The old-timey way to manage your money:
Throw your cash into buckets
Spend the month shooting holes in them
And try not to let them run dry
Fun for the whole family.
A simple data system for planning personal budgets and tracking your spending. Works on Linux CLI and also as local web interface. The guiding principles are simplicity, verifiability, and minimal user effort for maximum value.
Data is taken directly from bank records, downloaded in CSV form and never modified. App user inputs are tracked in human readable CSV files and everything is tracked in a GIT repo to provide easy rollback.
The data is read directly from banking CSV files. Every month is completely isolated from the previous and next. There is no data carried from month to month, other than the unspent funds in the cistern.
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Does plim stand for Plugging Leaks In Money? No, that’s not a bad description, but plim is not an acronym - it’s an old English dialect word. Did you know that if you let a wooden bucket dry out, the wooden slats will shrink and the bucket will develop leaks? So you never let them dry out. Instead, you keep the wood wet so the slats will stay swollen and the joints will be tight. You need to keep your buckets plim.
And that’s the metaphor I’ve built my budget app around. Allocate your money into spending category buckets and then keep topping them up so they don’t run dry.
I recently spent a pile of time trying to decide how plim should track debts: both the money you owe to others and the money they owe you. That covers everything from your mortgage to the $30 you loaned Dave at karaoke last Tuesday.
But a solution that covers all of them caught me by surprise — and made plim simpler in the process.
Don’t tell anybody, but I’ve finally lured a junior programmer down into my basement. He came for the promise of a few bucks and a little fun, and while he was poking around in my source code cellar, I quietly threw the deadbolt and locked him in.
He’s been there for a week and still hasn’t noticed. And you wanna know the best part?
We’re actually getting shit done.
In the last update, I described plim as a finacial rendering engine with a built-in time machine. What I meant was that it doesn’t just store a ledger of what your finances look like today - it keeps a record of everything that has happened, and when, so it can start from the beginning and replay those changes to compute what your finances looked like at any point in time.
Well that engine is done now, so let’s take a look.