anywhere in the world. I AutoPay many of my bills. If I set up automatic payments with Bitcoin I wouldn't be able to sleep at night.
There are problems that Bitcoin could help solve - it just isn't replacing currencies. I see a technology in search of a problem.
If you don't think the government is corrupt, I don't know what to tell you. You can keep on using your "fair" government currency (which the government prints by the hundred billion and gives to its billionaire friends) for everything, I'll be over here wishing for alternatives to Bitcoin.
Do you even hold significant government currency, or do you only hold the layer-2 bank currency, and stocks?
Yes my entire retirement is in "gov't currency" called US dollars and Stocks.
I asked for specific evidence or instances of corruption or unfairness. Making an accusation (gov't is corrupt) without evidence or example and saying something is true repeatedly is not a substitute for actual evidence. There are many documented cases of money laundering and wash trades with Bitcoin. These same activities are done using fiat currencies, but in the US at least BT (before Trump), they were illegal and people doing it were subject to criminal investigation. I do agree that there are many gov't policies that have lead to inequities in the distribution of the money that should be addressed.
Bitcoin will only make a fixed number of Bitcoins but they forked Bitcoins into 2 separate coins years ago which some might consider as printing more Bitcoin since everyone got a copy of their existing coins. New ShitCoins are minted to scam people on a regular basis. If anything the barriers to printing too much money are lower with Crypto because it is so easy to make a new coin type. Have you invested in any NFT's lately? What about coin front running? [0]
Thinking Crypto is not subject to corruption is very naive.
>"If you don't think the government is corrupt, I don't know what to tell you. "
If you cannot explain of give examples then I have to assume you don't really know - it is your opinion. I am sure people living in certain deeply corrupt countries - Russia comes to mind - like Bitcoin because their countries currencies are unstable and access to other currencies is limited. That said the reason they like it is BC can be exchanged for stable currencies to buy things. If those stable currencies did not exist BC would be useless for them also.
Has anyone been able to find a personal financial data provider that has a reasonable price?