Lunch Money

Have you ever wished you could quickly categorize your transactions as they came in and only log into your Lunch Money account once or twice a month to manage your overall budgets and trends? Good news for Telegram users: You can now do it! This month, we’re featuring Cristian, a Lunch Money user who has come up with a unique and efficient way to review daily transactions within the Telegram app!

One of the first orders of business when making a budget is to create a list of budget categories. It sounds pretty simple, but defining those categories can be tricky and lead to second-guessing: 💭 “How many categories should I have?” 💭 “How specific should my categories be?” 💭 “Should I group all bills & utilities in a single category?” 💭 “Should I track restaurants as food or entertainment?” 💭 “I must be forgetting something!” Our advice? Take a deep breath... Don’t worry about having a perfect list of categories when starting out. Instead, focus on some basic budget categories that can be refined over time. As you experiment and learn what works for you, you will be able to adjust your category setup! Read our latest blog posts to see what we recommend for getting started with your budget categories and how some Lunch Money users have theirs set up! https://lnkd.in/d5Y7MVmU

Join our team! We're looking to hire our first dedicated Full-Stack Software Engineer!

🌟 We're always thrilled to see such positive feedback from our community! Hearing how Maithili discovered and connected with Lunch Money reminds us why we're on this journey to build tools for delightfully simple personal finance. Thank you for your support, Maithili!

What an incredible FinCon! Thanks to everyone who stopped by our booth to piece together their financial future!

Annoucing the Least Annoying Price Increase in History! We’re raising the minimum for our flexible pay-what-you-want annual plan from $40 to $50 per year effective October 22, 2024. Everything else remains the same– same great features, same unlimited access, and the same commitment to delightfully simple personal finance. While we may occasionally adjust our pricing for new users, here’s where we’re different: as a loyal customer, your price is locked in at the rate you came in at, or whatever you last selected. Our way of saying thanks for sticking with us! We’re constantly thinking of ways to improve Lunch Money through new features and improvements, community initiatives and team expansions. This change helps us maintain the great experience you love while ensuring we continue to grow sustainably. Thank you for your continued support! We’re excited to keep growing with you.

What an awesome post, Pete! Thanks for the love and we appreciate you!

Introducing the Lunch Money Community Spotlight, where we highlight stories about Lunch Money users who are building useful tools for the community. This month, we are shining our spotlight on Tómas from LumoSync 🇩🇰 Tómas from Denmark talks to us about his new web app, LumoSync (currently in closed beta), which allows Lunch Money users to automatically import transactions from additional banks across the EU and UK. By using a service called GoCardless, LumoSync vastly increases the number of banks Lunch Money can sync with. [Q: Tómas, how did you come to start using Lunch Money?] I think I first saw it on Hacker News back in 2019 or 2020, but I sort of forgot about it because I was using another local app at the time. Then, in early 2021, I stumbled upon a post about Lunch Money on IndieHackers, an AMA I think. At that point, I was tired of the app I had been using and wanted something more powerful with a better UI, budgeting features, and useful visualizations — so I decided to give Lunch Money a try. [Q. You’re currently building a website called LumoSync that can help Lunch Money users automatically load transactions from European financial institutions. How does it work?] LumoSync aims to provide a super simple way to sync transactions to Lunch Money. Where Lunch Money uses Plaid to import transaction data, LumoSync uses a service called GoCardless, which is similar to Plaid but has better support for European financial institutions. For example, GoCardless supports 82 banks in Denmark, compared to eight for Plaid. While Plaid supports only 13 banks in Germany, GoCardless supports over 1000. You can find a list of banks that GoCardless supports here. The good news is that all a potential LumoSync user needs to do to get started is to sign up for an account, paste in a Lunch Money access token, set up the connection(s) to their banks, and finally pair those bank accounts with the ones they have set up in Lunch Money. That’s it, really 😃 [Q: What made you decide to start developing something?] When I started using Lunch Money, there was no support for syncing transactions from European banks. So first, I started with a script that I ran manually almost daily. That worked, but I got tired of having to remember to run something everyday, so I started working on something that would automatically import transactions. I was also inspired by a service for YNAB that syncs European bank transactions for its users. [Q: How did you decide to share what you were building with the larger community?] I see people asking on Discord if this or that European country is supported. While some generous Lunch Money users have shared their scripts, I wanted to help less technical users (and technical ones tired of running something themselves) sync their bank accounts to Lunch Money. Maybe it also allows me to kick off my own indie hacker thing… 🙂