The Money Mustache Community
General Discussion => Welcome and General Discussion => Topic started by: atribecalledquest on October 24, 2016, 08:06:20 PM
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A Little Background:
I was introduced to MMM and the concept of Financial Independence 5 years ago and have since been making strides to turn my goal of FI into a reality. From the beginning, I have always been tracking my progress, initially building Excel spreadsheets, then moving onto Google Sheets and now finally, a web application.
Throughout the iterations, I always returned to the idea that a web based tool would be the best solution. So I set out to build it; first by teaching myself web development (Ruby/Rails) and then over the last two years, working nights and weekends to make my idea a reality. I am proud to say through sheer stubbornness and determination, I have successfully bootstrapped and launched trackFI (https://www.trackfi.com).
One of the main drivers of building trackFI was to recapture that initial surge of enthusiasm you get when you first learn about financial independence. Those rosy first couple of months are great, but unfortunately, the journey to FI takes years of dedication. I wanted to build a tool that allows you to quickly & easily track your journey to financial independence. But more importantly, a tool that provides the much needed motivation to keep you moving towards financial independence, month in and month out.
Features:
- Explore motivational insights. See where you could retire to today based on current cities cost of living, your net worth and expenses
- Interact with rich visual charts and dashboards. See how many more years you have left until financial independence, your Savings Rate, Net Worth and more
- Centralize all your financial accounts to get a clear picture of your assets and liabilities
- Know where your money is going each month and how its changed over time
- Export your data at any time
- Receive email/SMS reminders to create monthly entries
- Fully responsive - works great on both mobile and desktop
- Highly customizable
Coming soon
- See how you are doing compared to others in your cohort (age/gender/location/etc)
- Receive custom, intelligent recommendations on how to get to FI sooner
- Option to create a public profile to interact and engage with other community members
How Does it Work?
trackFI is based on tracking the monthly values of all your Accounts, Expenses and Incomes. After you sign up, you will be guided through the onboarding process by a short tour.
- Add Your Accounts. Accounts consist of both assets and liabilities such as banks, investment accounts, credit cards, mortgages, loans, real estate and other assets and/or liabilities.
(https://www.trackfi.com/assets/homepage/step1.gif)
(https://www.trackfi.com/assets/homepage/transparent.png)
- Add Expense Categories. Expenses consist of all items you spend money on. These include items such as rent/mortgage, electricity, internet, groceries, gas, eating out, etc. You can think of expenses as typical things you would see in a budget.
(https://www.trackfi.com/assets/homepage/step2.gif)
(https://www.trackfi.com/assets/homepage/transparent.png)
- Add Your Incomes. Incomes are your sources of money that will help you achieve financial independence. These typically include income from jobs, investments or passive streams.
(https://www.trackfi.com/assets/homepage/step3.gif)
(https://www.trackfi.com/assets/homepage/transparent.png)
- Create Your First Entry! Put it all together as an Entry. Entries are monthly snapshots of your Accounts, Expenses and Incomes that power all the underlying charts, tables, dashboards and insights. The information provided in Steps 1 - 3 is automatically used when creating Entries.
(https://www.trackfi.com/assets/homepage/step4a.gif)
(https://www.trackfi.com/assets/homepage/transparent.png)
- Explore trackFI and All Your New Insights!
(https://www.trackfi.com/assets/homepage/step5a.gif)
I would be honored if you took a look. I put a massive amount of thought and care into making trackFI a reality and would highly value your feedback, criticisms, suggestions! I also hope you find it useful in tracking your own journeys to FI.
https://www.trackfi.com
Thanks,
Kevin
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Looks really interesting!
I will definitely check it out when I am on my computer (and not my phone.). :)
I would love to integrate my YNAB budget with something like this to track our journey to FI!
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Hi Kevin, I like what I see so far. Where would you like to receive feedback? I'll add my first feedback here... I am currently adding accounts in trackFI.com and as soon as I went over 10 it automatically wrapped to page 2. I would love to see other options for number of accounts per page (ex, 25, 50, 100). Thanks!
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Hi Kevin, I like what I see so far. Where would you like to receive feedback? I'll add my first feedback here... I am currently adding accounts in trackFI.com and as soon as I went over 10 it automatically wrapped to page 2. I would love to see other options for number of accounts per page (ex, 25, 50, 100). Thanks!
Great suggestion! Thanks for your feedback. I just rolled out the change.
(http://i.giphy.com/l0MYKB7jhB3l3kfiU.gif)
I'm glad you like what you see so far. Please feel free to post anything else you'd like to see added or fixed!
Kevin
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Great suggestion! Thanks for your feedback. I just rolled out the change.
Talk about Agile development!! I saw your implemented change and I thought I must of missed it first time around! :-)
I really like what you've done. I have been maintaining this exact type of data in my own spreadsheets on a monthly basis but without the graphs and the FI insight.
Do you have the functionality to export from trackFI.com?
I will continue to back enter my entries so I'll have more data from which to see my progress visually. I can see how this is going to be another something to look forward to at month end!! (along with updating my old school "Money or Your Life" wall chart!).
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I would love to integrate my YNAB budget with something like this to track our journey to FI!
I also use YNAB and for the expense entries in trackFI.com I've decided to only input my high level category group expense totals from YNAB (ex. Monthly Bills, Everyday Expenses, Rainy Day Funds, Giving) to cut down on duplicate entry. Works great! The trackFI.com fields also easily accept copy & paste entries.
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That is SO COOL.
User interface is simple but spiffy. Easy to use. Great amount of tutorial. Love how you have the option to keep things really simple or you can make them very detailed.
So, you can only create monthly entries? And it works out the overview (time to FI, etc) based on an average of the months over time? I track expenses quarterly, and (most) investment income and expenses annually. I don't know how you'd work that in.
Two suggestions - adding an entry, I would like to use the tab key to go to the next entry field instead of to the 'remove' button. And for some reason when I try to edit an entry it sometimes works, but sometimes goes to the Accounts page instead.
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And for some reason when I try to edit an entry it sometimes works, but sometimes goes to the Accounts page instead.
Never mind. Found the edit button, it wasn't really the Accounts page, that's just all I saw on my small window. PEBCAK.
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Amazing.
I wonder if you would be interested in incorporating a feature I've pondered:
An algorithm that calcs the user's 'FIRE Score'. Analogous to FICO score, except this would take into account parameters related to FI and capacity to RE. Preferably, the score range would mimic the same range as FICO does (up to 850) to give some relative familiarity. So someone with a FIRE Score say around 800 would be considered to have a stronger probability for FIRE success than someone in the sub-700 range, for example.
Something fun along those lines?
Folks could monitor and endeavor to improve their FIRE Score over time in the same way they do their credit score. For example, $10K of assets added to their portfolio would add X amount of pts to their score, whereas a new car purchase would cause a drop.
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Wow, this is awesome. Great job!
Also - you may want to add the link to this in your profile so everyone can find it easily even if they don't see this post.
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Hi Kevin, A few more suggestions that should hopefully be straight forward updates:
1.) For the Income and Expense tables on the Dashboard, could you add a bottom row called 'Total" that sums the income and expenses for each entry month. This would allow us to the see total average income and expense numbers in the average column.
2.) On your pie charts you now show the current month. Could you keep the default graphs as the current month but add a dropdown list that would allow you to view graphs from previous entry months.
Thanks again. Keep up the great work!
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Is this open to U.K. Savers?
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Great suggestion! Thanks for your feedback. I just rolled out the change.
Talk about Agile development!! I saw your implemented change and I thought I must of missed it first time around! :-)
I really like what you've done. I have been maintaining this exact type of data in my own spreadsheets on a monthly basis but without the graphs and the FI insight.
Do you have the functionality to export from trackFI.com?
I will continue to back enter my entries so I'll have more data from which to see my progress visually. I can see how this is going to be another something to look forward to at month end!! (along with updating my old school "Money or Your Life" wall chart!).
Once you create an entry, you have the ability to export a CSV, PDF or print your data. Right now its limited to the drill down view of a specific account, expense, income or entry.
