I LOVE the look of Mint. It lets you pool all your financial accounts and investments together so you get a single snapshot of where you are financially. Its dashboard looks sleek and simple, and I’m a Millennial sucker for a well-designed app that simplifies your life and presents your data in a streamlined, easy-to-understand way.
So it pained me to learn that using aggregate financial apps like Mint can actually void any fraud protection your bank might give you because you need to enter your sensitive account info/passwords into the app before you use it. (Money Sense: Hidden Danger at Mint.com)
Welp, I don’t want to take the risk.
But, I still like seeing my information in one location, so enter the basic, boring (yet oh so helpful) spreadsheet. My plan going forward is to create this spreadsheet below every month and track my progress as I go. It’s one more step to do at the end of the month, but I can take an extra 10 minutes at the end of the month when I look at my expenses/budget and add this step. Not so bad.
So this is what it looks like for me now. I have each investment on its own row, and I keep track of the date I’m reviewing it, the type of fund it is (RRSP, TFSA, etc), and other notables like how many shares I currently own. The main columns I care about are the contributions this month column (to make sure I’m contributing what I planned to) and the value column, which is simply listing how much money I have in the account at the moment.
And that’s it. Boring, but useful. I’m planning to look at a few more visualizations I can do in Excel, like pie charts and bar graphs to track my progress, but this will work fine for now.
Happy saving!
Sovereign Squirrel
