I don’t think one takes into account investment accounts with envelope budgeting, if I’m not wrong. All the accounts in this kind of budgeting should be involved in the budget, to be money that is to be assigned. “Give every dollar a job” kind of style. Money in investment accounts is for the most part saving for savings sake. But I guess people can assign that kind of money as well, e.g. “this is money that I’m investing to be able to buy a house in 5 years”. I’m not an expert on this so you could look up how YNAB does it, or if Actual has any docs on this.

Yes. You can read about on Actual Budgets documentation. It’s free for personal use. You just generate an API token. https://actualbudget.org/docs/advanced/bank-sync/gocardless/

If you’re in the EU you can do bank syncing for free with GoCardless integration. If you’re in the US you need to go with SimpleFIN which costs a small sum and is in a more experimental phase than the GoCardless integration I think. Either way, GoCardless has been working great for me. Actually far better than YNAB which didn’t even support my bank. It’s literally just set up and forget.

If one doesn’t want to self-host it one can always go through a service like PikaPods who do in fact have a revenue sharing deal with Actual Budget. And either way, Actual Budget isn’t really an accounting tool for businesses, or did I misunderstand you?

I’d willingly want to move down to 4-day weeks in some year even with the reduced salary. I’m privileged enough to afford it, and the time regained is absolutely worth the loss in salary and future pension. I’d like alternating Mondays and Fridays, so every 2 weeks you get a 4-day weekend.

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I don’t know if this is a US thing. I have no large expectations of HR, but I’m also part of a union and like most places my company has signed a collective union agreement. If there’s a conflict the union will represent you as well. The HR people at my company seem completely OK though, I have dealings with them due to my role.

It’s generally really hard if you have no experience. But if you’re willing to pay, maybe. Check this out: https://hitchwiki.org/en/Hitchhiking_a_boat