How do you handle personal finance without giving data to third parties?

Question

Most personal finance tools require either a direct bank connection (Plaid, Tink) or uploading your data to a cloud service. Both mean giving sensitive financial data to a third party.I've been thinking about this for a while. The alternatives I found are either too manual (spreadsheets) or too complex to set up (Firefly III, Actual Budget with full Docker stack).Curious how HN handles this. Do you: - Use a local tool and accept the setup complexity? - Trust a cloud service and accept the privacy tradeoff? - Just use spreadsheets? - Something else entirely?I ended up building my own solution (happy to share if there's interest), but I'm more curious about what others do.

Rotundo · Accepted Answer

I have everything set up as direct debit. I see, maybe, two invoices a year, if that.To be honest, I don't "do" my finances. I look at my bank statements (on my phone) once every couple of months or so. It never goes wrong.