I spent almost two years looking at every product on the market available for individuals, and was dissatisfied with all of them. Many didn't allow for custom investments to be added. Some didn't recognize unusual securities like preferred stocks or baby bonds. Some didn't provide the data I wanted or needed. Some didn't deal with bond ladders. The ones that automatically consolidated from multiple institutions made me nervous because if hackers get into the software that performs the consolidation, theoretically that could access every financial account. Yikes.
So, I slowly built my own spreadsheet over time. I created one main data entry page for every holding, with whatever information I had or wanted for that security. Then I created charts, tables, and calculations for whatever I wanted to see. It's become a pretty sophisticated but simple to understand view of my financials.
I decided to update the data manually, both for better cybersecurity, but also it allows me to become really in tune to the movement of prices. That gives me a pretty interesting perspective of how my holdings are doing versus market indexes.
For some of the data I wanted, I had to create some numerical approximations to get a "roughly right" view. For example, to create my bond ladder, I used bond ETF's, CD's, and individual bonds. I wanted to project yields to maturity for the ladder, and also see current yield and distribution yield. I wanted to see the maturity dates of the ladder. But, the calculations for that when you have bond ETF's gets very complex and is just a continuously changing approximation since bond ETF's are constantly resetting the duration. But, you can get it close enough. So, I built a roughly right ladder tool that gives me a snapshot in time whenever I go in and upate the data. It's very comforting knowing, for example, that my current ladder has a yield to maturity over 5%. I know how much "matures" each year, taking into account the duration and maturity date of my ETF's and individual bonds or CD's.
I update my data according to a schedule. Every week or few weeks, I update security prices. That gives me a solid view of equity vs fixed and other deeper category information. Every year I update equity holdings by S&P sector to give me a view of holdings vs "the market" by S&P sector. I update dividend rates, bond projected yields to maturity, and distribution yields every few months, and that gives me a rough view of yearly distributions from the porfolio.
So I only have to spend 15-25 minutes every few weeks to get a nice snapshot, then maybe an hour once or twice a year to get snapshot views of other data. I have a summary page of all sorts of data, like:
1. Holdings by major asset class (equity, fixed, cash, alternative assets).
2. Holdings by taxable status (pre and post tax) by asset class (cash, fixed-CDs, fixed-bonds, fixed-private debt, equity-common stock, equity-preferred stock, alternative-VC, PE, Other, alternative-Real Estate.
3.Net Worth.
4. Ratios - Equity/Fixed, Bond quality, years of short-term investments, domestic/foreign stock, large/mid/small cap stock %, investment grade vs high yield bond %, government vs corporate bond %, etc.
5. Further subcategories of investments, like foreign broken into emerging market vs developed, etc.
6. Investment themes - $ in investments based upon a particular theme, like healthcare or actively managed ETF's, etc.
7. Equity by market cap and growth vs blend vs value, or by sector.
8. Projected after tax income yearly.
9. Projected total returns, projected distributions.
10. Tax efficiency.
11. etc.
It's a pretty darn good tool. But it took awhile to build.