(http://i.giphy.com/3o6Zt5OiD7xxN8kcCs.gif)
If you have specific export requests, feel free to let me know. I can add them to the to do list :)
Great to hear you are liking it so far! I'd love to hear more about your 'Money or Your Life wall chart'. It sounds like something that might be useful to others via trackFI.
I also intend to build out a world map feature that shows you where you've been, figuratively speaking, each month that you've been recording entries.
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Looks really interesting!
I will definitely check it out when I am on my computer (and not my phone.). :)
I would love to integrate my YNAB budget with something like this to track our journey to FI!
The website works great on mobile but for the best experience desktop is the preferred choice :)
GREAT idea! I'll have to spin up a YNAB account tonight as I don't have one. More specifically, do you mean the ability to export your YNAB information directly into trackFI via a csv upload?
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That is SO COOL.
User interface is simple but spiffy. Easy to use. Great amount of tutorial. Love how you have the option to keep things really simple or you can make them very detailed.
So, you can only create monthly entries? And it works out the overview (time to FI, etc) based on an average of the months over time? I track expenses quarterly, and (most) investment income and expenses annually. I don't know how you'd work that in.
Two suggestions - adding an entry, I would like to use the tab key to go to the next entry field instead of to the 'remove' button. And for some reason when I try to edit an entry it sometimes works, but sometimes goes to the Accounts page instead.
Regarding tabbing, fantastic suggestion. I just rolled out an update to address that.
(http://i.giphy.com/3o7TKrRoshu3YBNQha.gif)
Unfortunately, right now, trackFI is setup to track information at a monthly level. That's not to say in the future it could not record entries at a quarterly or yearly level. Monthly entries hit that sweet spot of keeping finances top of mind without the obsessive feeling of always watching them. Also, more data points (compared to yearly or quarterly) provide for prettier charts :)
Regarding time til FI, it is calculated with the assumption of 5% growth after inflation. I intend to allow the growth rate to be adjusted by the user in the near future. The time til FI is a function of inflation adjusted growth rate, monthly savings (for that month), current net worth (for that month), and the 25x rule AKA 4% rule (expenses of that month extrapolated out for the year, times 25). With those variables, you can calculate time til FI via the NPER function.
Thanks for taking trackFI for a spin! I hope it helps you on your own journey!
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Is this open to U.K. Savers?
Absolutely! If you are willing to bear with seeing dollar signs for the time being. I am hoping that by this weekend, I can roll out a change that will allow you to choose your currency.
But for the time being, ignore those $ signs and pretend they are £ signs!
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Oh man it looks neat. I have a friend coming over tonight to help her figure out what is going on with her finances (she's motivated but has no clue). Maybe we could test your tool!
I'll come back if we do actually set it up.
Good luck!
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This is really useful! Well done and thank you!
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Definitely plan to check it out, thanks Kevin!
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Wow, this is awesome. Great job!
Also - you may want to add the link to this in your profile so everyone can find it easily even if they don't see this post.
Good idea, thanks!
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Amazing.
I wonder if you would be interested in incorporating a feature I've pondered:
An algorithm that calcs the user's 'FIRE Score'. Analogous to FICO score, except this would take into account parameters related to FI and capacity to RE. Preferably, the score range would mimic the same range as FICO does (up to 850) to give some relative familiarity. So someone with a FIRE Score say around 800 would be considered to have a stronger probability for FIRE success than someone in the sub-700 range, for example.
Something fun along those lines?
Folks could monitor and endeavor to improve their FIRE Score over time in the same way they do their credit score. For example, $10K of assets added to their portfolio would add X amount of pts to their score, whereas a new car purchase would cause a drop.
This is a really interesting idea. I like the concept of showing how your decisions impact a score. I'll have to noodle over how to implement it and the underlying algorithm (for lack of a better word).
Thanks for the suggestion!
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Hey Kevin,
Really neat layout, really enjoy it. I would love to see a direct link to accounts established.
Or if that's not possible, it may be helpful to have an "upload external csv" option. - even if there is an excel template that needs to be attached.
Finally - really love the "where could you live now" feature, it would be cool if it allowed you to scroll through different options - rather than just the one it auto-comes up with
Thanks again! it's neat!
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So I haven't actually used it yet but it sounds like you have to input your information every month? Is it possible to set recurring income/expenses? I don't want to have to reenter my mortgage every month. And yes to being able to import a csv from ynab, or for me, upload my credit card info .
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Pretty cool, just signed up. Seems like a more advanced version of the Madfientist FI tracker.
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Hey Kevin,
This is really neat! I have found something that I consider to be a bug though. I currently have a positive balance on a credit card and there is no way for me to enter that info (from what I can tell).
Also, when logged in I don't see any way to find info on how to contact you. If I log out I can access that info, but it's not in the footer when logged in.
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This looks great. What did you use to teach yourself Ruby/Rails? Who's hosting, AWS?
I'm going to register, check it out, and provide feedback as well, not just ask unrelated questions :)
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Where do I put P2P loans in accounts?
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Very awesome site! It looks very well done. On the graphs, having them show up without hovering over the month would be useful and also adding a total in with the itemized assets/liabilities/whatever.
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Where do I put P2P loans in accounts?
I did other (asset)
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Thank you ! It looks very good.
I would like to be able to make difference between my "net worth" and "stash". I own my home but that asset should not count for the 4% rule.
I'm wondering if I also should not count my emergency fund in the "stash". Maybe have a boolean field on each account to determine if it is part of the "stash" or not ?
I am hoping that by this weekend, I can roll out a change that will allow you to choose your currency.
Cool ! That would have been another feature request.
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I think this may become my new monthly net worth calculatir
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Really nicely done! The long development and your attention to detail and a great user experience really show.
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Nice! I'm going to play around with it. I'd second the request from RoboTurner for a way to upload from an xls since I imagine direct connections would be years and years of work.
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How do I count income from RSU vesting or ESPP events? They arent really investment income.
Edit: What is the "Share" column in the Accounts page?
Edit: Not sure what the correct way to enter a property with a mortgage is.
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Signed up. Will enter data soon.
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Hi Kevin, A few more suggestions that should hopefully be straight forward updates:
1.) For the Income and Expense tables on the Dashboard, could you add a bottom row called 'Total" that sums the income and expenses for each entry month. This would allow us to the see total average income and expense numbers in the average column.
Thanks again. Keep up the great work!
Great suggestion! Just rolled out an update that includes this!
(http://i.giphy.com/3oz8xvxzL15SrazeYo.gif)
I'm working on the second one as well!
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Oh man it looks neat. I have a friend coming over tonight to help her figure out what is going on with her finances (she's motivated but has no clue). Maybe we could test your tool!
I'll come back if we do actually set it up.
Good luck!
Thanks! Thats so great you are helping out a friend! Let me know if you run into any issues if you decide to try trackFI!
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Looking forward to setting aside some time to see your site. Thanks for sharing!
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Hey Kevin,
This is really neat! I have found something that I consider to be a bug though. I currently have a positive balance on a credit card and there is no way for me to enter that info (from what I can tell).
Also, when logged in I don't see any way to find info on how to contact you. If I log out I can access that info, but it's not in the footer when logged in.
Thanks for giving it a shot and providing feedback, it means a lot! Good point on not having contact info on the website once you are logged in. I went ahead and added an email address to the footer.
Regarding a positive balance on a credit card, I am torn as to what the right approach is in this scenario. I could change the validation to allow negative values. However, I am afraid that if I do that, some users will enter negative values for their credit card entry, thinking that they should enter a negative value as its money they owe. However that is already compensated for when they created the account and selected the account type as 'credit card', which sets the account to being a liability on the back end.
If you don't mind me asking, what is the positive balance on the credit card? I ask because, if its under $1000 or so, entering the balance as $0 will not really effect your results all that much. I would imagine that by next month the positive balance will either be smaller or be negative. Right now, I feel that by allowing negative values to be entered, it would be introducing confusion and and accidental misuse :(
I am open to any ideas you might have though!
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This is really useful! Well done and thank you!
Thank you for giving it a try! If you think of anything you'd like to see added or changed, let me know!
