Hold strong!

You’ll never fail anything if you don’t try! This guys figured it out!

Semi-manual tracking with YNAB. My bank doesn’t offer an OAuth2 API and there’s no way in hell I’m giving Plaid my bank credentials. So, I just download a transactions file and upload that to YNAB.

I know people here will probably recommend https://actualbudget.org/ which seems like a YNAB-clone (in a good way). But the reason I went with YNAB is because they have a ton of docs and videos about how YNAB works and budgeting in general. ActualBudget seems to be targeted at people who already know what they’re doing (not me).

YNAB/Actual might be different than Mint, though. YNAB is based on envelope budgeting, as opposed to just collecting spending metrics. I haven’t used Mint in a very long time, not sure if it’s changed since.

My new years resolution is to spend less money and spend more deliberately.

January is wrapping up and I’m kinda shocked. I discovered that the estimate in my head of how much monthly house bills are is… off… by… a lot… I was just thinking about the monthly bills like water, electricity, internet, but failed to account for gas, groceries, restaurants, and repairs.

Now that I’m actually budgeting and tracking, I’m seeing what’s really going on.

My neighbor told me I was gonna die in 1year after getting the first round of COVID vaccines. Pff. I wish! Still here unfortunately.

Good questions!

But problem is, all my email address would be @mydomainname.com instead of @protonmail which millions of people use. Isn’t that just linking all your account together.

I mean, yeah. You can’t setup sockpuppets on the same service. It’ll be obvious it’s the same person. And if someone is tracking you across services, it’ll be way easier to find you. This is a con.

I would recommend not picking a domain with your real name, like smith.com or john.com. Even though it does seem popular to have me@johnsmith.com. It won’t solve the issue you noticed, but it’ll mitigate it a tiny bit.

its hard to even pick a name that sound good

Also, true. Ideally, you pick a common word with normal spelling that doesn’t have a homophone that’s not embarrassing to say to random people on the street. It would be awkward to be applying to a job or a loan and have to say your email is “[email protected]”. Also, you will have to speak your email over the phone at some point, the shorter and easier it is the better.

I would also recommend picking a domain with either .com or .net TLDs. Some companies blanket destroy your email if it comes from some weird TLD like “.party” or “.xyz”. Omg, specifically, .xyz I think has been linked to tons of spam. Bigger companies will handle this more gracefully (put it in spam). But smaller companies, like my local garbage company run by normies, will just not deliver the email. (And debugging why emails don’t get received is really hard and annoying.)

Unfortunately, a lot of people squat domains, so finding a short, simple, easy domain is really hard. I’m curious what other people do. Maybe other people just have me@reallylongdomainthaticanactuallyget.com? Or maybe other people have had better experience with john@mail.club? Or maybe some people don’t care that their domain is john@boss.baby?

Ultimately though, having email independence is valuable enough for some folks to be OK with the downsides.

My experience with my friends and family:

I left Facebook a long time ago and never looked back.

https://purelymail.com/ seems like it’s a cheap, no-nonsense email provider. I’m already setup on Migadu and happy enough, so I haven’t tried it. But it seems like a lot of people like it.

People were recently talking about it on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42836818

Exactly the combo I use. Been happy with Migadu for the last 2 years. Although, purelymail also seems interesting.

… I’m not a purelymail user or know much about it… But, I guess I am old now…

I’m guessing the service being in beta for 6 years is a joke. It’s a reference to Gmail being in beta forever.

Personally, I’m tunning it out. The only time I dive into it is around elections so I can make an informed vote. But, after that it seems like I’m utterly powerless to change anything.

I used to think being informed would come in handy to change people’s minds, but that never happens. People have to change their own minds.

See also: https://lemmy.today/post/22524765

My grampa made it to 104. I think running his store helped.

7 years of updates is nice

True actually. Browsing Subscribed is better than All. Although, you have to venture out into All to find new communities to subscribe to.

I also found switching between Hot and Active sorts mixes things up.

You have to block A LOT of communities. In fact, blocking communities is more important than subscribing to them!

Also: https://lemmy.today/post/22524765

Also: Voyager (or other apps) with filters for keywords.

Being a DIYer is a good way to boycott stuff. Scumbag mechanic trying to screw you on the oil change? DIY. Scumbag cloud company, trying to hold your data hostage? DIY, self host or write your own!

Obviously it doesn’t work with everything, but for certain things it works really well.

It’s really hard to boycott when you’ve been de-skilled and depend on a service.