As the calendar year 2024 recently ended, now is a good chance to review some things that happened over the last 12 months.
First, a success, in that I kept up my financial tracking over the year. This means that I now have all kinds of information that I would otherwise be unavailable to me.
The information ranges from the trivial — When exactly was a car trip we took in the spring? — to the more significant — How did our spending compare to our income in 2024?
The latter reminds me of the benefit of using hledger or similar tools. They provide information, and that information becomes valuable when you apply good thinking to and apt judgment of it.
The information in your plain text accounting can be likened to potential energy. It’s there, it’s available, but potential energy needs to be released to accomplish anything. Similarly, the PTA data has potential value, which needs to be released. And the value comes from carefully reflecting on it and making good judgments about it.
Second, thanks to the efforts of several people, hledger continues to be updated and tweaked for improvements. I counted 6 new releases in 2024, not that the number of releases is the best metric for improved software. Rather, it’s an indication that hledger development is an active project.
Finally, my data remains in plain text format. Yes, that has been the same every year, but it’s good to remember that if your data is in plain text, it’s not locked into some proprietary format. It’s your data, and you can choose how to use it.