I got tired of Mint’s data collection and connection issues to my accounts so I’ve abandoned them in an effort to build my own budget tools.
This notebook takes CSVs from various sources and combines them into one aggregate CSV, which you can then import into a Notion budget database to tag purchases and more.
Next I’ll work on:
Adding support for importing other transactions (e.g. Venmo)
Creating a notebook with helpful budget visualizations (starting by basically copying the ones from Mint, which I actually don’t think are that helpful or interesting)
Nice!! For the last couple years I’ve been visualizing my BoA and Venmo transactions in Observable each quarter; I gotta figure out an anonymized way to share that notebook. I never found Mint very useful for some reason and it never stuck.
But now each quarter I see all my transactions uncategorized and then go through and write rules for categorizing them (like “does the substring ‘Starbucks’ appear”), and as I write more rules the “Other” category goes down toward zero, and in that iterative process of creating the categories I understand the categories, far better than if the categories were handed down to me from above.
And then I write down the dates for life events and see those overlaid on a timeline of all transactions broken down by category. I’ll share sometime once I anonymize a bit…
Ah that would be amazing! So you categorize them in observable or where are you categorizing them? And how are you piping the transactions into Observable, just via manual CSV export/import or do you have a (Plaid) API integration somehow?
Any additional info you can share would be very interesting.