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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • I started with zero-based budgeting via YNAB ages ago when ynab was a local-only app. Over time though I’ve adjusted and focus on tracking my expenses rather than budgeting. I’ve found that for me, budgeting is hard to stick to because I can never predict well enough. Ynab helped back when I used it but even then I always had a “rollover” fund I had to steal from almost arbitrarily to make things balanced.

    I do keep a rough spreadsheet budget of my fixed expenses though (rent, internet, phone, electricity, etc) that I use to understand how much of my money is “locked-in” and what is discretionary.

    For tracking, I have a spreadsheet I input all my expenses into every month or two that I use to see how Ive been spending my money, and I use that to decide if I’m happy with where I am.



  • That’s a shame. I didn’t realize it was that locked down. Ive had a lot of terrible routers but all the ones I remember allowed me at least a port forward.

    I think OP can accomplish some of the same result if he can get a cheap VPS to connect through (have the laptop Wireguard to the VPS, then have a proxy on the VPS forward to the laptop over the VPN, but that’s probably not worth the hassle for a starter project unfortunately.




  • With most consumer wifi networks you can usually enable port forwarding. That would let you access services from anywhere.

    Personally I would set up a Wireguard VPN server on the laptop and enable port forwarding only for the Wireguard port. This will let you access your laptop from anywhere, and it will protect you by limiting your attack surface (basically you only need to have a device Wireguard connection and you don’t need to worry as much about securing every other service you want to run).

    Then I’d set up dynamic DNS with any DNS provider so you don’t need to keep track of a changing IP.

    Then you can install whatever services you want on the laptop and you’ll be able to access them from anywhere by connecting to the Wireguard VPN. It does mean you can’t easily let a friend access a service on your laptop, but the tradeoff is you don’t have to worry as much about security while you’re learning.