I'm back on the wagon of tracking every expense. There's a certain
satisfaction in knowing that every cent is accounted for. This time,
I'm using John Wiegley‘s excellent
Ledger command-line accounting
tool. It works with plain text, of course.

I've just figured out how to do my fancy earmarked accounting thing.
I've partially sorted out my cashflow, but I'm not sure how much I'm
supposed to receive over the next few months or what'll happen when I
start working. For peace of mind, I've earmarked enough money to cover
tuition, rent, and food.

I want the earmarked money to be tracked separately from my real
savings so that I know how much money I can actually touch, but I want
to leave it in my regular high-interest savings account so that I can
earn interest on the whole amount. So I need two reports: one showing
what I can consider free and clear, and another that reconciles with
the account summary from the bank (includes earmarked accounts).

Here's the transaction setting up earmarked rent:

10.28 Earmarked for rent
   [Savings:Earmarked:Rent]      $4365
   [Assets:Savings:PCFinancial]

and every so often, I'll post transactions that look like this:

11.02 * PCFinancial ; Transfer for rent payment
   Assets:Savings:PCFinancial     $-485
   Assets:Checking:PCFinancial    $485
   [Assets:Savings:PCFinancial]   $485
   [Assets:Checking:PCFinancial]  $-485
   ; Automatically transfer rent money from Savings to Checking ($485)
   ; This is still part of my earmarked savings until it goes out of Checking
   ; So ledger -s -c bal shouldn't show it as part of my real checking account
   ; or my savings account, but as part of Savings:Earmarked
   ; but ledger -R -s -c bal should show an increase in checking and a decrease in savings
11.05 ! University of Toronto
   Assets:Checking:PCFinancial    $-485
   Expenses:Rent                  $485
   [Savings:Earmarked:Rent]      $-485
   [Assets:Checking:PCFinancial]  $485
   ; Now decrement my earmarked savings
   ; And make sure that Checking reflects actual balance
   ; And that savings is unchanged from before with virtual transactions

The ! signifies a pending transaction that has not yet been cleared,
while * signifies a cleared transaction. ledger can do
partially-cleared transactions too. This is pretty nifty.

Makes me want to have more to track…

Random Emacs symbol: shell-script-mode – Command: Major mode for editing shell scripts.