Anyone manage their personal finances by spreadsheet?
- Thread starter Trice
- Start date
I took a business class in HS that went through budgeting, finance, etc. Useful, but not everyone took it.
I use Mint, but am intrigued by Personal Capital. Are most of the tools free? Looks like you have to pay for some of the wealth management stuff.
Mint works for me right now, but curious if anyone has used both Mint and PC, and what advantages either one has over the other.
I use both. The budgeting tool on Mint is better. The Personal Capital retirement tool and asset allocation tools are great.
It is free to sign up and use the tools, but they will contact you to do some investing with them. I did and pay .90% in management fees which is reasonable. They are somewhat of a robo-adviser, but depending on how much you invest, you get two advisers that are assigned to your account. Mine have been very good. I love what they do in regards to tax loss harvesting. They automatically balance your asset allocation according to your risk tolerance which is nice.
My tiny little local CU built a better tool than Mint for tracking all accounts and instantly calculating net worth.
For savings, I have spreadsheet with good old-fashioned Accounting 101 t-accounts to separate savings that is for different purposes. Simple, works great.
For savings, I have spreadsheet with good old-fashioned Accounting 101 t-accounts to separate savings that is for different purposes. Simple, works great.
Personal Capital offers the app for free. They will pester you about scheduling an appt with an advisor. This will end in the advisor trying to get you to use their advisory service. I don't use their advisory service as I was an RIA for 15 years so I'm comfortable with just continuing the passive approach, primarily DFA funds, that I advised on.
I think PC has better reporting and is easier to navigate. Mint's hook is budgeting. Mint pesters you with on screen credit card and other offers. I just ignore these but they take up real estate something PC doesn't do.
As I said in an earlier post either of them will capture all your transactions and simplify the job. I only export transactions annually and then just for archival and analysis. You could do this more frequently if you thought that working with the detail helps you.
I used to exclusively use spreadsheets for everything. Then I read an article on Nerdwallet that compared different websites. I started with Personal Capital and used it for free for several years for retirement planning. Really easy to work with and you can setup many scenarios and assumptions and compare. I finally pulled the trigger and are having them manage my investments and so far so good. Getting ready to retire soon and since we don't have pensions it's completely our savings so Personal Capital's retirement planning models using 5,000 Monte Carlo simulations to calculate the outcomes gives me a lot more comfort to go ahead and pull the trigger on retirement. I still use a spreadsheet for budgeting.
My financial advisor has tools way better than some manual spreadsheet that has to be babysat 10 hours a month.
Thanks.
Mint has worked well for me, been using it since I graduated college. I agree that the ads are getting annoying - I keep getting ads for an Amex card I already have
They also have connectivity issues from time to time, and seem to be getting more frequent.I'll keep using Mint, but my finances aren't too complicated either. Will probably look into PC at some point down the road.
Interesting thread with lots of points of view. Different things work for different people. The point of intersection appears to be that people in this discussion are quite intentional about managing their personal finances. That would seem to be the key.
More super valuable information. Great contributions here, keep them coming.
Cool story. Maybe some people, you know, actually enjoy managing their own finances? What a concept.
Can't we have one thread on this board where we don't bag on other posters.
Follow that conversation back to its origin and tell me who's bagging on whom. I started the thread to see if other people had a common interest. No need for someone else who doesn't share that interest to weigh in without anything constructive to add.
The fact that you would say 10 hours means you probably have no clue how to build a spreadsheet. It takes me like 20 minutes to update our spreadsheet for monthly spending. I don’t know how anyone can feel good about their finances when they don’t know where their money is going.
