Personal finance management has moved to apps and cloud services. Mint, YNAB, Personal Capital, Betterment — most require an account, connect to your financial accounts, and store your data on their servers.
For users who prefer not to give third-party apps access to their financial accounts, here are Firefox extensions that handle the ambient parts of personal finance locally.
Portfolio watchlist without brokerage login
Stock Market and Finance Dashboard — your watchlist symbols on the new tab with current prices.
This is not a portfolio tracker (it does not know your position sizes or cost basis). It is a price display: enter your symbols, see live prices. For a morning check on how your holdings are performing, this replaces opening a brokerage app.
Quick calculations without a spreadsheet
Quick Calculator and Unit Converter — full calculator with percentage and unit conversion on the new tab.
Personal finance involves a lot of quick math: "what is 7% of this amount?", "how much is that in monthly terms?", "what percentage change is that?". The new tab calculator handles these without opening Excel or a search engine.
Tracking financial habits
Habit Tracker — a monthly grid for financial behaviors.
Good financial habits that benefit from daily tracking:
- "Checked monthly budget" (1×/month habit)
- "Logged today's expenses"
- "Reviewed investment account"
- "No unnecessary purchases today"
The habit tracker does not handle financial data — it tracks whether you performed the behavior.
Daily financial tasks
Daily Planner — today's finance-related tasks on the new tab. "Transfer to savings," "Call insurance about claim," "Review credit card statement."
Privacy trade-offs
This setup handles no actual financial data:
- Stock prices are public market data
- Calculator computations are local
- Habit and task data contains no account information
For account balance tracking, investment management, and budgeting, tools with account access (Mint, YNAB) are more capable — but they require sharing financial account credentials with a third party. This setup is the privacy-first alternative for the ambient parts of financial monitoring.
All are part of a series of 11 Firefox extensions I built — see the full series.
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