This is a good reminder that I need to sit down with H and create a massive spreadsheet of all of our accounts, for safety’s sake. I was for too long the wife-who-didn’t-get-involved-in-financial-matters (due to my own laziness, not due to any lack of openness on the part of my spouse) and it wasn’t a good thing.
That’s been my method, too.
We have Quicken set up to auto-update all of our accounts. Once a week DH takes all the receipts out of the bowl on the counter and checks that they pretty much match what the credit cards and bank accts say on Quicken. Takes about an hour. We don’t worry about categories of spending, but as long as we are spending far less than we are earning we don’t care. The main idea is to check for bank errors or fraud.
As far as net worth, I haven’t looked in a few weeks. I know the investments are down and I don’t want to invite that stress to my door right now. I have faith in our overall asset allocation.
My one action item this year, with Both of us over 59 1/2 and DH retired and income lower, is to use all those piddly assorted IRAs as income. I have three that (shame on me) I never consolidated and total less than $20,000. Now that there won’t be tax worries, there is some of our yearly 2016 income.
ETA
I realize that categorizing nearly $20,000 as " piddly" was probably wrong language. I have one IRA that’s worth about $15,000 form a former job. Another worth about $ 1600 from a different job, and a 403b from when my district restricted our investment options where my $3000 investment years ago has grown to a staggering $4100.
So there are tiny accounts to clean up, as well as one that’s pretty much a third of my current salary.
No tracking here either…but I do need to make an updated list of our retirements and investments…and bank accounts…so,that if something halogens to one of us, the other will,have the info easily at hand.
We have a financial advisor who keeps track of our net worth, I guess!
Well, and here’s another thing that is a good thing to do as these end-of-year statements come rolling in: check and make sure that your beneficiaries are listed the way you want them listed now. You might have set them up years ago when your kids were minors or you were married or you weren’t married or…
Excellent advice!