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Hi Kevin, A few more suggestions that should hopefully be straight forward updates:
1.) For the Income and Expense tables on the Dashboard, could you add a bottom row called 'Total" that sums the income and expenses for each entry month. This would allow us to the see total average income and expense numbers in the average column.
Thanks again. Keep up the great work!
Great suggestion! Just rolled out an update that includes this!
I'm working on the second one as well!
Thanks again for updating these features Kevin! I have never seen anyone as responsive to feedback as you have been! Keep up the great work!
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This looks great. What did you use to teach yourself Ruby/Rails? Who's hosting, AWS?
I'm going to register, check it out, and provide feedback as well, not just ask unrelated questions :)
Thanks for checking it out! I have been tinkering around with front end web design (html/css) for a while but got serious about true web development about 2 years ago. I enrolled in an online bootcamp that is self paced with weekly live sessions and study hours. It was an amazing experience and I learned a ton!
The program I went with was https://launchschool.com/. About a year ago they rebranded from gotealeaf and changed their pricing slightly. It is still a steal from when I went through the program. I think I spent $3000 total. Their new pricing is $199/month.
Just a heads up though, its a lot of work. I spent most of my work nights and weekends getting through the material. If anyone has any interest in web development (specifically rails), I highly suggest you check them out. They have a good Is this for me (https://launchschool.com/is_this_for_me) overview.
They also have a ton of awesome free resources that you can use today. https://launchschool.com/books
Regarding the hosting, Heroku (https://www.heroku.com) is my best friend :) I could not imagine trying to provision, administer and babysit servers. Heroku makes deploying rails applications super simple. Long story short, yes, the site is hosted on AWS, as Heroku is a reseller.
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Regarding a positive balance on a credit card, I am torn as to what the right approach is in this scenario. I could change the validation to allow negative values. However, I am afraid that if I do that, some users will enter negative values for their credit card entry, thinking that they should enter a negative value as its money they owe. However that is already compensated for when they created the account and selected the account type as 'credit card', which sets the account to being a liability on the back end.
If you don't mind me asking, what is the positive balance on the credit card? I ask because, if its under $1000 or so, entering the balance as $0 will not really effect your results all that much. I would imagine that by next month the positive balance will either be smaller or be negative. Right now, I feel that by allowing negative values to be entered, it would be introducing confusion and and accidental misuse :(
I am open to any ideas you might have though!
I can see why you would be hesitant to add the ability to enter a negative balance. I don't remember the exact text, but entering a negative balance does provide a message after you submit. Something like "Balance must be a positive number". Maybe in that blurb you can add some additional text as to why you can't add a negative number? You do have a point that a small positive balance does not mean much. I think some sort of additional explanation there could be beneficial. The balance is only $42 so it really doesn't matter much. :)
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Amazing.
I wonder if you would be interested in incorporating a feature I've pondered:
An algorithm that calcs the user's 'FIRE Score'. Analogous to FICO score, except this would take into account parameters related to FI and capacity to RE. Preferably, the score range would mimic the same range as FICO does (up to 850) to give some relative familiarity. So someone with a FIRE Score say around 800 would be considered to have a stronger probability for FIRE success than someone in the sub-700 range, for example.
Something fun along those lines?
Folks could monitor and endeavor to improve their FIRE Score over time in the same way they do their credit score. For example, $10K of assets added to their portfolio would add X amount of pts to their score, whereas a new car purchase would cause a drop.
This is a really interesting idea. I like the concept of showing how your decisions impact a score. I'll have to noodle over how to implement it and the underlying algorithm (for lack of a better word).
Thanks for the suggestion!
Wanted to add, if you do this, it'd be better to have it in % like cFireSim has % probability of success. I'm not in the US and have no idea what a FICO score is and a score out of 850 would be meaningless.
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So I haven't actually used it yet but it sounds like you have to input your information every month? Is it possible to set recurring income/expenses? I don't want to have to reenter my mortgage every month. And yes to being able to import a csv from ynab, or for me, upload my credit card info .
Mozar, awesome idea! I went ahead and implemented your suggestion, this should really become a time saver for power users!
(http://i.giphy.com/3oriO7fcNBqA6ZatQQ.gif)
With the change, when you create an account, expense or income record there is now a recurring flag that is by default set to false. If you want to change that, you can go into the record and edit it by toggling the recurring flag.
Now when you go to create an entry, if you have more than 0 entries, and the recurring flag is set to true for the record, the new entry will automatically pull in the most recent prior months value for that record.
Regarding the CSV import, it is a top priority as a lot of people have been requesting it!
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Regarding a positive balance on a credit card, I am torn as to what the right approach is in this scenario. I could change the validation to allow negative values. However, I am afraid that if I do that, some users will enter negative values for their credit card entry, thinking that they should enter a negative value as its money they owe. However that is already compensated for when they created the account and selected the account type as 'credit card', which sets the account to being a liability on the back end.
If you don't mind me asking, what is the positive balance on the credit card? I ask because, if its under $1000 or so, entering the balance as $0 will not really effect your results all that much. I would imagine that by next month the positive balance will either be smaller or be negative. Right now, I feel that by allowing negative values to be entered, it would be introducing confusion and and accidental misuse :(
I am open to any ideas you might have though!
I can see why you would be hesitant to add the ability to enter a negative balance. I don't remember the exact text, but entering a negative balance does provide a message after you submit. Something like "Balance must be a positive number". Maybe in that blurb you can add some additional text as to why you can't add a negative number? You do have a point that a small positive balance does not mean much. I think some sort of additional explanation there could be beneficial. The balance is only $42 so it really doesn't matter much. :)
Good call on clarifying the error message. Will add it to the to do list :) thanks!
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Nice! I'm going to play around with it. I'd second the request from RoboTurner for a way to upload from an xls since I imagine direct connections would be years and years of work.
Agreed, the next big iteration will be to support CSV imports.
Regarding direct integrations, I have zero desire to connect to peoples financial institutions. No way am I going to ever want to collect and store that type of information. Talk about a massive security vulnerability.
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How do I count income from RSU vesting or ESPP events? They arent really investment income.
Edit: What is the "Share" column in the Accounts page?
Edit: Not sure what the correct way to enter a property with a mortgage is.
Hi starguru, sorry it's not more clear as to what to do regarding a mortgage! Hopefully I can clear it up for you.
The best way to represent a home with a mortgage would be to first create a new Account with the type of property. Then, since you don't own the home outright, you would want to create a second Account with a type of loan.
Then when you go to create a new monthly Entry, you can enter the values for those two accounts for the month in question. For the Account with the type of property, put in the total estimated value of your home. For example, if realtor.com says your house is worth $340k, enter that amount. Next in the second Account with the type of loan, enter in the outstanding balance that is remaining on the mortgage.
Now you will have two accounts, one being an asset (albeit illiquid) and the other being a liability (the mortgage). The difference between the two is your equity in the house.
You are also going to want to represent the house as an Expense as well if you are still paying a monthly mortgage.
It's a little confusing but it starts to make sense once its all modeled out.
Regarding the "Share" pie chart, I did away with it in the most recent build tonight. It initially showed what percent an Account/Expense/Income made of the most recent Entry. Not the most useful or clear metric. I've had other people stumped by what it means so I removed it for the time being.
Regarding income from RSU vesting or ESPP events, if you are actively withdrawing from them, I would say to add them as an Income and record how much you are withdrawing as income each month in the Entries. However, if you are not, I would classify them as an Account (type asset).
For example, I track my 401k as an Asset as I am not withdrawing from it even though it is technically making me money via interest. Those gains in interest are not being withdrawn so I don't consider it income and the gains are reflected in the month over month entries.
Hope that helped clear up some confusion!
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Looks like an awesome tool! I'll be sinking some time into this tomorrow =)
Very sleek so far, I'm really impressed with the "feel" of it. (Not tech heavy over here, obviously).
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I noticed you can't make an expense (example mortgage payment) a reoccurring expense until you have created the expense and then go in and edit it. Tiny suggestion would be to have the reoccurring expense option pop up when you first select your type of expense. So far though I am really liking the site, great work!
