We don’t track either. Since I file quarterly taxes I do take a look at investment statements along with everyone’s income. I have a general idea of what we have, though I honestly haven’t a clue what the house is worth. Houses in our neighborhood have gone for plus or minus $200,000 with no obvious differences in the real estate ad descriptions. I know some haven’t been updated since the 50s, or possibly even the 20s. Ours is now mostly renovated so I think it might be worth more, but we have a weird lot which is a minus.
I guess when I used the term “net worth”, it brought to mind real and personal property values…I’m not really interested in that. I’m more amused than anything that H is driving a car that has 388,000 miles on it.
I use one of the custom excel spreadsheets and update it when the statements come in from the various accounts. Not a perfect solution, but keeps general track of things.
I use the tracker on one of the mutual fund companies we use for our IRA. The majority of the investment is with the company and it is not difficult to add other stuff (bank accounts, other mutual fund info, etc) to the tracker. I like it since it gets updated everytime I log in. (super helpful when I was filling CSS)
My net worth spreadsheet ignores cars, checking account, CC balances, and personal possessions like furniture. I update the house value every couple of years at most, and keep it conservative (based on what the neighboring houses have sold for), but keep it in the calculation to watch the mortgage go down and the home equity go up. It’s not very useful, but neither is stamp collecting or scrapbooking, and people do that.
In the separate retirement spending spreadsheet I leave out the home equity and accounts that are meant to fund cars, vacations, weddings, etc. That lets me smooth expected retirement spending and just focus on the investments and what level of additional spending beyond pensions and SS can be supported depending on how the investments grow (or not).
Same here @FallGirl . At the beginning of December he thought it might be a good idea to pull 50% out , but decided not to. I hate when he says " want to know how much we lost today?" NO I really don’t.
surprised that someone else uses MoneyDance. I use it for expense tracking but had a heck of a time getting investment tracking set up. I actually gave up on the exact stock counts and just use it to watch dividends and capital gains. So investments are a “rough estimate” only. But I can watch trends.
I got away from Quicken even though I used to love it because they kept destroying it for the MAC. dummies.
Better, though, than being worthless, I would think.
[insert rimshot here]
More seriously, I can’t be the only one who actually enjoys watching the value of my retirement accounts going down right now, because it means my next 403(b) stock purchase is going to be made at discounted rates compared to the overall curve. (Of course, if I were in my 60s, I’d feel differently—but for now…)
I was pretty good about using it for a while, then yes, they made it difficult. The killer was a few months ago I was told my version of Quicken for Mac would be obsolete, so if I wanted to continue using it, I had to pay to upgrade. I chose not to, and now we’re not using any program at all. Perhaps when things settle down after our impending move, I’ll try something again.
Folks should be aware of inheritance taxes in the state where they reside.
I guess I’m even older-school–I just put it into a Word document that I update every so often.
I am surprised that nobody use portfolio tools like Financial Engines available on websites of many 401K and IRA providers. You can give them access to all your retirements accounts or add them manually. Then every time you log in it will give you full picture. The main purpose of these tools is to encourage you to save more although their algorithms are quite optimistic.
I’m not comfortable entering my financial info into software–too many security holes and don’t see us saving more regardless, since we are already living below our means.
I don’t really track it. I’m starting up with Mint to track everyday spending, but for long-term – we didn’t / don’t ever have buckets (e.g., we never really had a bucket for kids’ college education) - just a long-term number we are working towards that should (God willing!) be something where we don’t have to worry again. It’s not going to change our management strategy, just upset us when the Dow goes down!
I am so agreeing with @GMTplus7, post #9. I also try NOT to look at the portfolio balance on those nasty down days, but I know it is bad.
I never really track my investment until a couple of years ago, even that I only use a simple Excel spreadsheet, just capturing the year end value of mutual funds, one brokerage account (which I seldom trade in recent years), and my 457b. Prior to that, I looked at year end statements, had some ideas on value and then filed them!!
My H uses Excel, but he links to the various investments so the information is updated whenever he opens the file. He does something I find obnoxious - goes through the credit card statement every month and logs each purchase into a category, i.e., entertainment, travel, food, clothing, etc. so he can keep a running total by month/year. Always making a point to tell me how much was in the clothing category. Is there a program that we can use to dump the info from the bank so that it will categorize it? If it were compatible with Excel, then he could just add it to his huge master spreadsheet. Does Quicken have this function?
I don’t understand the point of all of this when the banks or firms do it for you. When have you ever needed to know your net worth? I’m also not worried about the stock market, I figure it’s all part of the dollar cost averaging.
Isn’t this the point of investing in funds so you don’t have to track it yourself constantly?
eyemamon, between my husband and I, we have retirement funds all over the place. We also have some investments that aren’t earmarked for retirement. I think it would be responsible to figure out how much there is.
@Gourmetmom . I also track the CC statements by category. H has his own card which I track as HEntertainment. I break down my cards into categories as I cover my gas, all the family food, entertainment, household, travel, clothing. H often forgets I buy to cover 5 people and he buys the “fun for one”. Tracking has defused many an argument.
My father calculated his/their net worth on December 31 by hand in a ledger book that he began at age 20 and continued until his death at 85. Fun to look through and have an insight into my parents life. He never had a computer, but had meticulous hand-written records (and copies of everything).
@dentmom4 How do you track your expenses? We just use a worksheet within the same Excel file that is used to track investments, then it’s applied to a column on the main page. It’s really cumbersome because we use the card for everything (points) and the monthly statement is very long. It’s just a monotonous task and we’re always a few months behind. I would love to copy and paste the online visa statement into something that would categorize each purchase.