In this homelab series video, I walk through installing Actual Budget so you can finally get a clear picture of where your money’s going—especially if you’re kicking off a new year and trying to budget for real. I show the homelab side first: I spin up a fresh VM, update my DNS repo so I can hit a clean hostname, add the host to my Ansible inventory, and then let AWX run my workflow to create the VM, patch it, install Docker/Docker Compose, and set up NGINX + TLS with my step-ca setup. Once the server’s ready, I SSH in, grab the official docker-compose from the Actual Budget GitHub, and bring it up detached. From there I access it through my reverse proxy and do the initial setup. I also demo how I use it day-to-day without linking a bank account (I’m pretty security-conscious about that): I create a local account, add transactions (Costco, gas, Target… “just food”), categorize everything, and then jump into the budget view so you can see the month-by-month rollup. I also show scheduled transactions for recurring income, plus the reports/dashboard views if you like graphs. The takeaway: it’s a simple self-hosted way to track spending, build categories, and budget for things like your next homelab purchase.