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How do I count income from RSU vesting or ESPP events? They arent really investment income.
Edit: What is the "Share" column in the Accounts page?
Edit: Not sure what the correct way to enter a property with a mortgage is.
Hi starguru, sorry it's not more clear as to what to do regarding a mortgage! Hopefully I can clear it up for you.
The best way to represent a home with a mortgage would be to first create a new Account with the type of property. Then, since you don't own the home outright, you would want to create a second Account with a type of loan.
Then when you go to create a new monthly Entry, you can enter the values for those two accounts for the month in question. For the Account with the type of property, put in the total estimated value of your home. For example, if realtor.com says your house is worth $340k, enter that amount. Next in the second Account with the type of loan, enter in the outstanding balance that is remaining on the mortgage.
Now you will have two accounts, one being an asset (albeit illiquid) and the other being a liability (the mortgage). The difference between the two is your equity in the house.
You are also going to want to represent the house as an Expense as well if you are still paying a monthly mortgage.
It's a little confusing but it starts to make sense once its all modeled out.
Regarding the "Share" pie chart, I did away with it in the most recent build tonight. It initially showed what percent an Account/Expense/Income made of the most recent Entry. Not the most useful or clear metric. I've had other people stumped by what it means so I removed it for the time being.
Regarding income from RSU vesting or ESPP events, if you are actively withdrawing from them, I would say to add them as an Income and record how much you are withdrawing as income each month in the Entries. However, if you are not, I would classify them as an Account (type asset).
For example, I track my 401k as an Asset as I am not withdrawing from it even though it is technically making me money via interest. Those gains in interest are not being withdrawn so I don't consider it income and the gains are reflected in the month over month entries.
Hope that helped clear up some confusion!
Hey thanx for replying. Yeah I realized "Share" meant "Percent of Total" after I asked.
It seems to me that for tracking income I need to enter monthly income for the snapshot, which means I need to go back and see how much DW and I got paid, and add it up. I considered including RSU and ESPP as income in the months they apply. I also considered not counting income at all, and just tracking value of investment accounts/assets. Any thoughts on that? Why do we need to track income?
Also I think you did a great job with this web app. Very impressive for someone who doesn't do this for a living. I want to ask a hard question though, which is what value is this adding that something like Personal Capital does not already add? If you have going on a dozen accounts, plus credit, plus mortgage, its a lot of work to enter all this stuff, with Personal Capital I don't have to do anything.
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I never tracked income before but this has inspired me to try it out of curiosity as my passive income has increased a lot over the last couple of years
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Just tried to make an entry but it wil only let you save if you put a value in every field. I just wanted to put my wage for the month in and fill out the rest later
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Just tried to make an entry but it wil only let you save if you put a value in every field. I just wanted to put my wage for the month in and fill out the rest later
Yeah this bugged me a bit as well, would be nice if the auto setting was taken from the month prior - so accounts that haven't changed value will remain stagnant without needing input
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This seems super neat! Playing with it now. :)
Are people just putting in their post-tax income? I didn't see a tax section.
Thanks for making this!
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Signed up. Will enter data soon.
I entered my data. Nice, clean UI. Functionality is a little old school by requiring you to go into a separate edit screen to modify data. In-place editing would be better.
The underlying math is a little opaque. "How this is calculated." hover text or popup windows would help.
The Financial Independence Locale Index feature threw me for a bit. It displayed Lugano Switzerland when I had entered a different home city. I had to think for a while to figure it out. (Non-intuitive) It would be better if it defaulted to the home city and offered an option to see a different location. Even better would be to let the user modify this field. For example, select a city and see how years to FI changes.
You might want to investigate a collaboration with another new site being discussed on MMM. www.theearthawaits.com The two sites might complement each other nicely.
Here is the URL for the message thread. http://forum.mrmoneymustache.com/welcome-to-the-forum/mustachians-interested-in-retiring-abroad-%28or-slow-travel%29/
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Just tried to make an entry but it wil only let you save if you put a value in every field. I just wanted to put my wage for the month in and fill out the rest later
Yeah this bugged me a bit as well, would be nice if the auto setting was taken from the month prior - so accounts that haven't changed value will remain stagnant without needing input
I had a similar problem adding my DW's income. She is paid on commission. Sales are large and infrequent so some months she has no income. Fields should allow a zero value.
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Hey thanx for replying. Yeah I realized "Share" meant "Percent of Total" after I asked.
It seems to me that for tracking income I need to enter monthly income for the snapshot, which means I need to go back and see how much DW and I got paid, and add it up. I considered including RSU and ESPP as income in the months they apply. I also considered not counting income at all, and just tracking value of investment accounts/assets. Any thoughts on that? Why do we need to track income?
Also I think you did a great job with this web app. Very impressive for someone who doesn't do this for a living. I want to ask a hard question though, which is what value is this adding that something like Personal Capital does not already add? If you have going on a dozen accounts, plus credit, plus mortgage, its a lot of work to enter all this stuff, with Personal Capital I don't have to do anything.
All great and fair questions! I believe what sets trackFI apart from the likes of Personal Capital is that trackFI is solely focused and built for the financial independence crowd. The tool is specific in that regard. Personal Capital does not offer important and fun metrics like Years til FI, Savings Rate, Current Years Saved and the Financial Independence Locale Index.
Additionally, as time goes on, I also plan to build out more tools and metrics and charts that are specific to the financial independence crowd. In future phases, I also plan on building out features that allow users (if they chose to) to create public facing profiles where they can surface the information they want. I want to provide users the means to also be able to blog alongside their entries and encourage discussions and encouragement between users. The dashboard is phase 1. In future phases, I want to shape the platform so that it provides motivation and encouragement to stick with the goal of financial independence. It's a long road, and I feel we could all use some help in that regard.
Another major differentiating factor is that not all people are comfortable handing over their financial institutions login credentials to a 3rd party. In order for Personal Capital to work, you have to hand over all your usernames/passwords to all your financial accounts to them.
I don't mean to drone on, but another benefit of trackFI and the more manual approach is that you are forced to sit down and actually look at the data critically. With more automated processes, you become removed from the data and things might slip through the cracks.
With that said, trackFI might not be a good fit for a majority of people. But I believe it is a great fit for those who are actively engineering their ways towards FI.
Regarding why you would want to track income, the data you provide for incomes is directly used to generate the time til FI metric and to calculate your savings rate. The first metric being much more a vanity feel good metric, used primarily for encouragement purposes and the latter being a cornerstone of financial independence. One of the mantras of FI is "It's not what you earn, its what you save", which is exactly what the savings rate metric gets at.
With that said, I totally get the frustration of manually entering information and I am working through ways to get some sort of CSV importing integrated. I don't want to say never, but I am 99.999% sure that trackFI will never integrate directly with financial institutions for a plethora of reasons, security being at the forefront.
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Just tried to make an entry but it wil only let you save if you put a value in every field. I just wanted to put my wage for the month in and fill out the rest later
Yeah this bugged me a bit as well, would be nice if the auto setting was taken from the month prior - so accounts that haven't changed value will remain stagnant without needing input
I had a similar problem adding my DW's income. She is paid on commission. Sales are large and infrequent so some months she has no income. Fields should allow a zero value.
Hi Threshkin! Thanks for trying out trackFI. Entries should allow values to be entered as 0. The only validation on those fields are that the value cannot be negative and must be a number. Let me know if you cannot enter 0 for an income in an entry and I'll take a close look!
Another avenue you could pursue is that if you do not have an income for a particular month, you can remove the entry via the "Remove" button.
(http://i.imgur.com/yeaNDAX.png)
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Signed up. Will enter data soon.
I entered my data. Nice, clean UI. Functionality is a little old school by requiring you to go into a separate edit screen to modify data. In-place editing would be better.
The underlying math is a little opaque. "How this is calculated." hover text or popup windows would help.
The Financial Independence Locale Index feature threw me for a bit. It displayed Lugano Switzerland when I had entered a different home city. I had to think for a while to figure it out. (Non-intuitive) It would be better if it defaulted to the home city and offered an option to see a different location. Even better would be to let the user modify this field. For example, select a city and see how years to FI changes.
