Comments on: Making a Monthly Personal Balance Sheet

By: Ben

Ben — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 16:50:39 +0000

I would like to agree with Saver Queen. I have been using Wesabe http://www.wesabe.com for about 6 months. As long as your bank allows for downloading your transactions you can use Wesabe to upload the transactions through their tools it becomes an autamated process. The Security is better than Mint.com because you do not have to save your passwords on the website they are saved to your comptuer. I love the goals, tips and tracking by tags! I wouold recommend it to anyone.

By: Barch78

Barch78 — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 12:18:28 +0000

Mint.com looks really interesting. I am afraid though of entering all my financial institution information. Where does it go and who has access to it?

By: Rebecca

Rebecca — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 02:54:20 +0000

Great tips! This is definitely a good first step to making a solid budget.

By: Jess

Jess — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 00:17:03 +0000

What requires you to update Quicken or Microsoft Money? They don’t stop working when a new version comes out.
Plus, you should know there are plenty of free, open-source programs available on finance.
Not that you have to use a program, but know that program resources are definitely out there.

By: Yynatago

Yynatago — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 22:51:01 +0000

Since one of my financial goals is to be able to live of passive income, I found it useful to monitor ratio between my passive income to my personal expenses. Other useful indicators include ratio between direct income (ie work pay) to personal expenses, and the ratio between net asset and passive income.

By: Andee Sellman, One Sherpa

Andee Sellman, One Sherpa — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 20:53:09 +0000

Thanks for your insight here. It always is amazing to me how many people become activity junkies and never stop to see what they’ve achieved financially.(i.e. what’s in their balance sheet!) If more people had a focus on the balance sheet I doubt whether there would have been so much personal debt taken on in the boom times. So many people knew what their monthly payments were but had no focus on how much debt was outstanding. I guess the balance sheet simply brings another perspective which can really show you what you’re actually achieving

By: susan

susan — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 20:27:13 +0000

I have an excel spreadsheet that I track on that’s very detailed. I also use networthIQ for the big picture net worth. If you fill it in every month it’ll give you month over month percentages plus you can see how you stack up against others in your age range, profession or state.

By: carlos

carlos — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 20:06:43 +0000

I also use GNUcash, it is great. On windows I use the Portable edition ( http://portableapps.com/de/apps/office/gnucash_portable ), it requires no installation (I have it on a USB Stick to be able to use it at work). On my home, I use the OS X version and I keep the data synced through the USB stick.

By: Brigitte

Brigitte — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 17:33:15 +0000

I agree with the others about GNUCash. It’s free, open-source, and a real accounting program that works quite well. As far as accounting goes, better than Quicken I think.

By: CPA Kevin

CPA Kevin — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 17:04:47 +0000

I use Quicken 2006 and am now getting notices that it won’t be supported after 4/30/09. However, I can still use the program, I just can’t download transactions, update my portfolio values, etc. which is normally what I use it for.

So now I have to decide if I want to pay the upgrade charge – $40 – or just go to a free program or create my own with Excel. Excel won’t have the downloading and easy reconciling capability like Quicken does, but I could customize it more easily.

By: Lissa

Lissa — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 16:04:30 +0000

I can’t speak for Quicken, but the other posters about Microsoft Money are correct – you are never prompted to upgrade it. I too used Money 99 for several years, then used Money 2003 and 2007 – only because I got them free with TaxCut. I just wish it had a Mac version and I’m now running it via Fusion.

By: Sacha Chua

Sacha Chua — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 15:40:46 +0000

If you feel like sharing your progress (anonymously or not), there's a site called Net Worth IQ which will let you post monthly summaries, and will even chart them for you and compare them against people of similar circumstances. =)

By: dave

dave — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 14:33:03 +0000

i use a plain excel spreadsheet for my monthly balance sheet. have been doing it since 2007 and it’s nice to see the historical data easily. i also keep a worksheet for the following year with assumptions plugged in, so i can estimate future activity. and i don’t have the extra worry about my data on some company’s server.

By: Ilah

Ilah — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 13:42:51 +0000

I’m an accountant/bookkeeper, I use Quicken for my at home finances and have used several other business specific accounting software including every QuickBooks,QBPro, QB Premier and QB Enterprise. The QB, is okay, but like Quicken it assumes everyone using it is an idiot. It can be very frustrating not to be able to do certain journal entries, so one has to do 2-3 JE’s to actual create one. I used to like Quicken for my home finances, it was easy to use and fairly efficient. But then I upgraded to the 2007–ugh! Once again a software company that “improves” their product only to make it worse.

By: CF

CF — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 13:18:48 +0000

I’ve been doing a monthly profit & loss (income) statement for many years. Like you, I track each type of income and each expense, and also have a section for after-tax investing (mainly 529s for the kids), so I can see a net both before and after the investments are made. Depending on the net balance for the month, I have a formula for putting that additional amount into paying off our HELOC (almost at zero!) and to an ING account with various sub-accounts (vacation fund etc).

I use Excel – it’s very simple, doesn’t take much time, and each year is a different tab, so I can quickly look at years of data. I have a separate Excel worksheet for net worth, which I update quarterly.

By: Lance Ware

Lance Ware — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 13:18:09 +0000

I used Mint.com and I love it. Its a once and done senario. I have grown with since beta and it has gotten pretty impressive. I used to use Microsoft Money but the constant logging of transactions got to cumbersome for just calculation net worth. With Mint, its definitely a once and done solution. I’ll be glad when they start to add more information.

By: Rasto

Rasto — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 07:50:00 +0000

I found myself using RQ Money (on my flash disk) that appears to be small yet very powerful software to track my incomes and expenses. The link is: http://www.rq.sk/rqmoneyen.html for those of you who want to have a look. Starting this year I make all efforts to track every cent I spend and it starts to pay off already.

By: Rocketman

Rocketman — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 05:53:22 +0000

I use Quicken and only upgrade it when I upgrade my computer (if then) currently I am using Quicken 2000. I have been using Quicken ever since I got my computer back in 1993 (just after we got married) and have kept all the data. So I can see how my net worth has been going for 16 yrs, and figure expenses for that same time period – not that I really do much with data over 5 yrs old – but it is nice to figure out when we have a question.

By: Mike

Mike — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 05:49:58 +0000

I’ve used Mint.com and it’s slick, but I like Yodlee.com much better (and Bank of America’s My Portfolio, which uses Yodlee’s services).

Part of what it provides is exactly what you’re doing: comparing income vs expenses, and assets vs liabilities. However, it does this automatically, it shows the changes graphically, and you can view those changes either weekly or monthly, at various time scales (3 months, 6 months, this month, last month, etc). It takes a bit of effort to initially set everything up, but it is very easy to maintain.

While my income and expenses bounce around a lot, I have a positive net cash flow; and while my net worth is very negative, it’s been slowly creeping upwards since last June.

By: Mr. ToughMoneyLove

Mr. ToughMoneyLove — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 05:44:09 +0000

Quicken wants you to update yearly but you don’t need to. My version is three years old. The time you save by being able to import data from multiple online accounts (particularly investment accounts) is enormous compared to manual entry in a spreadsheet. One click and you have a net worth report. It is also easier to do net worth comparisons, exclude categories, etc. using a software tool. But for families with limited data to use, a spreadsheet is perfect.