After setting up all of the automatic withdraws for bills, saving, investment, etc, the only real problem left is making sure that, over time, your checking account balance stays about the same (or increases). Involved, detailed budgeting tools are overkill when everything is automated. This tool allows for an account balance and a date to be entered from the command line and then differentials for each interval, or aggregated over time, to be reported.

The idea is for a balance to be entered approximately once a month.

$ budget add 2016-01-01 1000.00
$ budget add 2016-02-01 1500.00
$ budget add 2016-03-05 1250.00
$ budget add 2016-04-02 1350.00
$ budget show -n 3
2016-02-01 -> 2016-03-05: 1500.00 -> 1250.00 | -250
2016-03-05 -> 2016-04-02: 1250.00 -> 1350.00 | 100
$ budget show -d 2016-03-01
2016-03-05 -> 2016-04-02: 1250.00 -> 1350.00 | 100
$ budget show -n 4 --aggregate
2016-01-01 -> 2016-04-02: 1000.00 -> 1350.00 | 350

Use --help for complete details.

Use the -f or --file switch to point at a particular file. All data is read and written as plain text. Multiple files can be used to track multiple accounts. The default file if none is provided is ~/.budget.

add adds an entry to the given file; it takes positional arguments for date and amount. The formatting of the date is required to be yyyy-mm-dd; this is enforced at write time to make reads easy.

show shows progress over time. Either -n, the number of rows, or -d the date lower-bound is required. The format of the date for -d is the same as for adding an entry. An optional -a or --aggregate flag shows a single step for the entire time period; the default shows a diff for each line in the record.