Thank you very much to all of you for taking the time to reply. I guess my first mistake was to think that 'creating the ledger' was 90% of the work done. It appears that that is just the start! From your responses, it is clear that I need to spend more time learning bean-query, and then thinking through all of the answers that I want.
@Chary, the Jupyter notebook might be a great addition as it 'keeps state' aka I can go back up the notebook to see older plots. I'd be interested in when you release it. I agree with you and Adrian that with df + csv I probably would end up recreating beancount + fava anyway. @Red, thanks for the detailed reply. *Year by Year:* Ahh! I'm stupid. It says in big letters "Time". Don't know why my eyes skipped that. *Text contrast: *My Fava instance in firefox doesn't match that. The grey is much too light. Screenshot below. *Net Worth: *I think I have some errors with how I created my ledger, because the numbers it spits out seem three times too high. Perhaps it has to do with how I handle transfer of money between my different accounts with different currencies. At least I know where to head for this. My net worth should appear as a negative number due to the accounting sign conventions right? *FIRE: *I accept. It is indeed a bunch of assumptions that I must sort out. My idea was to get a simplified answer assuming the trinity study, 4% SWR and current savings rate+expenses continuing indefinitely. *Restaurants: *Yes! Thank you. Exactly what I was seeking. The Balances (yearly) table + the plot are perfect. As a general aside, where did you guys learn how to use Fava? I have a preference for linearly-written documentation vs discord ask-around or just aimlessly clicking around playing with things to figure it out. The latter options always make me think I'm not yet *getting* how the tool behaves. Thank you all! On Monday, 18 August 2025 at 18:22:55 UTC+2 Red S wrote: > You’ve received a lot of excellent responses and perspectives already. To > add to those, it seems to me like most of the issues you presented either > are already solved and are trivial, and you might need just a bit of > exploration of the Fava UI to get what you want; or are actually very deep > questions requiring custom solutions that you might not realize as such. > Specifically: > > If I load my ledger into fava, I see some poorly-designed plots not useful > for analyses. I don’t get the fuss. > The plot area is too small, the colours don’t contrast well, the tooltips > often goes off-screen, or covers the plot so I cannot see where I am. > > These seem to be UI issues that I don’t have, and I get annoyed rather > easily with such issues. Platform/OS/version info might help. Recording a > screen video and showing what you’re seeing would help a lot. > > Also, from what I can see, there is no way to limit the plots to just 2023 > or 2024 etc. > > Type in 2023 or 2024 or ‘2023 - 2024’ into the ‘Time Box’ on the top. It’s > very versatile. See here > <http://172.19.83.239:5000/am-accounts/help/filters>. > > The most useful view is the Treemap of Expenses, but even their the text > contrast is poor and I can’t seem to generate it year-by-year. The > documentation also seems non-existent. > > The text contrast is 100% fine for me. I imagine this is an OS or browser > setting at > your end. Does it match the screenshot here > <https://beancount.github.io/fava/>? > > But now what? How can I answer questions like: - What is my net worth? > > Ease: trivial. > > That’s what the “Balance Sheet” tab already shows in its default view. > Pick “Converted to USD”. Or use this link > <http://172.19.83.239:5000/main-accounts/balance_sheet/?conversion=USD&time=year+-+day&interval=day> > and > bookmark it. Replace USD with your currency. Replace ‘main-accounts’ with > your title in your ledger: > option "title" "Main accounts" > > > - What is my savings rate? > > Ease: trivial. > > Income Statements -> Net Profit (default). Use “Converted to “ and > “Yearly”. > > > - What is my FIRE date at the current savings rate? > > Ease: moderate - complex, but there are solutions that make this > reasonably easy. > > This is a much deeper question than you might realize, involving dozens of > assumptions in your mind that no good software can figure out for you. What > do you consider your threshold for retirement? Will you earn at the same > rate between now and then? What’s your expense profile between now, > retirement, and at various milestones? Eg: are there loans/mortgages to be > paid off? Major expenses? Unforeseen expenses and how you’ll mitigate for > those? Withdrawal pattern in retirement and how it might be based on how > well the market is doing? Will you downsize? How will your tax rate and > profile change? Assumptions about the market in the next few decades. Etc. > > I personally use some scripts with Beancount to feed all my ledger data > into a calculator like ficalc.app that includes things I said above > > > - How much have I been spending on Expenses:Restaurants year-over-year? > > Ease: trivial. > > Income Statment -> Click on Restaurants in the treemap -> “Changes” -> > Pick “Yearly” on the top right -> “Balances (Yearly)” > > This is really nice: it gives you stacked bars that instantly let you zero > in on problem areas while also giving you an expandable tabular treemap. > > Must I generate bean-queries for everything? Because that rather defeats > the purpose of a ledger file in my opinion. I could just as easily list my > postings on CSV and write python queries to it. > > I’d imagine 85-95% of your needs would not need bean-queries or other > advanced solutions when you’re starting out. That’s the problem Fava > solves. As your needs get more sophisticated, you’ll find yourself solving > those. Beancount makes it very easy to write these custom solutions as > fundamentally, Beancount is a versatile python library into your > double-entry ledger. > > See a sample article > <https://reds-rants.netlify.app/personal-finance/computing-taxes-with-beancount/> > > for example, or Fava-Miler <https://github.com/redstreet/fava_miler>, > which are among many things I use Beancount for. > > What’s more, I don’t see how it could be interactive and *fast*? In the > absence of a quick feedback loop, what exactly is the tedium of writing out > all of my postings going to get me? > > Generally, answers everyone wants to see like some that you asked above > are trivial. Advanced queries require custom solutions. > > Hope that helps! Happy accounting! > > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Beancount" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to beancount+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. 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