10 years of personal finances in plain text files
January 2026 will mark 10 years since I started storing my personal finances in plain text files using Beancount. Since January 2016, I’ve taken out about 30-45 minutes every single month to download my monthly bank statements and import them into my Beancount ledger. There’s a lot to talk about here, but let’s start with some fun numbers! The 10 year old Beancount ledger 10 years of financial transactions is a lot of data! All in all, my ledger contains over 45,000 lines of Beancount entries spread across 16 plain text files. All of it is stored in a finances directory (version controlled) on my laptop. Here’s a snapshot: ❯ find . -name “*.beancount” | xargs wc -l 4037 ./includes/2020.beancount 3887 ./includes/2018.beancount 27 ./includes/cash.beancount 4398…
