two_cents 1.0.1

UNKNOWN

Two Cents is a continuously (rather than monthly) updating budget program. So instead of saying “You have $500 to spend on groceries in April”, Two Cents either says “You are over your grocery budget right now, try not to spend more than you have to” or “You are within your grocery budget, go ahead and make a nice dinner”. In this way Two Cents directly tells you whether or not it’s OK to splurge at the moment, which is often all you need to know.

Each budget can have an allowance, which would be something like $500/mo. Every time you run two_cents, it will calculate how many seconds have elapsed since you called it and apply allowances for each budget accordingly. It will also download recent activity from your bank, ask you to assign transactions to budgets, and credit or debit your budgets accordingly. Finally, it will display the balance for each budget. For budgets with negative balances, it will also display an estimate for how long it will take for the budget to return to the black.

Installation

Two Cents is available on PyPI, so you can install it with pip:

pip install two_cents

Basic Usage

The first step is to tell Two Cents about your bank. Currently only Wells Fargo is supported:

$ two_cents add-bank wells_fargo

Two Cents will ask for commands it can run to generate your username and password. It needs this information so it can log into your account and scrape your most recent activity. Your login information is stored locally and is never sent to any site other than your bank. If you don’t mind storing your password in plaintext, use the echo command:

Username: echo "jane doe"
Password: echo "pa55w0rd"

Otherwise, provide a command like gpg or gnome-keyring that can store your password encrypted and can unencrypt it for Two Cents.

Once you’ve added your bank, the next step is to add one or more budgets:

$ two_cents add-budget groceries -a 500/mo
$ two_cents add-budget restaurants -a 200/mo
$ two_cents add-budget miscellaneous -a 100/mo

The -a option sets the allowance for the new budget. You can also leave off this argument and set (or change) the allowance later. There is also an option to set the initial balance for the new budget, but the default ($0) is usually what you want.

Once you’ve configured your bank and your budgets, you can run two_cents with no arguments to see the status of your budgets:

$ two_cents

If any new transactions are found from your bank, you will be asked to assign them to a budget. If a budget has a positive balance, you should feel comfortable spending from it. If a budget has a negative balance, you should try not to spend from it for a while. Two Cents will tell you how long it will take the budget to return to a positive balance assuming no further spending.

Downloading Transactions via Cron

It can take a while for Two Cents to connect to your bank and download new transactions. If you want to save yourself some time, you can use cron to download new transactions in the background every hour or so:

$ crontab -e
0 * * * * two_cents download-payments -I

The -I command prevents Two Cents from expecting any input on stdin. You also need to ensure that the username and password commands you provided will work without your input. For example, if you used gpg, you will need to be running an agent with your unlocked private key.

Once your account activity is being downloaded in the background, write a simple shell function that will call Two Cents with the -D option unless any other options are specified. The -D option tells Two Cents to not download new activity:

$ vim ~/.bashrc
function two_cents () {
    if [ $# = 0 ]; then
        command two_cents -D
    else
        command two_cents $@
    fi
}

(I know it’d probably be better to have a configuration file, but for the time being this is the best way to do this.)