Guide · · 2 min read
Tracking your money across several currencies
Earn in one currency, save in another, spend in a third? Here's how to keep one honest total, and why your net worth can change while you do nothing.
If you're an expat, a freelancer with foreign clients, or someone who keeps savings abroad, your money lives in more than one currency. Most budgeting tools quietly assume it doesn't. The result is a total that's either wrong or missing entirely.
Keep each account in its own currency
Record every account in the currency it's actually held in. A euro account should show euros, not a dollar estimate you typed in last spring. Converting at the source loses information and goes stale the moment rates move.
Convert only when you add things up
Pick one display currency, usually the one you think in or plan to spend in, and convert to it only when you need a total. That way balances stay exact, and the total is always based on current rates.
Your net worth can move without you
When the euro strengthens against the dollar, a euro balance is worth more dollars, even though nothing in the account changed. That's real: it's what you'd get if you converted today. But it's worth knowing which part of a change came from you and which came from the market.
Tip: look at a breakdown by currency. If one currency's share of your total jumps while its balances barely changed, the exchange rate did the work.
Moving money between currencies
A transfer from a dollar account to a euro account should be one event, not a withdrawal plus an unrelated deposit. Record what left one account and what arrived in the other. The gap between the two is the real cost of the transfer: the exchange rate plus any fee.
How Finance handles it
- Every account keeps its own currency; you can add any currency you need.
- Totals, charts and forecasts convert to the display currency you choose, at live rates.
- Transfers fill in the converted amount for you, and you can change it if a fee applied.
- The dashboard shows how much of your net worth is held outside your display currency, with a breakdown by currency.
One limitation worth knowing: historical charts use today's exchange rates for every day, so they show how your balances moved rather than how past exchange rates moved.