Lunch Money is a great tool for tracking your personal
finances. I wrote about it a couple months ago in my comparison of personal
finance tools. However, the way most people use it, it will track finances
from your net income. That is, it will track your finances for the portion of
your paycheck that hits your bank account – because it uses your bank and
credit card transaction history to track your finances. And that’s fine for a
lot of people, but it won’t give you a complete view of your finances. In
particular, if you’re only tracking finances from your net paycheck, you’re
probably not tracking your 401(k) contributions, taxes, and other paycheck
deductions.
A couple months ago, I discovered that the
classifier-reborn gem (a popular
Jekyll plugin to group related posts) was essentially incompatible with Ruby 3.
I use Jekyll to build some of my own websites (including this one), and I wanted
to be able to upgrade to Ruby 3 while continuing to use classifier-reborn.
Although I was initially frustrated that classifier-reborn didn’t yet support
Ruby 3 out of the box, I realized that I might be able to implement Ruby 3
support myself and contribute back to the project since classifier-reborn is,
after all, open source software. The pull requests I submitted turned out to be
some of my biggest open-source contributions yet, and I’m proud of the work I
did!
For years, Mint was the first thing people would
recommend to anyone looking for a budgeting or personal finance tool. More
recently, competitors like You Need A Budget
(YNAB), Personal
Capital, and Lunch
Money have grown in popularity. Over
the last couple years, I’ve spent some time using all of these apps because I
wanted to explore the alternatives to Mint. Let’s explore the similarities and
differences to see what might work best for you.
ConfessIt is an examination of conscience app for Catholics. Available on Android, iOS, and the web. The Android version has 4.7 stars in the Google Play App Store after more than 730 reviews.
About
I'm a senior software engineer at Strava. I have experience in a range of technologies including Linux, Ruby, PHP, Scala, Java, SQL, Javascript, and Android. In my increasingly scarce free time, I develop some websites and Android apps. I maintain ConfessIt, an app for Catholics, with a 4.5 star rating after more than 550 reviews and 28,000 downloads.
I graduated Summa Cum Laude from the Colorado School of Mines in 2011 with a degree in computational and applied mathematics; I subsequently completed a Master's of Education at the University of Denver as part of the Denver Teacher Residency. After a short stint of full-time teaching, I returned to the field of software engineering at SpotX, where I worked for 3 years before joining Zen Planner and finally moving on to Strava.
