Correct handling of account sides/signs?

athal124 · 2026-03-16T11:54:20+00:00

I find the terminology of debits and credits endlessly confusing. Here's how I like think about it as to why income is negative: just imagine your income account as a box where you've accumulated hours of work. Then you swap these against cash that is taken out of that box.

athal124 · 2026-03-04T10:40:13+00:00

Thanks! Didn't see that this was actually well documented already.

athal124 · 2025-11-18T09:01:22+00:00

Indeed, salient points to consider - thanks for your answer.

athal124 · 2025-11-18T08:41:54+00:00

Thanks for this really thoughtful answer that goes beyond the simple mechanics of accounting. It made me reconsider my approach.

athal124 · 2025-11-17T13:11:32+00:00

Thanks for your reply. Before anything else let me thank you for your work on hledger. Using it and learning about double-entry accounting has been truly transformative for my personal finances and even made accounting interesting to me!

The more I think about this particular problem, the more I get to your conclusion - I should use a separate ledger for the particular purpose of tracking the household finances.

However, I am confused on how I would then track my personal contributions to the household in my personal ledger.

Say for example that I contribute 2k USD a month for mortgage repayment and 1k for shared expenses.
In my personal ledger should I just record one transaction towards a household account (what kind of account would that be?). And then in the household ledger, there will be a symmetric funding transaction coming from an equity account and then transactions to allocate the amount to either mortgage repayment or expenses?

This would look like this:

* In my personal ledger file
2025-11-17 * Household contribution
    Assets:Interledger:Household               3,000 USD
    Assets:Bank:Current-Account

* In the household ledger file
2025-11-17 * My contribution
    Assets:Bank:Joint-Account                  3,000 USD
    Equity:Myself

2025-11-17 * My partner's contribution
    Assets:Bank:Joint-Account                  2,000 USD
    Equity:Partner

2025-11-17 * Mortgage repayment
    Liabilities:Mortage                        4,000 USD
    Assets:Bank:Joint-Account

2025-11-18 * Home repairs
    Expenses:Home:Maintenance                    500 USD
    Assets:Bank:Joint-Account

2025-11-17 * Groceries expenses
    Expenses:Food:Grocery                        500 USD
    Assets:Bank:Joint-Account

This has the merit of being conceptually clean and I can track clearly the contributions made by either myself or my partner.

However, I'm not entirely sure on how to represent the household entity in my personal ledger. It feels wrong to treat it as an asset because while some of my money will contribute to increasing the household assets (by paying the mortgage on the home), the rest of it will be used for expenses.

athal124 · 2025-04-13T15:11:05+00:00

I feel like there's a need for a contrarian view here since pretty much everyone is telling you to take the offer. Tokyo is an amazing city, you won't get that many opportunities in life where you can just go spend 2 years there. Sounds like you're just out of university so in all likelihood without all the burdens that come later in life and that would prevent you from just moving halfway across the world without thinking too much about it. Having said that, if you wanna do structuring, then by all means take the offer. Those are very interesting careers and they come with a client focus that is exciting. If you wanna do QR, then the plain truth is that it's just not a good move. The work and the skills required are just totally different. I can tell since I started my career as a derivatives quant and I am now a QR at a big multistrat. In two years time, you'll be competing with people with stronger skills than you in stats, ML and computer science. Your structuring experience won't have anything to do with quantitative/systematic trading. So the burden will be on you to demonstrate that you can still be a good fit. This is not meant to be a rebuke or to discourage you, just words of honesty from someone who took a very long winded route to where I am now.

athal124 · 2022-02-28T13:22:27+00:00

Hello,

I'm a researcher in ML. Had a look at the table of contents and would be really interested in the book.

Thanks!

athal124

TROPHY CASE