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

[big-papa]

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]

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

so true!!

 

[Chuckanut]

[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]

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]

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]

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]

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.

 

[wildsun]

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

I check in almost every day because, in past decades I have found that when I didn't watch my investments that closely, those who make the day to day decisions about the monies for me, don't pay as much attention to earnings as I want them to.

The best defense against that problem is to educate yourself so you understand what is going on, and talk people who manage the money frequently so they know you have expectations.

My growth has been beyond my expectations since I took this approach, and of course it helps that we finally responded to Covid and the country is on a growth track again.

 

[travelover]

I check in almost every day because, in past decades I have found that when I didn't watch my investments that closely, those who make the day to day decisions about the monies for me, don't pay as much attention to earnings as I want them to.

The best defense against that problem is to educate yourself so you understand what is going on, and talk people who manage the money frequently so they know you have expectations.

My growth has been beyond my expectations since I took this approach, and of course it helps that we finally responded to Covid and the country is on a growth track again.

That is a very interesting perspective. So, your money manager only makes you money when you hound them?

 

[NW-Bound]

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

It is, for a guy like me who sells option contracts daily.

 

[Rocky mtn high]

I have totaled net worth 6/30 and 12/31 and calculate % up or down for years and check investments almost daily unless I am traveling. Glad I am not the only one and this just shows early retirees are very much planners.

 

[aja8888]

I have totaled net worth 6/30 and 12/31 and calculate % up or down for years and check investments almost daily unless I am traveling. Glad I am not the only one and this just shows early retirees are very much planners.

You mean checkers, not planners.

 

[NW-Bound]

You mean checkers, not planners.

Some of them are just checkers, but a few of them are traders.

 

[dixonge]

As an index fund investor, I check the direction of futures and occasional intraday numbers of the index, but only because it's on a widget on my phone's home screen. Come to think of it, I should remove that really.

I update a spreadsheet monthly which calculates how much our net worth has risen along with the average monthly rise over the last 2 years. I do not include our two financed vehicles in this figure.

 

[gayl]

As an index fund investor, I check the direction of futures and occasional intraday numbers of the index, but only because it's on a widget on my phone's home screen.

which has led me to wondering today why I have 50k in cash. It just sort of crept up there (as did my liquid net worth). It's now 5% of my Schwab acct

 

[Koolau]

I update a spreadsheet monthly which calculates how much our net worth has risen along with the average monthly rise over the last 2 years. I do not include our two financed vehicles in this figure.

Heh, heh, I don't include our two paid-for vehicles. SWAG is they have gone up significantly since the recent unpleasantness. That might make the Buick worth $1500 and the Toyota worth $6500. Since I would only have to replace any car sold, I don't even think of cars (my cars) as adding to NW. Just my approach. Those with a new (paid off) Bugatti or even a new Vette would probably think otherwise. YMMV

 

[Hubcity]

I have a spreadsheet that I update monthly that has things like previous 12 months expenses, withdrawal rate of initial balance and of current balance, 12 month and total returns. I update it once a month, but I look at it much more often. I'm going to switch to updating that to once a year in the hopes that I will look at it less often.

I've been retired for 5 years now and am in a good place financially (as is almost everyone who retired 5 years ago, I imagine). If the market or the world makes a big enough move to force me to make major changes to my spending then that news will be on the front page of every newspaper. I won't need to be updating spreadsheets every month to notice.

 

[citrine]

Once a quarter....I note it down old school...pen and paper

 

[W2R]

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

But, but... I want to KNOW!!!

I mean really, to make an analogy, why would I go around with a black hood over my head, so to speak, when I can remove it and see all the light and colors around me.

Another analogy could be drawn between this habit and my habit of recording and adding up all my spending every month. I never spend even half of what FIRECalc says I could, so it's not like this is keeping me from begging with a tin cup down on the street corner. But I just want to KNOW how I'm doing with my spending!!!

 

[Dtail]

But, but... I want to KNOW!!!

I mean really, to make an analogy, why would I go around with a black hood over my head, so to speak, when I can remove it and see all the light and colors around me.

Another analogy could be drawn between this habit and my habit of recording and adding up all my spending every month. I never spend even half of what FIRECalc says I could, so it's not like this is keeping me from begging with a tin cup down on the street corner. But I just want to KNOW how I'm doing with my spending!!!

Same here in terms of just want to know where the dollars are going. Short term spending decisions are not made on this concept.

 

[skyking1]

I am working to NOT look at the whole picture except on that chosen day of the month. Bank accounts, I am in there paying bills and naturally look at deposits, but the other assets I leave alone.

 

[lem1955]

Daily - even Sundays when most financial institutions don't post anything - using Quicken for Mac. Some days it motivates me to look into other sites that update periodically like mySocialSecurity, or Zillow.