finances — Personal Finance Visibility

Type: Personal Status: Planning — plumbing in flight Created: 2026-05-24

What is this?

Build repeatable transaction-level visibility into personal cashflow (TD chequing + TD Visa to start), so monthly/quarterly reviews run as a quick collaborative analysis instead of a fresh manual download-and-script cycle each time.

Motivation

Years of ad-hoc R scripts at /Users/davidtingle/Code/2105.finances/ proved the analytical value, but the pipeline (manual CSV downloads, regex categorization rewritten each month) never generalized into a regular cadence. Goal is to make the data flow automatic so the time is spent on insight, not ingestion.

What does success look like?

  • Transaction-level data lands in a normalized local store on a regular schedule, no manual download steps
  • /fin answers questions like “what’s my current savings rate?” or “how has dining out trended?” in seconds, against a categorized dataset
  • Categorization rules live in version control and evolve incrementally, not rewritten monthly
  • Historical CSV archive (2020–present) backfilled into the same store for trend continuity

Architecture (planned)

Wealthica (aggregator)  →  pull script (scheduled)  →  ~/topaz/finances/transactions.db (SQLite)
                                                              ↓
                                                       categorization rules
                                                              ↓
                                                         /fin queries
  • Aggregator: Wealthica (Canadian-native, supports TD)
  • Store: SQLite at ~/topaz/finances/transactions.db
  • Rules: versioned ruleset under this project (categorization.md, to be created)
  • Analysis surface: /fin skill + ad-hoc collaboration

Known unknowns

  • Wealthica API access path for personal/individual use vs. their formal add-on developer track
  • Whether the free tier covers TD chequing + Visa, or whether a paid plan is needed
  • How investment accounts (if any) get modeled — out of scope for v0

Assets

  • Historical CSV archive: /Users/davidtingle/Code/2105.finances/raw/ (chequing 2020+, Visa 2021+)
  • Prior analysis scripts (R, regex categorization): same directory — useful as source material for the categorization rules