You might want to investigate a collaboration with another new site being discussed on MMM. www.theearthawaits.com The two sites might complement each other nicely.
Here is the URL for the message thread. http://forum.mrmoneymustache.com/welcome-to-the-forum/mustachians-interested-in-retiring-abroad-%28or-slow-travel%29/
Both fantastic suggestions! I added them to my backlog, hopefully have them rolled out in the next couple of days!
Thanks for the feedback and for the link to the theearthawaits as well
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First of all great job, I'm amazed at the ease of use and speed of the site.
Was curious to how you calculate "years till FI" is that purely based on expenses to net worth and 4% rule? I keep the same data tracked in a pretty complex spreadsheet but also have different returns of values to say cash compared to equities, so in my spreadsheet I get a number like .09 months remaining where in your site I get -1.23 years, just wondering if you have any plans to allow change of the variables for calculating FI?
Thanks and again great job.
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...snip...
I want to ask a hard question though, which is what value is this adding that something like Personal Capital does not already add? If you have going on a dozen accounts, plus credit, plus mortgage, its a lot of work to enter all this stuff, with Personal Capital I don't have to do anything.
...snip...
Another major differentiating factor is that not all people are comfortable handing over their financial institutions login credentials to a 3rd party. In order for Personal Capital to work, you have to hand over all your usernames/passwords to all your financial accounts to them.
...snip...
I don't see manual data entry as a problem. There is a significant user security risk and a site developer liability risk if you store financial login credentials in your site. I was actually very pleased that you were not expecting me to enter my login info. I would not have done that.
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Just tried to make an entry but it wil only let you save if you put a value in every field. I just wanted to put my wage for the month in and fill out the rest later
Yeah this bugged me a bit as well, would be nice if the auto setting was taken from the month prior - so accounts that haven't changed value will remain stagnant without needing input
I had a similar problem adding my DW's income. She is paid on commission. Sales are large and infrequent so some months she has no income. Fields should allow a zero value.
Hi Threshkin! Thanks for trying out trackFI. Entries should allow values to be entered as 0. The only validation on those fields are that the value cannot be negative and must be a number. Let me know if you cannot enter 0 for an income in an entry and I'll take a close look!
Another avenue you could pursue is that if you do not have an income for a particular month, you can remove the entry via the "Remove" button.
(http://i.imgur.com/yeaNDAX.png)
I tried it again with a new entry. The actual problem is that if you leave a field blank you get an error. If I enter a "0" it is happy. Perhaps add a default value?
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...snip...
I want to ask a hard question though, which is what value is this adding that something like Personal Capital does not already add? If you have going on a dozen accounts, plus credit, plus mortgage, its a lot of work to enter all this stuff, with Personal Capital I don't have to do anything.
...snip...
Another major differentiating factor is that not all people are comfortable handing over their financial institutions login credentials to a 3rd party. In order for Personal Capital to work, you have to hand over all your usernames/passwords to all your financial accounts to them.
...snip...
I don't see manual data entry as a problem. There is a significant user security risk and a site developer liability risk if you store financial login credentials in your site. I was actually very pleased that you were not expecting me to enter my login info. I would not have done that.
I literally would not be able to sleep at night if I was trying to do that. Way too much liability and way too sweet of a target for hackers.
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Just tried to make an entry but it wil only let you save if you put a value in every field. I just wanted to put my wage for the month in and fill out the rest later
I can't make any promises but I will look into being able to save a draft of an entry. Thanks for trying it out!
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Just tried to make an entry but it wil only let you save if you put a value in every field. I just wanted to put my wage for the month in and fill out the rest later
Yeah this bugged me a bit as well, would be nice if the auto setting was taken from the month prior - so accounts that haven't changed value will remain stagnant without needing input
Hi Roboturner! Are you referring to accounts that do not change in value month over month? Essentially recurring items that remain the same value? If so, on page one someone recommended adding the ability to prepopulate entries with the prior months values if the item is flagged as recurring!
Check out this post to get the full scoop on recurring items: http://forum.mrmoneymustache.com/welcome-to-the-forum/i-just-launched-trackfi-com-i-would-love-your-feedback!/msg1278843/#msg1278843
(http://i.giphy.com/3oriO7fcNBqA6ZatQQ.gif)
Let me know if you had something else in mind!
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This seems super neat! Playing with it now. :)
Are people just putting in their post-tax income? I didn't see a tax section.
Thanks for making this!
Orvell, I use take home page (ie, post tax, post 401k). The 401k contributions are accounted for when you add your 401k as an Account (type: investment). Thanks for trying out trackFI and providing feedback, it means everything to me!
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This seems super neat! Playing with it now. :)
Are people just putting in their post-tax income? I didn't see a tax section.
Thanks for making this!
Orvell, I use take home page (ie, post tax, post 401k). The 401k contributions are accounted for when you add your 401k as an Account (type: investment). Thanks for trying out trackFI and providing feedback, it means everything to me!
Thanks for answering! :D
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First of all great job, I'm amazed at the ease of use and speed of the site.
Was curious to how you calculate "years till FI" is that purely based on expenses to net worth and 4% rule? I keep the same data tracked in a pretty complex spreadsheet but also have different returns of values to say cash compared to equities, so in my spreadsheet I get a number like .09 months remaining where in your site I get -1.23 years, just wondering if you have any plans to allow change of the variables for calculating FI?
Thanks and again great job.
Thanks relaxednature for giving trackFI a try!
Regarding time til FI, it is calculated with the assumption of 5% growth after inflation. Yes, I intend to allow the growth rate to be adjusted by the user in the near future. The time til FI is a function of inflation adjusted growth rate, monthly savings (for that month), current net worth (for that month), and the 25x rule AKA 4% rule (expenses of that month extrapolated out for the year, times 25). With those variables, you can calculate time til FI via the NPER function.
More information on the NPER function can be found here: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/NPER-function-240535b5-6653-4d2d-bfcf-b6a38151d815
Also, it sounds like you might not need to use trackFI moving forward :P Congratulations on getting there!
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It'd be nice if, regarding the above, there was a way to indicate what accounts should expect what growth.
For example, some of my accounts that are part of my net worth are cash. They're not going to grow at 5%
A thought would be an extra layer of inputs for "expected" ROI that's not required, but for folks who want to increase precision. :)
ETA: now we're just getting to the fiddly "wouldn't it be nice" parts.
It seems like a solid tool! :D Just has some assumptions baked in that won't be 100% applicable to everyone.
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Putting data in tonight, really like it.
Another suggestion is a place to put a rough amount for those with defined benefit pensions. Where it can be seen but kept separate from networth.
Mine is worth around 300,000 k but won't access it until 55 - 60 so like to keep it separate.
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With that said, I totally get the frustration of manually entering information and I am working through ways to get some sort of CSV importing integrated.
I think the easiest and quickest way to add this functionality (which I would really like) would be to provide a csv template - im cool shifting numbers around to fit a template. Just a thought
Also, I could be wrong, but it does seem as though the 'FI years to' includes non-liquid assets, is this true? Trying to keep my house out of it :P
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yeah i'd totally be on board with this if it was like PC where i can just enter my accounts. manually entering all that data isnt worth my time to see cool charts... though it does look cool.
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It really is very quick to manually enter the data
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This seems super neat! Playing with it now. :)
Are people just putting in their post-tax income? I didn't see a tax section.
Thanks for making this!
Orvell, I use take home page (ie, post tax, post 401k). The 401k contributions are accounted for when you add your 401k as an Account (type: investment). Thanks for trying out trackFI and providing feedback, it means everything to me!
That would account for the current value of your 401k, but how are you accounting for the value of future contributions in your FI projections? The only thing it knows is that Incomes - Expenses = Savings. If 401k Contributions aren't included in Income, how can they be included in my FI projections? Or HSA contributions or employer matches? That's leaving an awfully big chunk of savings out of the loop. Or am I missing something here?
