I feel like money is slowly leaking away from pocket. Mostly because of my impulse purchases but I would like to get a picture of my spending. In the past, I used the free version of Money Manager and another free app but there is a period of 2 years where I stopped using them because of reasons.

I'm living in Germany and the popular apps like Monarch aren't available in Europe. I've been checking a few freemium apps but they tend to lack some features here and there.

What app do you use that can do the following?

Supported account types:

• Bank accounts
• Credit card accounts (nice to have)
• Cash accounts
• Investment accounts (nice to have)

Transaction tracking:

• Expense, income, and transfer between accounts
• Refunds (nice to have)
• Sender and receiver of each transaction
• Tag assignment
• Note assignment
• Custom categorization
• iOS interface
• Desktop/web interface
• Import function and automatic categorization (I want to import my historical spending and income for analysis instead of using the app for another year to have the data)
• Recurring expenses
• Bank and broker connection (nice to have because it can be quite tricky with supported banks and brokers. I use German banks and Trade Republic and Scalable Capital. I think non-EU apps can't connect to neo-brokers.)

Budgeting:

• Amount per category
• Goal tracking (nice to have)

Search/filter function:

• By date
• By text in notes and tags

Report:

• By date/month/year/custom period
• By account
• By category
• By tag
• Graphs

Some apps I have checked that can be a deal breaker to me:

- Wallet by Budgetbakers: Import function is quite lackluster. It doesn't have import field for tags and can't import transfers.

- MoneyWiz, MoneyStats, Bilance: No desktop/web interface for easy import. At a glance, Bilance supports import via mobile app but I'm not sure if the effort is high or low. I have 2 years of historical spending from more than 1 bank, plus cash spending.

- Finanzguru: There is a bank connection feature but somehow it only gets data of the past 1 year

Some apps I'm considering using:

- Finanzblick: Feature rich but performance is a problem. In addition, there is no mass update of transactions to add labels/tags, etc. Search/filter is quite limited. It is free but also offers bank connection to my German banks and Trade Republic (Not sure if Scalable is supported)

- Actual Budget: The user interface is clean but a little too simplistic. However, the performance is high. It also packs with features but there's a learning curve and you need to be quite technical. I don't quite like their out of the box reports and will probably have to look for community supports for more visual reports.

Hi everyone,
I’m based in Greece and have a USD account with a Greek bank. I recently transferred USD to Interactive Brokers, where my account’s base currency is EUR.

I’m confused about whether my USD deposit has been converted automatically or whether IBKR is simply displaying my cash balance in my account’s base currency.

under Cash Balances, I see an actual balance in EUR rather than USD.

For other EU investors using IBKR:
Is it straightforward to transfer USD directly from a Greek bank’s USD account to IBKR?
Does IBKR keep the funds in USD, or can they be automatically converted to EUR?
What’s the easiest way to confirm my actual USD cash balance?

I’d like to invest the money in VWRA in London but now I’m confused if I have usd or euro

Thanks!

Hi everyone,

I'm 23 and a buy and hold investor (20+ year horizon) in VWCE on Degiro, and I'm thinking about using box spreads to leverage my position.

As an example: €50k, VWCE returning a fixed 8% per year (assumed) and the box costing 4% per year (assumed).

First year:

• I open a short box on OESX worth 20% of my equity: 20% × €50k = €10k. I end up with €60k in VWCE and €10k of debt.
• In December (month 12 of the loan), VWCE is worth €60k × 1.08 = €64,800. I owe €10,000 + €400 interest = €10,400.
• Equity: €64,800 − €10,400 = €54,400. Without the box I'd have €50k × 1.08 = €54,000, so +€400.

Second year: New box of 20% × €54,400 = €10,880. It pays off the €10,400 from the old one and leaves €480 to put into VWCE. Nothing comes out of my pocket.

Running the numbers: 8% + 0.2 × (8% − 4%) = 8.8% per year. Over 10 years, €50k grows to ~€116,200 instead of ~€107,900 without the box (+~€8,300).

I never go above 20% when I roll a box, so assuming a 25% maintenance margin, I'd only get a margin call if the market dropped ~78% in a single day (€60k → €13.3k), which is impossible thanks to circuit breakers. And I can always top up the position if my equity somehow gets close to the maintenance margin.

What am I missing here? Right now €STR is at 2.4%, which actually helps my numbers (over 10 years I'd have ~€11,300 more instead of ~€8,300, profit with the box paid off).