Weird Question... How often do you count your money/assets?

[Kook]

I download from Quicken pretty much every day, except when I am on the road traveling for work 2-3 days per week. Not so much to monitor investments (but there is that!), but to also log and monitor spending as I prepare for retirement.

[calmloki]

We are on Quicken daily and enter NW # M-F. We use the property tax statement to get a "true cash value" which we use for the places - means every year around November we have a big change in NW. Incoming rents and loan payments, outgoing expenses, quarterly taxes, various lumpy expenses make substantial NW changes and the market wanders up and down but we enter the total stock value and NW M-F with yellow highlighter on new all time high days. It's been a very yellow week.

[travelover]

I'm curious as to why anyone would check everyday. It doesn't seem actionable.

[bltkmt]

Quote:

Originally Posted by travelover I'm curious as to why anyone would check everyday. It doesn't seem actionable.

One reason to check often is for security purposes - checking that balances are at the level you expect them to be.

[Musica40]

Thought I was the only one who did this. I seldom make changes, but I do follow the market and when the market does well, I update the spreadsheet.

Over the years we have found that oftentimes doing nothing works well.

[mpeirce]

Quote:

Originally Posted by travelover I'm curious as to why anyone would check everyday. It doesn't seem actionable.

Neither is a wreck at the side of the road, but somethings are hard to ignore.

[iloveyoga]

Quote:

Originally Posted by travelover I'm curious as to why anyone would check everyday. It doesn't seem actionable.

I do it quickly as part of my morning/coffee routine. Unless there has been a big market down day, then I hold off. I do check my checking account every day.

[OldShooter]

Quote:

Originally Posted by bltkmt One reason to check often is for security purposes - checking that balances are at the level you expect them to be.

Have you detected any problems this way?

FWIW I have been reconciling our accounts every month, starting about 30 years ago and don't remember ever discovering any problems. Maybe there have been forgettable small ones, but certainly none that would motivate me to check every day.

[ArmchairMillionaire23]

Quote:

Originally Posted by wildsun Almost Daily. I have all my assets, bank accounts, retirement accounts and debts in www.personalcapital.com 's "net worth" screen. I just log on, let it refresh, and the current numbers show up. From that point, if I want to know more about something I can drill in and look at holdings, performance, etc. I don't pay Personal Capital for this service - its free to anyone who wants to sign up. For about 2 years I paid them to manage my retirement accounts, but I switched to someone else for that service, because it wasn't working out for me with Personal Capital. But their web site "Net Worth" tools are pretty good.

Both Vanguard and John Hancock have a similar free service and I use them both. I may not be checking every single day but at least a few times a week. I like to verify my contributions every week after payday.

I also like to compare the balances between each service to see if there are any anomalies between the two to make sure all my accounts are updating correctly.

I've been checking Vanguard more frequently lately as I'm getting close to a seven figure balance just in Vanguard and once you accumulate seven figures you become a Flagship™ client. Not that I ever used the services offered when I became a Voyager Select™ client a few years back. But it will still be a nice milestone and another sense of accomplishment for me considering 20 years ago I was just beginning to focus on retirement and had only $12K in my 401(k) account when it switched over to Vanguard after a buyout of my previous employer.

[RunningBum]

Quote:

Originally Posted by travelover I'm curious as to why anyone would check everyday. It doesn't seem actionable.

Looking at my "net worth" spreadsheet numbers getting larger and my spending spreadsheet numbers staying steady reminds me that I can blow some of that dough. That's certainly an actionable item. If things reverse, I can go back to regular spending. My VPW plan will cut it more if need be.

Also, it's fun, especially when the left most number increments.

[big-papa]

Quote:

Originally Posted by travelover I'm curious as to why anyone would check everyday. It doesn't seem actionable.

I do a lot of things every day that aren't actionable but I still find enjoyable. In this particular case if someone is prone to making behavioral investing mistakes then frequent peeking might not be advisable.

Cheers.

[VanWinkle]

Quote:

Originally Posted by mpeirce Neither is a wreck at the side of the road, but somethings are hard to ignore.

so true!!

[Chuckanut]

Quote:

Originally Posted by VanWinkle [emoji23] so true!!

I arrange my gold grickles in neat stacks in my basement vault. Each stack is the next number in the Fibonacci series. I can easily count them daily in under five minutes.

[tulak]

Quote:

Originally Posted by travelover I'm curious as to why anyone would check everyday. It doesn't seem actionable.

It saves me time. When I’m traveling, I don’t update Moneydance and when I get back it takes me an hour or so to get everything back on track. If I do this regularly, it only takes a few minutes.

[tb001]

Quote:

Originally Posted by travelover I'm curious as to why anyone would check everyday. It doesn't seem actionable.

My parents were very set it and forget it types. Last year someone hacked their amazon account and then somehow their Costco credit card and charged 12k in gift cards in June and then again in December. A huge pita (for me) to fix. About half they were unable to recover because 6 months had passed.

We’ve found several wrong charges, but I do it more to stay on top of recurring bills or subscriptions that we don’t need.

[tb001]

Quote:

Originally Posted by RetiredHappy I know many people use Personal Capital app to consolidate their accounts by linking to their accounts in other systems. It is ripe for the accounts to be hacked into. I spent a significant part of my career in information security and it makes me nervous as hell and no way I would use their system.

Out of curiosity, do you think the same of quicken? Personal capital made me uncomfortable with all of the calls to use their other services so I deleted our account.

I tend to track spend using quicken and then manually log in to our investment accounts. They’re fairly consolidated, so it’s easy to track. Since I only look at the latter on up days, I don’t want to be forced to look on down days when I’m reviewing our budget!

[RetiredHappy]

Quote:

Originally Posted by tb001 Out of curiosity, do you think the same of quicken? Personal capital made me uncomfortable with all of the calls to use their other services so I deleted our account. I tend to track spend using quicken and then manually log in to our investment accounts. They’re fairly consolidated, so it’s easy to track. Since I only look at the latter on up days, I don’t want to be forced to look on down days when I’m reviewing our budget!

I have not used Quicken so I do not know how it works. I do track our financial picture in Excel, encrypt and store it on OneDrive in the "Personal Vault". I also keep an encrypted copy on my laptop.

[Nick Striker]

Once a month for me when I reconcile my accounts. Most assets are in commercial real estate, so it doesn't fluctuate. My Vanguard I don't want to see the ups and downs, but still check once a month. We have way too much cash that is basically losing money through inflation, but I can't help thinking that markets will fall, especially as the Delta Variant will influence the economy. I want to have some cash to go shopping for real estate deals at that point. That may be a stupid gamble.

[WestUniversity]

I use the Mint app daily, not so much to see the totals, but to keep an eye on the daily details. Doing so helped me catch some credit card fraud items recently. Very large dollar items at that. Once a month I download all of our transactions from our bank and FIDO. I run them all through a homegrown spreadsheet that generates reports showing a financial statement line item detail that compares actual to budget. The same spreadsheet also has a tab that reports out our TWRR for all of our cash and investments. Dealing with huge data dumps in massive spreadsheets was one of my routine tasks at MegaCorp. This spreadsheet has only about 20 or so tabs. Simple by comparison…

[doneat54]

I'll admit to checking my biggest account pretty much daily as I have the Prudential app on my phone and it is just a fingerprint log in to see the balance.