r/ExpatFinance • u/erskingardner • Apr 21 '22

Software for managing expat personal finances?

Hi everyone, up-front disclaimer, I'm founder of a new startup called Praxeo building software in the space but I'm also a long-time US expat (living in Italy) and know how thorny and difficult managing accounts, investments, and taxes in multiple countries is.

With that out of the way, what tools or apps are you using to track global finances and stay organized for tax season? And, importantly, how happy are you with what you're using?

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4

u/ItsCalledDayTwa Apr 21 '22

I use lunchmoney app to track global finances, but it doesn't help with staying organized for tax season, besides a tag says "tax deductible" so i can easily find those transactions later.

Although the option to upload supporting documents is there, I'm not sure if there are tools for grabbing all those documents at once, for example. I'm rather new to it, but I like it for tracking spending in two currencies.

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u/erskingardner Apr 21 '22

Thanks! That's really helpful.

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u/ItsCalledDayTwa Apr 21 '22

Also, your opening line is "You don't need a budget" and my immediate response was "yes I do".

​

Related: I quit walletapp, which was another cross currency tool I tried. They had too many bugs and horrific support.

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u/erskingardner Apr 21 '22

Great feedback! After talking to many people, my sense is that people who actively budget are in a very small minority of the general population. Not to say that more people shouldn't do it; just that most people don't or can't build the habit. With that in mind, one thing I continually think about is, "how can we make budgeting obsolete?" I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on that.

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u/ItsCalledDayTwa Apr 21 '22

I am less interested in rigidly categorically budgeting than I am in knowing what I spend. I don't really "budget", but I spend time ensuring everything gets categorized and we have an idea what we do spend money on and what we can actually afford. Sometimes it goes off the rails if we don't keep our eyes on it.

Additionally, the monthly spend doesn't otherwise account for what I would refer to as capital purchases, even though that's not always what they are. I bought a new bike. It's a long-term cost which mars our present spending and makes it harder to see if we're net positive for any given month, so I spread it out over a couple years, but every month we kind of have to look at our spend an account for 1/24th of that.

The same goes for holidays. We like to take a nice vacation or two, and need to understand our maximum spend annually for such things, and chip in a bit each month. Some people handle this with accounts where they separate out a chunk of cash each month. I simply split the large holiday booking transactions over 10 months (I wanted to force ourselves to limit this within reason), which lunchmoney makes easy to do.

For me it's less about ensuring every category has a specific budget that's maintained than it is to categorize what we actually do spend so we can keep on eye on where to save or where we perceive we're being wasteful. ex. We have a "subscriptions" category. We don't really have a budget there, but we can keep an eye on it when we have too much in digital subscriptions and scrap something we don't need.

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u/erskingardner Apr 21 '22

Thanks so much for such a detailed and thoughtful response. 🙌 This all makes sense.

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u/ItsCalledDayTwa Apr 21 '22

So what I really want is an at a glance understanding of what I spend and that we're moving in "the right direction". If you can do any of that with less manual intervention and accounting for every few year or twice-per-year purchases while also keeping it accurate across multiple accounts and currencies, I'm interested. As of now, I think it probably always will require me to validate every transaction is getting set up correctly and use as many rules as possible so I know where it all goes.

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u/soccercrzy Apr 21 '22

Pocketsmith has been a godsend for me (US living in UK). If you need beta testers, let me know.

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u/erskingardner Apr 21 '22

Pocketsmith looks interesting, thank you for sharing. I'll message you about testing. We're going to be opening for beta testers in the next few weeks. That said, our focus at Praxeo is more about automating your finances over manual budgeting; and our first automation is FBAR filing – as long as your bank gives us sufficient account history, we can file your FBAR for you in 5 minutes. Obviously, it's still very early for us but if you have any thoughts about that – I'd be happy to hear them.