Overall it's neat and there's a lot of potential, but also a lot of assumptions. It reads like a good alpha build to me where it's up and running and you've got the basics and the interface and infrastructure are all in place, but not all the features have been implemented and it needs building out to make it really usable to a wider audience. As an example, Incomes - Expenses = Savings, but Savings does not always equal Savings For FI. Excluding it from income corrupts your income history. Including it in expenses could inflate that number throwing off your FI date depending on what you're saving for.
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Thank you ! It looks very good.
I would like to be able to make difference between my "net worth" and "stash". I own my home but that asset should not count for the 4% rule.
I'm wondering if I also should not count my emergency fund in the "stash". Maybe have a boolean field on each account to determine if it is part of the "stash" or not ?
I am hoping that by this weekend, I can roll out a change that will allow you to choose your currency.
Cool ! That would have been another feature request.
Hi FrugalByChance, I rolled out your great suggestion tonight! You now have control over the safe withdrawal rate as well as the rate of return. You can access these options by clicking on the question mark beside Years til FI on the dashboard. Feel free to tweak away!
(http://i.giphy.com/l2JhuJ709XlgDDcbK.gif)
I also added the ability to exclude any Account from being considered in your Net Worth calculation (which also impacts Time til FI as well as Current Years Saved metrics). To exclude an Account, lets say in your case your house, navigate to your Accounts, find your house account and then go into edit. Once you are editing the house account, you should see the toggle Exclude from Net Worth. Go ahead and check the box to exclude the account!
(http://i.giphy.com/l0MYN69dJKcMvQEp2.gif)
Thanks again for the great suggestions! Hope you are finding the tool useful! Let me know if you come across anything else you would like to see or would make using the tool easier/better/more fun!
Kevin
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Putting data in tonight, really like it.
Another suggestion is a place to put a rough amount for those with defined benefit pensions. Where it can be seen but kept separate from networth.
Mine is worth around 300,000 k but won't access it until 55 - 60 so like to keep it separate.
Hi frugledoc, you now have the ability to exclude any Account from the net worth calculations. Let me know if that solves your issue!
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With that said, I totally get the frustration of manually entering information and I am working through ways to get some sort of CSV importing integrated.
I think the easiest and quickest way to add this functionality (which I would really like) would be to provide a csv template - im cool shifting numbers around to fit a template. Just a thought
Also, I could be wrong, but it does seem as though the 'FI years to' includes non-liquid assets, is this true? Trying to keep my house out of it :P
Hi Roboturner, check out the new update that allows you to exclude any Account, should do the trick :)
Let me know if that doesn't work for you.
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Great start, and very clean layout.
I use mint regularly but feel it is catered to those who can’t manage money, and it is cluttered by expense categories I don't use but can't delete. I only use it to track my net worth over time, and as a overview of all of my transactions to help me spot any errors.
I don't mind entering the data manually. It takes more time, but it forces me to recognize every penny coming in and every penny going out.
Some changes that I'd love to see:
- More colors on the pie charts. They look too similar to each other, so I can't tell which category is which slice of the pie.
- Ability to add expenses on a rolling basis without needing to update every single category. I'd prefer to update my expenses daily, and update my investments every couple weeks.
- It'd be cool to filter retirement location by region. I want to retire somewhere in the US with amazing winters, so my interest would be piqued by a city in western montana but I had no interest in the colombia that it showed me. I'd also recommend showing fewer pictures - just let the user click on it to expand if they're interested. An uninterested user will see it as visual clutter to an otherwise clean page.
My personal excel projection showed me retiring in 8 years, whereas your calculator said 4 years. Maybe that was influenced because I only entered one data point, which happened to be this month when I got a big bonus?
One thing that I haven't figured out (with or without this calculator) is how to treat my retirement funds. I am 23, and will not be able to access them for decades to come, but much of my net worth is tied up in them. I guess I need to calculate how much I need in non-retirement funds to last me until I'm 59.5, and how much I need in retirement fund to take me from then until EOL. I've decided to max out my 401k this year but it might not make sense to do that in my remaining working years.
I recently read "Your Money or Your Life" and will make the chart recommended in that book. That would be a great addition to your website.
Thanks so much for sharing your hard work with us! Sounds like it started as a fun project - is the plan to ultimately earn income from it (thru advertising, donations, or other means)?
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One thing that I haven't figured out (with or without this calculator) is how to treat my retirement funds. I am 23, and will not be able to access them for decades to come, but much of my net worth is tied up in them. I guess I need to calculate how much I need in non-retirement funds to last me until I'm 59.5, and how much I need in retirement fund to take me from then until EOL. I've decided to max out my 401k this year but it might not make sense to do that in my remaining working years.
http://forum.mrmoneymustache.com/investor-alley/how-to-withdraw-funds-from-your-ira-and-401k-without-penalty-before-age-59-5/
Read that and prepare to have your mind blown.
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One thing that I haven't figured out (with or without this calculator) is how to treat my retirement funds. I am 23, and will not be able to access them for decades to come, but much of my net worth is tied up in them. I guess I need to calculate how much I need in non-retirement funds to last me until I'm 59.5, and how much I need in retirement fund to take me from then until EOL. I've decided to max out my 401k this year but it might not make sense to do that in my remaining working years.
http://forum.mrmoneymustache.com/investor-alley/how-to-withdraw-funds-from-your-ira-and-401k-without-penalty-before-age-59-5/
Read that and prepare to have your mind blown.
BINGO! Thank you!
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Really slick, enjoying putting in my numbers so far.
I don't really like the rounding to whole numbers, maybe I'm alone in this, but I'd rather see 2 decimal places displayed on all numbers where I entered 2 decimal places (I also think some of the addition is getting screwed up because it's adding up rounded numbers?).
I'd love to see a screen that shows savings rate over time, as well as average savings rate for a span of time. I appreciate the simplicity of the savings rate calculation you are doing, but a lot of folks here end up calculating savings rate factoring in 401k contributions, employer match, etc. No idea how you might try and approach calculating that, or if you even want to. As an example of how complicated one can make it, my formula for savings rate:
(savings) 401k match + All Retirement Account Contributions + HSA Contributions + Long Term Taxable Investments + Debt Paydown / (income) Take Home Pay + Side Hustle Earnings + 401k Match + 401k Contributions + HSA Contributions
Again, very awesome tool, thanks for sharing!
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That would account for the current value of your 401k, but how are you accounting for the value of future contributions in your FI projections? The only thing it knows is that Incomes - Expenses = Savings. If 401k Contributions aren't included in Income, how can they be included in my FI projections? Or HSA contributions or employer matches? That's leaving an awfully big chunk of savings out of the loop. Or am I missing something here?
Overall it's neat and there's a lot of potential, but also a lot of assumptions. It reads like a good alpha build to me where it's up and running and you've got the basics and the interface and infrastructure are all in place, but not all the features have been implemented and it needs building out to make it really usable to a wider audience. As an example, Incomes - Expenses = Savings, but Savings does not always equal Savings For FI. Excluding it from income corrupts your income history. Including it in expenses could inflate that number throwing off your FI date depending on what you're saving for.
I am putting my income as gross paycheck minus taxes. This means future 401k contributions that come from my paycheck are still counted as income, and will eventually show up as an asset, just as normal cash would. Any paycheck deductions that don't end up in a bank account (retirement or not) are considered expenses (e.g. health insurance excluding FSA/HSA).
OP - if the program is intended to be used differently, please let me know!
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Kevin, a very cool tool and an even more impressive story of how it came to be.
I have something to admit: I created an account, started adding my data, and then got scared that I would start to love the tool so much that I'd be up a real creek if it ever went away some time between now and the time I retire. So then I spent the rest of the night stealing your best ideas and putting them into my personal FI spreadsheet ;)
It's a little scary to me that the site doesn't make YOU money, because that might mean it's not sustainable and might go away. I would feel better if I could pay to use this!
It'd be nice if, regarding the above, there was a way to indicate what accounts should expect what growth.
For example, some of my accounts that are part of my net worth are cash. They're not going to grow at 5%
A thought would be an extra layer of inputs for "expected" ROI that's not required, but for folks who want to increase precision. :)
ETA: now we're just getting to the fiddly "wouldn't it be nice" parts.
