Hello. I am wondering what people use to track net worth and investments? I know Personal Capital is the favourite tracker in the US but if you aren’t American (with a US cell phone to validate your account), you can’t sign up. Additionally there are no links to any non-US accounts/banks/brokerages. I am an ex-pat with investments in 4 countries so would be keen to find something appropriate although realise that i’d most likely have to enter everything in manually - once.
thanks!
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You might not like the answer, but excel does a pretty good job. for getting started, check out Mr.RIP’s sheet for tracking his net worth. Well, you would have to collect all your data every [desired time period] . I would not know of any software that i would trust access to my broker/bank accounts for automated net worth data collection.
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I share your point of view Nugget, Excel does a great job. You can customize your sheets and display information in charts, cheese graph, etc…
I still hope that someday Mint or Personal Capital will issue a version for swiss users but let’s be realistic, we will have to wait a few years…
Using beancount to track my finances (after using gnucash and then ledger-cli at first for a while). Nothing beats a proper old fashioned double-entry bookkeeping system. Very scriptable/hackable and handles multiple currencies like a breeze.
Regarding Mint and Personal Capital - are these the types of sites who ask for your bank and brokerage passwords? Call me paranoid, but there’s no chance in hell I’m giving out such sensitive passwords to a third party, no matter how fancy their website is. I’ve worked enough in IT to see how risky this can turn out to be.
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Hi,
I’ve used gnucash for several years but then switched to moneydance. I’m also a fan of the double-entry system and both those tools gave me that. Never tried automatically pulling security prices in gnucash however moneydance works like a charm.
thanks all. Personal Capital is promoted by all the US financial bloggers, they have 1.3m users and more security apparently than the brokerages so i was willing to give it a try. They have partnered with the banks and brokerage houses. Anyway i’ll keep plugging away with Excel for now as usual.
more security apparently than the brokerages
I seriously doubt that, otherwise they should not put bullshit like the following in their AGBs:
TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW, THE LIABILITY OF PERSONAL CAPITAL, ITS AFFILIATES, LICENSORS AND AGENTS TO YOU SHALL NOT EXCEED ONE HUNDRED U.S. DOLLARS ($100).
Is the value of your investments $100? Cause that’s the most they guarantee you’ll be getting if they screw up big time and your money disappears in some offshore with little trace. You might not even get as a much as $100 if the company goes bankrupt at the same time. Banks/brokers will wash their hands off and not compensate anything to you, because you acted highly irresponsible when giving your passwords to a third party and were not supposed to do that. They’ll have no way of knowing if this was you sending money to your offshore or some hacker or insider…
Personal Capital is promoted by all the US financial bloggers
Probably same thing you could say about Lehman Brothers before 2008… Don’t go blindly with the crowd, use your brain.
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Hi there,
I used Lincoln when in France then Mint when in the US. But having money in multiple currencies and tracking that was becoming a problem.
Now I use gnucash mainly with automatic securities price retrieval (through a custom Python script I’m willing to share).
I like the software for data entry and it looks robust. However I feel a bit frustrated by the (limited or overly complicated) reporting capabilities.
In your opinion, why are Beancount or Moneydance superior?
Both @hedgehog and @lv24 have used gnucash before then switched to something else.
I’ve been collecting data on gnucash meticulously since 2016
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Beancount is a different breed of tools to others - plain text accounting. Not everyone’s cup of tea, but offers superior scriptability. Cleaner API and file format compared to other of its breed (ledger-cli & co). Reporting-wise, there’s a pretty nice frontend available for it, check the demo
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Oh I don’t mind the geeky approach at all! I already use scripts that call Gnucash’s API mainly for prices and FX rates updates.
I was looking into using then for building custom reports or some kind of web interface. I like the Fava one!
I’ll look into beancount+Fava then. From what I see, it’s double-entry accounting (plus the notion of “payee” and “payer”) and the way things are handled are very similar to Gnucash, so it should be easy to migrate the data if I decide to go forward. But then again this makes me wonder: do you like it better because it’s hackable? What feature does it have that you can’t achieve (or it’s too difficult) with Gnucash? What about a report/feature that tracks investment performance properly also for tax purposes?
I know it’s a lots of questions, please don’t feel obligated to reply to a random guy on the internet 
I’m getting excited about this potential new project!
I am pretty much on the same spot as @Ed_Waadt, only that i didnt writ my own FX script but failed to install some available pearl (or something) plugin to automatically fetch stock quotes.
I’ve also though about beancount, and now seeing the demo i am quite… interested!
Plain text accounting is the killer feature. As opposed to point and click GUI. You can treat your books as code, put them in git with version control, generate and parse them or parts of them with scripts, refactoring and testing is easy.
For example, I have script that takes csv files from IB with my transactions and formats them into beancount transactions, dividends and w/h tax amounts are parsed and put into corresponding accounts automatically. Another script to walk through all beancount files, find symbols mentioned in it and spit out beancount’s price db with all daily prices for them from my private timeseries database. I could easily write a script to walk over my accounts and compute tax liability for the current year
Compared to gnucash, one pretty big improvement I could mention is multi-currency account handling. In gnucash AFAIK I had to create subaccounts for each currency which was PITA. In beancount each account can have a mix of currencies. Another minor feature that I’m fond of is tags and links. Sort of like mini-accounts, helps to keep your main account hierarchy lean without unnecessary details. For example, I have tags to track of cost of my PC as I upgrade it - so that when it comes to sell it I can readily access all relevant transactions and compute my P/L for it
Yet another cool feature is integration with documents hierarchy - you can create a directory tree with same structure as your accounts, drop .pdf’s (account statements, invoices, etc) with date prefix in filename and and you’ll see them in fava next to book entries. Helps to keep your documents organized and in sync with accounts.
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I use a Python script that update FX prices and stock/ETF prices every evening. Very much willing to share if you don’t judge my code 
I see, I though of such things via continuous API calls to Gnucash, but I see that parsing a text file is much easier.
Interesting. I’m quite used to having too many accounts for different currencies.
Sweeeeet. You got me hooked for the long Easter weekend.
BUMP UP 
I’m totally frustrated with Morningstar - the CH one doesn’t know Fundsmith or SSON, the UK one doesn’t know ARK… why on earth are these tools this disjunct, under the same brand?!
I want to track my funds as well as my direct stocks to see how much of title X I own through my ETFs and funds… is that possible somehow? I’m surely not the first to want such a thing without programming knowledge.
ewwww, a fat app in 2021 
I downloaded it, seems to tick a lot of boxes, but… no, thanks
Your loss 
PP is an amazing tool to track performance over time. You can even automatically import all your trades from e.g. VIAC to exactly keep track of fees and more.
I know 
Don’t care about fees too much and I want to open this on multiple devices, ideally.
I’m gonna end up with a Google Sheet like everyone else, I believe, and just do monthly snapshots as a poor man’s tracking option.
All I want is all funds and all stocks in one portal, why is this so damn difficult in 2021? sigh
Sure, an iPad App would be nice, but otherwise…
I didn’t get around to trying Portfolio Performance, but indeed seems to.
Open Source
Cross-Platform
No online portal required, no account foisted upon me, no subscription
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