I can really recommend doing this for your personal finances! Tools like ledger are really powerful, and properly accounting is a great way to save on money. I can very easily go into my personal ledger and (say) get a report on "How much money did i spend daily on groceries last month" or "List all subscription services i pay for and how much they cost each month" or whatever. It gives you a great view into where your money is going and helps you plan for the future. It's very satisfying to run the command "ledger reg -Mn Assets Liabilities", which is "show me my net wealth (i.e. the sum of Assets and Liabilities) for every month in the ledger", and see your personal wealth grow over time.
But almost more importantly: if you're a programmer, it's really very fun! Like, i have my own system where I download my bank statement as a CSV and process it in AWK together with an org-mode table of payees that map each line on the bank statement to an account, which then generates a ledger file. Since it's just you using it, you can make it so it works however you like, and it quite satisfying to see it all come together.
It's also a great way to learn about accounting. Turns out, I really kinda like accounting! It has many of the same pleasures of programming or math, and seeing everything balance is very satisfying. In short: if you're a programmer who feels like they haven't quite got a handle on their finances, I can't recommend plain text accounting highly enough.
But almost more importantly: if you're a programmer, it's really very fun! Like, i have my own system where I download my bank statement as a CSV and process it in AWK together with an org-mode table of payees that map each line on the bank statement to an account, which then generates a ledger file. Since it's just you using it, you can make it so it works however you like, and it quite satisfying to see it all come together.
It's also a great way to learn about accounting. Turns out, I really kinda like accounting! It has many of the same pleasures of programming or math, and seeing everything balance is very satisfying. In short: if you're a programmer who feels like they haven't quite got a handle on their finances, I can't recommend plain text accounting highly enough.