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How do you manage your personal finances?
How do you track your expenses? Do you have a budget? What about investments and goals?
Here's my current system:
- GSheet to set and adjust a budget, do asset allocation for investments, and keep track of current income. I check this every few weeks, usually in time to reconcile my credit card bills to make sure they're paid in full each month.
- A separate GSheet to track net worth, which I update every month or so
- Pocketsmith to track expenses as it integrates with all the main financial service providers I use - a few banks, credit cards, and investment platforms.
I'm finding that it's been getting a bit painful to keep track of expenses across many accounts manually, and the software options that I know (Mint, YNAB, Pocketsmith, Fudget, etc.) are either manual, don't support the banks I use, or have a massive learning curve/set up time.
I'd love to hear how you handle yours 😊
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Inam from Outgrow
Divide them into 40 sections and give 1/40 to poor needy people around you every year. It will add a whole positive vibe to your life.
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On the note of net worth - what's the benefit to tracking this?
I have a budget for income & expenses, and to me, I just see net worth as a product of that (basically thinking "as long as I control my income/expenses, the savings and therefore net worth will follow"). And investment feels like something I have little control over (the market's gonna do what the market's gonna do, no point in trying to predict it, just chuck it in an EFT/managed fund and never look again), so I'm sort of like... spend little, save lots, and forget the rest?
@jenny_sahng LOVE your take on this and am so with you on focusing what we can control; e.g: saving more and investing consistently 😍
On net worth: I find this mostly useful to check how we're tracking on a high level towards retirement and a home deposit. Great to know where we stand on debts and assets, but I do check this less often - probably closer to once a quarter 😄
On tracking investments: For the most part I ignore my investments too, but I do find it interesting to see how they've performed over time. I find it too tedious to track ETF/managed funds at the moment, so I just use what the fund providers have. I'm currently thinking of tracking how much was invested vs. their current value for less stable investments (e.g: individual stocks) to see how our experiments are going 😊
@kina Fascinating! Thank you for that, that's pretty validating to know that I'm not missing a hugely important part of personal finance by not managing my investments or net worth more closely 🌱
I've used Copilot since it's early beta stage (https://www.producthunt.com/post...). You can connect all your banks and brokerages via Plaid to see account balances. Helps save me time from manually logging into each account to check.
If you want you can use my code for a free month if you wanna try it: PGGK76
Just a personal fan of the product's UI and UX.
@louismin Copilot looks SO good Louis!! So gutted that it's not available in NZ's App Store though 😔
How often do you check Copilot, and what do you usually do when you do log in? 😊
Wow, this is super interesting! I tried using YNAB, but dropped off for some reason... the manual reconcilement process was fine (kinda satisfying tbh) but dunno why it didn't work for me.
GSheet makes sense, and I've seen people use it effectively, but they're all people who have honed their personalised spreadsheet for like 10 years and it's super intimidating to know where to start. Do you have any thoughts on like base template or something for spreadsheets?
@jenny_sahng Thanks for sharing Jenny! I hear you, I find each year I start a new spreadsheet and iterate on the previous template 😂
There's a few base templates I know of!
Free — It's No Secret is a bril NZ-based podcast from Kernel Wealth and they shared a nice base template here: https://tinyurl.com/INS-template
Paid — @moneywithaims (IG) sells really comprehensive templates for $17-31NZD with video tutorials! Link to her etsy here: https://www.etsy.com/shop/MoneyW...
@kina Oh amazing, thanks for those base templates! That's super interesting, I've never calculated net worth before.
I find budgeting hard and I don't really stick to it. I follow Barefoot Investor (Scott Pape) which is more about setting aside $$ for each different purpose and then once a month, seeing how you are tracking and adjust as needed. Highly recommend the book! So simple and easy to follow without apps or spreadsheets.
@kanocarra LOVE the barefoot investor!! I think it might be time to reread the book 😂
I've recently quite enjoyed She's On The Money by Victoria Devine (another Australian book) since she expands topics like estate planning, home loans, and how to choose a financial advisor 😊
I use Notion or write it on a notepad sometimes when handling personal finances. Sometimes I forget to take note when I spend on something :D
@adriel_cruz Thanks for sharing Adriel! How do you handle the missing notes at the moment? 😊
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