It seems like a solid tool! :D Just has some assumptions baked in that won't be 100% applicable to everyone.
With all that in mind (and you may be thinking about this already), here's my humble suggestion for you:
I think you would do well with a freemium model, where both free and paid accounts have the same full functionality that you have today, but the difference between the two account types is as follows. Free users' features operate off of a single, sensible, immutable, well-documented set of assumptions for each feature, while Paid users have the ability to adjust the underlying assumptions if they don't work for them and they want more control.
As a bonus, this would help keep simple the very nice user onboarding flow you have currently, and once users get up and running with the base product if they want to twiddle more knobs they'll have the option!
Just my 2cents
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- Ability to add expenses on a rolling basis without needing to update every single category. I'd prefer to update my expenses daily, and update my investments every couple weeks.
Update from day 2 of using it: I'm just editing my october entry with purchases I made in the past day, without needing to update the other items. This will probably continue to work just fine, but it'd be cool to have a little plus button next to each category where I type in the new entry and it does the math for me and adds it to the total.
I could see myself using this as a tool regularly. Thanks again.
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I can't make this work. When I click, "+ Add Entry" it gives an error message at https://www.trackfi.com/entries/new
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I can't make this work. When I click, "+ Add Entry" it gives an error message at https://www.trackfi.com/entries/new
Hi MudDuck sorry to hear you are having issues! Have you created any accounts/incomes/expenses yet?
Is the issue with creating an Entry or is it something else? Are there any error messages that are shown when you try and submit an Entry? If you could post a screenshot or the steps you took to create the error, I will get to the bottom of them ASAP!
Thanks for trying out trackFI.
Kevin
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It'd be nice if, regarding the above, there was a way to indicate what accounts should expect what growth.
For example, some of my accounts that are part of my net worth are cash. They're not going to grow at 5%
A thought would be an extra layer of inputs for "expected" ROI that's not required, but for folks who want to increase precision. :)
ETA: now we're just getting to the fiddly "wouldn't it be nice" parts.
It seems like a solid tool! :D Just has some assumptions baked in that won't be 100% applicable to everyone.
This is a great suggestion and I put it on the roadmap to implement in the future! Right now though, I feel that it might introduce more questions and confusions than its worth. Then again, the FI crowd is a really savvy group :)
A workaround for the time being is that you could lower the rate of return which is now customizable by going to the dashboard overview tab and clicking on the Years til FI question mark. It will pop up a modal where you can adjust the rate of return and safe withdrawal rate.
The default rate of return is 5.0%. Let's say you have assets that total $500k with $100k as cash (20% cash), you could reduce the rate of return to by 20% to 4.0%. It's not ideal, but then again, holding a large cash position over the long term is not ideal either :P
I guess I should also have a disclaimer that trackFI is not designed to be an exact science.
Thanks again for all your feedback!
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Great start, and very clean layout.
I use mint regularly but feel it is catered to those who can’t manage money, and it is cluttered by expense categories I don't use but can't delete. I only use it to track my net worth over time, and as a overview of all of my transactions to help me spot any errors.
I don't mind entering the data manually. It takes more time, but it forces me to recognize every penny coming in and every penny going out.
Some changes that I'd love to see:
- More colors on the pie charts. They look too similar to each other, so I can't tell which category is which slice of the pie.
- Ability to add expenses on a rolling basis without needing to update every single category. I'd prefer to update my expenses daily, and update my investments every couple weeks.
- It'd be cool to filter retirement location by region. I want to retire somewhere in the US with amazing winters, so my interest would be piqued by a city in western montana but I had no interest in the colombia that it showed me. I'd also recommend showing fewer pictures - just let the user click on it to expand if they're interested. An uninterested user will see it as visual clutter to an otherwise clean page.
My personal excel projection showed me retiring in 8 years, whereas your calculator said 4 years. Maybe that was influenced because I only entered one data point, which happened to be this month when I got a big bonus?
One thing that I haven't figured out (with or without this calculator) is how to treat my retirement funds. I am 23, and will not be able to access them for decades to come, but much of my net worth is tied up in them. I guess I need to calculate how much I need in non-retirement funds to last me until I'm 59.5, and how much I need in retirement fund to take me from then until EOL. I've decided to max out my 401k this year but it might not make sense to do that in my remaining working years.
I recently read "Your Money or Your Life" and will make the chart recommended in that book. That would be a great addition to your website.
Thanks so much for sharing your hard work with us! Sounds like it started as a fun project - is the plan to ultimately earn income from it (thru advertising, donations, or other means)?
Great post! Thanks for taking the time to type it up, it means a lot.
Regarding providing more colors, I just added it to the backlog.
Regarding adding expenses, can you clarify a little bit more by what you mean. The idea I originally came up with for trackFI is that you only have to create expenses once during the onboarding or whenever a new expense arises (say in 3 years your future mini you starts daycare, etc). Im interested to learn more about what you mean by adding expenses frequently (daily).
The retirement location by region needs a complete overhaul and might move into its own tab in the next couple of days/week. Right now, the main purpose for it is to provide you motivation and inspiration. I want people who maybe only are 30% of the way to login and see whoa! I could retire to this backwater in India right now if I wanted to! But obviously, most people wont do that, but its a fun thought exercise and provides motivation to keep going as each month, in theory, the cities improve as the cost of living in those cities increases.
I do like the idea of having the ability to select a city and it telling you how many more years it would be until you could retire there as well.
I will look into reducing the amount of images loads with the option to load more.
The time til FI metric is heavily dependent upon that particular months expenses. If you have a very high expense month, the time til FI will be drastically increased as it is using that months expenses to calculate how much you would need to become FI (based on the 4% rule AKA safe withdrawal rate, which is also now customizable). It does not use an average of expenses but I plan to tonight roll out new charts that will show, over time, the fluctuations of all the main metrics on the dashboard overview page. This will allow you to see how the Years til FI has bounced around based on expenses.
I'm really curious about the "Your Money or Your Life" graph you mentioned. Could you point me towards an example or more information? Thanks in advance!
Regarding monetization, I have no immediate plans. I really, really, REALLY want to stay away from advertising as the monetization source at all costs. It just feels dirty and in my opinion cheapens whatever product you are using. I am hopeful that enough people find trackFI useful that I can build out advanced power user features, possibly some nifty importing, more customizable features, better control, insights, etc, and offer a premium version, at a very reasonable price (credit to fumanchu282 for the idea!). It would be totally optional and I plan to always have a free version that is very capable.
But adding membership is months off. My costs right now are around $200/month on server fees, plus around $3000 in sunk costs, so unless things increase by a factor of 10, I have plenty of runway to focus on building features and incorporating feedback. This does not take into account the literal 1000's of hours I've invested, but I look at that as more of a learning experience.
I would love nothing more than to quit my day job (which I really enjoy), and focus 110% of my time on this but until I can prove out a sustainable business model, it will remain my hobby project for the foreseeable future!
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Kevin, a very cool tool and an even more impressive story of how it came to be.
I have something to admit: I created an account, started adding my data, and then got scared that I would start to love the tool so much that I'd be up a real creek if it ever went away some time between now and the time I retire. So then I spent the rest of the night stealing your best ideas and putting them into my personal FI spreadsheet ;)
It's a little scary to me that the site doesn't make YOU money, because that might mean it's not sustainable and might go away. I would feel better if I could pay to use this!
It'd be nice if, regarding the above, there was a way to indicate what accounts should expect what growth.
For example, some of my accounts that are part of my net worth are cash. They're not going to grow at 5%
A thought would be an extra layer of inputs for "expected" ROI that's not required, but for folks who want to increase precision. :)
ETA: now we're just getting to the fiddly "wouldn't it be nice" parts.
It seems like a solid tool! :D Just has some assumptions baked in that won't be 100% applicable to everyone.
With all that in mind (and you may be thinking about this already), here's my humble suggestion for you:
I think you would do well with a freemium model, where both free and paid accounts have the same full functionality that you have today, but the difference between the two account types is as follows. Free users' features operate off of a single, sensible, immutable, well-documented set of assumptions for each feature, while Paid users have the ability to adjust the underlying assumptions if they don't work for them and they want more control.
