Can you share your spreadsheets?
We slowly consolidated everything over the years such that we're at:Simplifying
During year-end tax planning, I realized that we have too many accounts and I'd like to simplify. Aside from retirement accounts, we have three brokerages: Merrill for Preferred Rewards, JP Morgan for cash, Fidelity for main taxable.
The Merrill brokerage qualifies us for Preferred Rewards, JPM for Chase Sapphire banking, and Fidelity because that's where the bulk of our investments are. I'd like to get this down to two brokerages.
The only benefit of Merrill is that we make an extra $1.5k a year in CC cash back. Is that even worth having this extra account? $1,500 is nice, but isn't going to make a big difference in our finances.
Financial Tracking Software
Can you share your spreadsheets?
We put all of our spend on a single credit card. I also track our savings rate on a bare bones spreadsheet. Our CC has some basic expense tracking, but I'd like to get more detail on what we're spending money on, just so I know and have more visibility.
What is the recommended software these days? I don't trust the free financial aggregators. I'm happy to pay a small amount for software that'll work and is easy to use, but I don't want to spend hours manually inputting data and categorizing it.
Fidelity: Each of our IRAs, Each of our Roths, each of our HSAs, our joint taxable account
TreasuryDirect: I-bonds, though in the past we also had some T-Bills there
Credit Union: Checking & credit card
Previously we had a taxable account at Schwab, but closed it a couple of years ago. Whenever I left an employer, no matter where the 401K was held, we always rolled it over to Fidelity. Same for my DW. All employers with any sort of stock plans used Etrade, so when I retired, I closed all of those. We had a Vanguard taxable account as well, but closed it a number of years ago and moved the proceeds over to Fidelity.
A lot of people around here use Quicken. I did a long time ago but when they released a version that couldn't read data files from an older version, I walked away.
These days I use a spreadsheet for tracking overall wealth. Very little manual entry since I can download everything into a single .csv file from Fidelity, which my spreadsheet can then read and update all of our charts and stats.
For spending, I only look at it at a gross level with the only categories being "big spends" vs. "everything else" where a big spend might be a new car, roof or whatever. That has its own spreadsheet, but it's pretty simple.
Cheers.
Statistics: Posted by contactme — Fri Dec 13, 2024 7:33 am