Hello everyone! So I've been keeping personal books, and now joint, for more than five years. It's pretty comprehensive at this point. First gnucash and then converted over to ledger.
I've always had a very good intuitive sense of how I'm doing based on regular incomings being greater than outgoings, and I want to really move beyond this -- it really seems that no matter what reports I put together, I fundamentally revert back to this intuition as a gut-check. Some challenges and reasons to move beyond this: - Income can be occasional, monthly, more secure or less secure (eg bonus, shares). This is becoming more significant for me. - Long term savings can be locked-in pension, cash, or various forms of long term investments that are sellable (eg buy-to-let, ISA accounts) - Expenses can be optional. Some things can be dropped without significant impact. (Holidays, renovations) - Expenses aren't regular. Some are prepaid for a year (eg insurance), some are prepaid for a few years (eg car). - Expenses can be time-bound. Specifically, large childcare expenses aren't forever. Or lost-income due to unpaid maternity time. Some reports I'd love to get: - See how I'm trending. How would my change of net worth be in 12 months if I continue on the same course? - See how things could change. What if I earned more? Earned less? Took on more expensive childcare? - How is my liquidity position? If I were to take on a longer-term investment, or leverage myself up, how easily could I cover my debts/de-leverage? - How is my liquidity position trending? Does anyone have any good approach to this? I've written both python and nodejs wrappers on top of ledger to generate my own reports, so this is more of a question of how to best make use of double-entry accounting. I really just want to have a superior gut-check. Thanks! Mark -- --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ledger" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
