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

[DrRoy]

I actively avoid daily updates on the market. I see some info in the newspaper, which only comes 3 times a week. I update my accounts monthly.

[Dtail]

I check my CC charges daily, in order to update my expense spreadsheet daily and to look for potential fraud.
I fully update my investment accounts spreadsheet monthly.

[Midpack]

I update our net worth quarterly, otherwise I don't "count."

[big-papa]

Quote:

Originally Posted by donheff Ditto. My spreadsheet uses Google functions to load the COB prices from the evening before. I check the actual accounts every 3 months or so to update changes from dividends. Like big papa, I don't freak out when prices crash so checking daily is not a problem.

Yup - I use an add-in for Excel to do the same thing. A lot of stuff is automated, but I still manually type in dollar amounts from my accounts. Helps to be able to have an aggregator like Fidelity's Full-View so I only have to log in one place to retrieve the data.

[Ronstar]

Monthly. I look up my balances (including checking acct) online and sum up in a spreadsheet. Sum of the accounts is portfolio value, and difference in monthly checking balance (plus income) equals monthly spending.

[scrabbler1]

I check it monthly, for recording purposes, mid-month which is when my bank statement comes out. But I will also check it at the end of the month when my monthly bond fund distributions come out, and whenever I make any purchases or redemptions, or when there are irregular distributions such as cap gains. So, I could access my account on line 2 or 3 times in a week then not check it again for 2 or 3 weeks.

If I know I am approaching a milestone, I will check it more often, too. I have missed those a few times over the years.

[mrfeh]

I check our portfolio value every day. Net worth is available in mint whenever I'm curious.

[pb4uski]

All of our accounts are defined in Quicken and I run One-Step Update a few times a week to fetch unposted transactions, review them and post them.

[Koolau]

Back when I hated my j*b, I would check almost daily. Once I created my own area of expertise within Megacorp (and all but created my own assignment) I backed way off and only checked for "Financial Independence" every month or so. Once retired, I kept tabs on my cash reserves, but didn't check NW except every 3 months (when all the quarterly statements arrived.) Now, I do a NW overview once a year (after all the yearly statements arrive) and once in a while, I'll review the quarterlies and update the NW.

Once I decided that I had "enough", the pressure to know NW or individual asset performance seemed to fade. I guess I still fear black swans like hyperinflation or LTC, but I no longer fixate on FI since I am already there. YMMV

[DayDreaming]

I check about every day or ever other day. It's just 1 click with Moneydance (and other tools), so why not. But I'm not doing it to check my net worth, I do it to make sure there are no unexplained transactions, particularly on my credit cards.

The OP mentioned running FireCalc regularly too - I don't do that any more, after over 10 years of retirement, I know that I'm doing well enough that I don't need to worry about it.

[Winemaker]

Net worth quarterly, statements monthly, some accounts daily, others once in a while. Not everything is with same broker.

[RunningBum]

Whenever I feel like it. Sometimes it can be most days in the week, other times I might go 1-3 weeks without updating. Maybe even longer. I don't worry about it. Probably more often if the market has made a big swing up or down. Always on 12/31 or 1/1 to take a yearly snapshot, and anytime I might be doing something like a withdrawal to see if I can do any rebalancing along with the transaction.

[Gumby]

I have my portfolio on Yahoo Finance and generally take a look at it every evening. I only go into the actual accounts at the end of each month to true up dividends and distributions.

[Exchme]

Investments each night, but only if the markets went up! I get a little dopamine hit that way. Then a few minutes each weekend to check asset allocations to see if I need to rebalance (I run 80/20 but don't want to let it rise above there) and a few more minutes monthly to look at the bank statement to see if we need to move money to checking.

[EastWest Gal]

Same as RunningBum.

I track spending more than assets, because we have more control over that. Our statements are all online. I print a year end statement and of course the tax statements to keep with our copy of our tax return.

I have two credit cards and get daily balances by text. I also get a text message for every charge, so that if something seems wrong, I catch it right away. Same for the bank balances. I get a text if our checking account goes below a certain amount so I can transfer from the Schwab account before we go under.

I don't track net worth, only assets. Value of home, cars, and contents is only going to be important when those things get sold, and except for the house, the value is trivial. This is true for the investments, but some of these are periodically sold to fund our lives.

The importance of money is diminishing in our lives, as we have more than we need. Time is becoming more important each day.

[Aerides]

I think we all do peak here and there, some more regimented than others, and you might find you look less after you've RE'd for a couple of years (we did):

https://www.early-retirement.org/for...ng-109963.html

[Tadpole]

I have kept once a week updates since 2004. I still do the updates each week but rarely pay attention to the current status. We are in our 70s and I made the mistake in 2007 of pulling most of our money out of the market so it has set there making almost nothing for thirteen years as the market has bubbled and not given me a comfortable buy-in crash. (Yes, I am very cowardly when it comes to gambling.) So, since 2007 we have only doubled our savings. My bad. Now that we are RMD all my savings do is increase my tax bracket since our income from other sources exceeds our spending. Meanwhile our direct deposits bubble our bank account and I haven't a clue what to do with excess dollars. It's hard being a coward.

[MichealKnight]

I've retired early at 45, partially by choice, but mostly because a 20+ year success in business started to go sour in the last 3 years.


I do a real "grand total" at *least* once a month. Every single account. Money in, money out. Trends.

I do a mental calculation, I'd say on average....twice a week.

Yes, I love family, music, movies, food.

But looking at my balances is keeping me sane and sleeping at night.

I'm still not settled on my grand plan long term, so *those* calculations I bet I do 3-5 times per day, every day.

[MichealKnight]

Yes, I admit - the stock portfolio I look at a few times a day.

My dream is to be able to ignore it for weeks at a time.

The closest I got was a few days ago when there was a small 500 point dip in the Dow: I swore to myself, NO looking. NO scaring myself. NO panic selling. (In my whole life, I've panic sold at EVERY crash and each time - I see I'd been much wealthier had I just held on)

So last week, for that one day - I didn't;t look!

And days after, my portfolio was worth a bit more overall.

[Ole Red 29]

I too have a spreadsheet detailing my entire portfolio, but I only update it in January and July. Have been doing so for years. Makes it easy to look back and see performance of all
my accounts at a macro level. I do update expenses monthly.