Program for investments?

[spotty_dog]

Quicken has this feature.

How much detail do you need, and how many transactions are you making? I have an excessively complicated portfolio (36 positions in 7 accounts across 3 banks and investment services) that I invest and rebalance by hand; I update my totals every week or two in an Excel spreadsheet and it takes about 15 minutes.

Retirement investments should mostly be set it and forget it, except maybe for rebalancing among asset classes every year or two. Keeping tabs too closely is a recipe for reactivity and emotional responses, which is a huge glaring no-no for long-term investing.

Your investment service or bank may be able to give you some reports that would serve your purpose better than this transaction-by-transaction stuff.

(Mint freaked me out because their online interface was so sketchy and kept crashing on me; it didn't give me confidence to have all my bank passwords with them so I deleted my account there.)

[spaz]

A lot of accounts

posting to you privately

[spaz]

I guess he would like to see on all one page how the 529, extra retirement account, ROTH, practice retirement plan, our other investment/stock plan, etc have done over the last 20 years from inception of each of them. He wants to see that he made 10 percent on this account and lost 1 percent on this account, all on one page. You need the detail to know that kind of thing because if you don't know what you bought it for 10 years ago, then how can you know what it is worth. Because some of the accounts if I start with 2014 it looks like we bought it pretty high, when really we bought it at about 1/2 the price 10 years ago...

[spotty_dog]

I guess he would like to see on all one page how the 529, extra retirement account, ROTH, practice retirement plan, our other investment/stock plan, etc have done over the last 20 years from inception of each of them. He wants to see that he made 10 percent on this account and lost 1 percent on this account, all on one page. You need the detail to know that kind of thing because if you don't know what you bought it for 10 years ago, then how can you know what it is worth. Because some of the accounts if I start with 2014 it looks like we bought it pretty high, when really we bought it at about 1/2 the price 10 years ago...

Okay, so for this information what you want is Excel's XIRR function. It's really the only way to get a meaningful picture. http://whitecoatinvestor.com/how-to-...xirr-function/

The good news is that you don't need all the itty bitty details. Dividends, value changes, rollovers, this stuff gets absorbed into the calculation. However, you do need to know when you ADDED money to your accounts and when you REMOVED money from your accounts (down to the date), BEGINNING balances and ENDING balances.

I hope you have been keeping your statements. I think that if you don't want to pay a pro for this, you do have your work cut out for you.

[poky]

Okay, so for this information what you want is Excel's XIRR function. It's really the only way to get a meaningful picture. http://whitecoatinvestor.com/how-to-...xirr-function/

The good news is that you don't need all the itty bitty details. Dividends, value changes, rollovers, this stuff gets absorbed into the calculation. However, you do need to know when you ADDED money to your accounts and when you REMOVED money from your accounts (down to the date).

I hope you have been keeping your statements. I think that if you don't want to pay a pro for this, you do have your work cut out for you.

yeah, this. Mint won't pull enough history to do this for you, but you definitely don't need every fluctuation of value, just how much you added and removed, and when.

[spaz]

Yeah I saw that post about Excel... I don't have a clue how Excel works. Yes, we keep all statements for the current year and at the end of the year we save only the end of the year one that shows all the actions for the year.. But you are still talking about a ton of information to enter and as I said I don't have a clue. So Excel is the way to go. I looked at his site but didn't understand what he was saying about what to put on there.

[spotty_dog]

Yes, it's a ton of information to keep track of, but that is why the professionals make the big bucks and the DIYers are usually better served by keeping it much, much simpler!

I am looking at the XIRR information for my last fiscal year. I get the values of all my accounts on 1/1/13 and pretend that was like a deposit. Then I put in the values and dates of all the contributions we made through the year; 11 monthly contributions to the main retirement account, 7 intermittent contributions to the taxable investment account, a withdrawal (closed my Roth with Fidelity) and a deposit (reopened my Roth with TIAA-CREF). Then I enter the values of the accounts on 12/31/13 as a negative. I run the XIRR function on the date column and the amount column. (Result: 17%. In the same fiscal year, a combination of 56% total stock market, 30% total bond market, 14% total international market would have returned about 20%, and a Vanguard Target Retirement 2025 fund, currently at a 70/30 allocation, would have returned 18%.)

FYI -- I calculate return differently on retirement/long-term money than on college/savings/short-term money, because my investment strategy is different and my expected return is different in those categories.

WCI's article is the best I've seen, you may need to learn by doing. Start with just the most recent fiscal year before you start doing your whole backlog of recordkeeping.

[The White Coat Investor]

Yes, it's a ton of information to keep track of, but that is why the professionals make the big bucks and the DIYers are usually better served by keeping it much, much simpler!

I am looking at the XIRR information for my last fiscal year. I get the values of all my accounts on 1/1/13 and pretend that was like a deposit. Then I put in the values and dates of all the contributions we made through the year; 11 monthly contributions to the main retirement account, 7 intermittent contributions to the taxable investment account, a withdrawal (closed my Roth with Fidelity) and a deposit (reopened my Roth with TIAA-CREF). Then I enter the values of the accounts on 12/31/13 as a negative. I run the XIRR function on the date column and the amount column. (Result: 17%. In the same fiscal year, a combination of 56% total stock market, 30% total bond market, 14% total international market would have returned about 20%, and a Vanguard Target Retirement 2025 fund, currently at a 70/30 allocation, would have returned 18%.)

FYI -- I calculate return differently on retirement/long-term money than on college/savings/short-term money, because my investment strategy is different and my expected return is different in those categories.

WCI's article is the best I've seen, you may need to learn by doing. Start with just the most recent fiscal year before you start doing your whole backlog of recordkeeping.

As noted, I use excel. But the more investments you have, and the more you buy and sell them, the more of a pain it is, no matter what system you use. Quicken and Mint do pull some information, but you lose some privacy and it never really did what I wanted, so I just do it myself. The XIRR function is the best way to get your returns anyway. The good news is you don't have to worry about distributions that you just reinvested. You just need dates and amounts of deposits and withdrawals from the account.