I get overwhelmed when I have too much to remember, and so I try to Use structured writing to keep track of things so that I don’t have to remember things, and can retrieve things easily.

Also part of this is whom I’ve lent money to, and whom I’ve borrowed money from. The purpose of this is not to be anal about it, but to remember whom I owe money to (even if they forget), and create clarity about where my money goes.

Implementation in YNAB

For the purpose of tracking my lending and borrowing, I have two off-budget (tracking) accounts:

• Loaned is a generic asset account. When I lend money, that money goes from one of my on-budget accounts into here. This is an off-budget asset account, because it’s still my money, even if I can’t access it right now (someone has borrowed it).

• Borrowed is a generic liability account. When I borrow money, that money goes from here into an on-budget account. It is categorized as generic inflow, ready to assign. This account is either at zero (when I haven’t borrowed anything) or below zero. This is an on-budget liability account.

Implementation in beancount (double-entry accounting)

The implementation in beancount is similar to the YNAB one.