I made a somewhat of a goal this year to track my spendings better and form healthy budgeting habits. To do so, I decided to use Actual Budget, an open-source software which I installed it on Coolify on my personal server using their Docker image.
I like the usage of accounts there, which are On-budget or Off-budget, the various categories it supports. As a PWA on mobile is good as well, comes in handy for tracking cash spendings.
It’s also actively maintained. I was feeling rather dissapointed that it does not have multi-currency support (there is a workaround, though quite inconvenient), but a few days after I set it up, a new release was launched, and there was an update related to currency display. Not the full conversion of the account sums, but still a step forward. And of course, given I host the data (yes ok on some Hetzner server, but not on some corporations cloud), I count this as a plus as well.
Regarding my budgeting strategy, I’m still unsure - I’d want to track my spendings better a few months then I’ll probably try Zero-Based budgeting? The default on Actual is Envelope budgeting, maybe that? I admit I’m not that informed here to make a decision, but I’d want to be more strategic. See: budgeting-strategies