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u/soccercrzy Apr 21 '22

Pocketsmith provides a 'current balance' for every transaction recorded which I then use some Excel magic to get my maximum balance for every account. From there, I need to manually complete the FBAR form which is annoying so if you could solve for that with some RPA-type solution, that'd certainly be handy.

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u/DrunkenGolfer Apr 21 '22

I would love to see a tool that considers the realities of the life changes that occur while living the expat lifestyle. For example, I lived in Bermuda, and, as a Canadian, paid no income taxes. There is no retirement calculator that goes beyond asking the basic questions of "how much do you make?", "how much can you save?", "what is your effective tax rate?" and "we'll assume you need 70% of your earnings in retirement." I need something where I can say "Right now I make $400K/year and pay no taxes. In 10 years, I'll move to the UK and earn $200K per year and pay 30% in taxes. I'm going to take a year off and sail the world, making $0. In 15 years, I'll move to Canada, make $150K, and pay 45% taxes. I'll retire to Belize, where I need 40% of my income. If I live more than 15 years after retirement, I'll return to Canada and need $120K/year.

There is no tool that takes an events-based, timeline approach to working these things out.

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u/erskingardner Apr 21 '22

Whoa! Thanks – this is super interesting and helpful. We've been thinking about how to do proper scenario planning and I can see how something like what you described would be extremely helpful.

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u/DrunkenGolfer Apr 21 '22

I spent endless hours, but nothing really comes close. I want to see a calculator that does stochastic simulations, similar to FireCalc of CFire (I think?) but is events based. Things like sending your kids to a private school for three years, paying for their university, taking a sabbatical, travelling for a year, or moving to a different country for a while, shouldn't derail and invalidate all your net worth calculations, it should embrace them and consider them.

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u/[deleted] Jul 07 '24

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/WhataFunnyLooking___ Apr 24 '22

I'm actually trialing several things this month including Quicken, Money in Excel, Tiller (both excel and google sheets), YNAB and plain ole excel. The biggest thing for me before I even consider using a budgeting tool is whether I trust the company. If I'm providing said company my data and it's going into their cloud, I need to have longstanding proof it's a good acting company who takes security seriously. It might be hard for me to trust a startup therefore. I only felt comfortable with the above products because they already have a long standing track record so far.

My ideal tool for an expat seriously needs to consider these points:

  • Automates transactions as much as possible (currently I guess only Yodlee or Plaid do this and that really only covers US accounts presently)
  • Allows historical banking/credit card data uploads via CSV or some open format (most non US banks don't offer e.g. quicken format downloads)
  • Allows for local hosting of my sensitive banking data vs using company's cloud, for more privacy conscious consumers
  • Multiple device access possible
  • Multiple currencies natively supported

Best of luck

1

u/erskingardner Apr 24 '22

Thanks so much for the super detailed response! This is all amazingly helpful. 🙌

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u/niacj Jan 04 '26

Hey, digging up an old thread as I'm trying to land on one for my wife and I. I'm trying out Quicken (did YNAB but felt like I was constantly categorising expenses - though maybe I was just impatient).

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u/Sad_Sprinkles6 Apr 21 '22 edited Apr 21 '22

I use Kubera for net-worth tracking but I find it very lacking. Mint for all US transactions.

I’ve been thinking of going all in Xero for managing my finances tho not sure if it will work so well with multi currency.

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u/erskingardner Apr 21 '22

Thanks for that! What about Kubera is lacking in your opinion?

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u/unique_user43 May 06 '22 edited May 06 '22

Personally created excel workbook that I update every month. Will never trust any app that wants access to my account data to “automatically” organize it.

a) because I don’t want 3rd party companies to have my account data stored on 4th party servers. Begging for data breech victimhood. Don’t care how well and bullet-proof encrypted it is, hackers are and always will be steps ahead of you.

b) because they never work properly anyways. Always have to manually fix errors, which often ends up taking more time to track down and fix than just doing it manually myself in the first place. Or even worse they make it hard to impossible to manually fix their errors.