chaoxu

I was looking for something that aggregates my transaction informations across banks, and output to a database (or a csv, so I can handle it later). The point is to have this programmatically. This can be later used by the accountant.

Plaid was the go to tool for this. Unfortunately, many bank require OAuth2 now, and using Plaid with Oauth2 requires production account and jumping through a lot of hoops.

Are there anything else out there? I don't mind paying.

Currently, I just think about getting something like Mint, and then get some tool to scrape Mint.

The rules for taxes although complicated, still seems can be expressed with lots of equalities and inequalities. For example, there are multiple rules on 401k contributions, and it seems to be just set of inequalities:

Let x be a 401k plan (the wording I'm using might not be correct)

  1. employee contribution = after tax contribution + salary deferred
  2. sum salary deferred over for all 401k plans <= 19500
  3. salary deferral for plan x <= earned income from the company associated with x
  4. employer contribution <= 0.25 \* earned income from the company
  5. employer contribution + employee contribution <= 56000
  6. there are lot more but looks like all can be expressed as some form of inequalities.

The problem with all the tax software I know is that it is for tax reporting, not planning. It is a blackbox function. But if it can be expressed as a set of inequalities, it can help with tax planning as one can do optimization over it.

I did some search and it looks like people do use linear programming for international tax planning. https://www.ttn-taxation.net/pdfs/Speeches_NewYork_2012/N08-MiklosVasarhelyi.pdf

As another example, this tax planning related article about the long term capital gain bump would be very easy to incorporate into an optimization system(in fact, completely automatic) if we do have the system of inequalities in place. https://www.kitces.com/blog/long-term-capital-gains-bump-zone-higher-marginal-tax-rate-phase-in-0-rate/

I saw the discussion on the best bank for startups https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23682511 and was wonder what people use as a personal checking account.

There are many financial products out there, but I don't think any consumer checking account having an API.