As a bonus, this would help keep simple the very nice user onboarding flow you have currently, and once users get up and running with the base product if they want to twiddle more knobs they'll have the option!
Just my 2cents
Hi fumanchu282! Great to hear that you gave trackFI a spin! I wanted to address your concerns, trackFI is very much a long term project for me and I would be lying if I didn't say that I wanted it to eventually become a sustainable business.
Right now, I am very much focused on providing value and incorporating feedback. I have no immediate plans to monetize the site and since monthly costs are very reasonable (around $200/month), I have a very long runway to figure out the financial aspects of the site.
I very much like your idea of membership with the paying tier receiving additional configuration options. I hope I can win you back and you become a regular user :P
In the highly unlikely event that it doesn't pan out, I will absolutely notify all users and provide ways to export all account information.
Thanks for taking time to check out the site. Your feedback is invaluable!
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Regarding adding expenses, can you clarify a little bit more by what you mean. The idea I originally came up with for trackFI is that you only have to create expenses once during the onboarding or whenever a new expense arises (say in 3 years your future mini you starts daycare, etc). Im interested to learn more about what you mean by adding expenses frequently (daily).
.........
I'm really curious about the "Your Money or Your Life" graph you mentioned. Could you point me towards an example or more information? Thanks in advance!
Thanks for your thoughtful reply.
When I said adding expenses, I mean expense entries/transactions, not the categories.
If I purchase $8.05 worth of groceries tonight, I'll go back and add $8.05 to my october groceries category. I would prefer to type in $8.05 somewhere and click a plus button, and it's automatically added. Instead, I have to add it to my "running tab" in a calculator (or my head), let's say 250.25+8.05 and update the groceries category to be $258.30. That make sense?
There is a "your money or your life" graph attached below.
There are three lines graphed over time:
- Earned income
- Expenses
- Investment income (I use a 4% estimate from index funds, but plan to add rental cash flow in the next few years)
These are all month-to-month, not cumulative.
The goal is for the earned and investment income lines to go up over time, and the expenses to go down or stay steady. When the investment income line crosses over the expenses line, it's called the "crossover point" and you're free to drop the "earned income" job and retire! It's just a graphical representation of the concepts you and I and everyone on this forum knows well.
Any long term plans for an app?
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Looks interesting based on screenshots others have shared.
I have 10 years of expense data I would like to import in....is that possible?
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Very nice, kevin. I love it! This kind of website has an immediate appeal to people like us here :)
On the overview page you calculate years to FI, which is based on last month. For me, both incomes and expenses fluctuate quite a bit, so the number will jump around. Is it possible to get some sort of average here instead? One set of boxes as is, but another set of boxes showing the average for the past 12 months? That would be really useful.
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That would account for the current value of your 401k, but how are you accounting for the value of future contributions in your FI projections? The only thing it knows is that Incomes - Expenses = Savings. If 401k Contributions aren't included in Income, how can they be included in my FI projections? Or HSA contributions or employer matches? That's leaving an awfully big chunk of savings out of the loop. Or am I missing something here?
Overall it's neat and there's a lot of potential, but also a lot of assumptions. It reads like a good alpha build to me where it's up and running and you've got the basics and the interface and infrastructure are all in place, but not all the features have been implemented and it needs building out to make it really usable to a wider audience. As an example, Incomes - Expenses = Savings, but Savings does not always equal Savings For FI. Excluding it from income corrupts your income history. Including it in expenses could inflate that number throwing off your FI date depending on what you're saving for.
I am putting my income as gross paycheck minus taxes. This means future 401k contributions that come from my paycheck are still counted as income, and will eventually show up as an asset, just as normal cash would. Any paycheck deductions that don't end up in a bank account (retirement or not) are considered expenses (e.g. health insurance excluding FSA/HSA).
OP - if the program is intended to be used differently, please let me know!
From the OP, as quoted in my original comment:
Orvell, I use take home page (ie, post tax, post 401k). The 401k contributions are accounted for when you add your 401k as an Account (type: investment). Thanks for trying out trackFI and providing feedback, it means everything to me!
Personally, I did somewhat similar to you and entered an income source for net pay and then additional sources for savings type paycheck deductions so that they are included in the FI projection. Alternatively, I could have used my gross pay and then added all non savings deductions, including taxes, as expenses. Or your method of gross - taxes + other deductions as expenses. Not just net pay though, and in any case, the interface should make it clear to the user how to enter their data without consulting the author of the software.
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Looks interesting based on screenshots others have shared.
I have 10 years of expense data I would like to import in....is that possible?
Out of interest, what is the point in 10 years worth of expense data?
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2.) On your pie charts you now show the current month. Could you keep the default graphs as the current month but add a dropdown list that would allow you to view graphs from previous entry months.
Thanks again. Keep up the great work!
Hi randellman, I incorporated your suggestion! You can now view all data for previous months as a percent of total! To access these new charts, go the either the Assets, Liabilities, Expenses or Incomes tab and scroll down to the pie charts. If you have more than 1 entry, you now have the option to view historical data by the different segmentations!
Below is a demo of looking at the expenses over time as a percent of total.
(http://i.giphy.com/l0MYwFEtwNUGwfGPS.gif)
Thanks for the great suggestions! Let me know if there is anything else you'd like to see.
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I haven't read all the comments yet, so I hope this hasn't been mentioned before.
I just started playing with it and spent quite a bit of time adding in my expenses. Only to realize after I put in about 10 that none of them were marked as reoccurring. I had to go back and manually open them all as I could not find a select all and mark as reoccurring.
Also I would like to see the expenses marked as reoccurring by default. I think the majority of expenses will always happen, mortgage, utilities, internet, insurance, etc.
P.S. I really like it. I still have more playing around to do but so far Two Thumbs Up!
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Thanks this is really cool
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I haven't read all the comments yet, so I hope this hasn't been mentioned before.
I just started playing with it and spent quite a bit of time adding in my expenses. Only to realize after I put in about 10 that none of them were marked as reoccurring. I had to go back and manually open them all as I could not find a select all and mark as reoccurring.
Also I would like to see the expenses marked as reoccurring by default. I think the majority of expenses will always happen, mortgage, utilities, internet, insurance, etc.
P.S. I really like it. I still have more playing around to do but so far Two Thumbs Up!
Hi MrsDinero, thanks for trying out trackFI!
I hope I can help clear up what I believe reoccurring means. Please correct me if I misinterpreted you, but the idea behind a reoccurring expense is that the value of the expense does not change month to month. For example, a mortgage is going to cost the same month in and month out, a good candidate for a reoccurring expense. However, groceries, or the electric bill would not necessarily be reoccurring as the value fluctuates based on how much you eat or how much you use your AC every month.
The expense will show up in all entries moving forward regardless of its reoccuring status. Reoccuring just means that the value from the prior month will be automatically populated into the new months entry to save you time and effort as it did not change. Hence the reoccuring status.
I might have assumed wrong, but I think that the majority of expenses fluctuate month to month for people, with the exception of things like mortgages or cell phone bills, which can be manually adjusted to become reoccurring. This is why by default, reoccurring is disabled.
I think your idea of having a way to select a bunch of expenses at once and toggle a setting is a great idea! Much quicker and easier than having to click into each item. I added that to my roadmap!
Thanks for taking the time to provide great feedback! I hope you trackFI gets/keeps you motivated :)
Please let me know if you disagree or if I didn't provide adequate clarification. I am very much open to suggestions!
Kevin
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Thanks this is really cool
Thanks nnls! Please feel free to message me on the forum or email me at kevin@trackfi.com if you run into any issues or have any questions/requests!
Kevin
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Qualifier: scanned the thread briefly and have not visited briefly clicked on privacy policy at the site.
[edit: I see you have an extensive privacy policy and several security features described on the cover sheet, so clearly you are thinking about what I wrote below. That is good. Personally, I would never entrust a site with my account information under the privacy policy terms as written, but many will. Good luck]
Comment: I currently work with financial information in the context of delivering a public service. One area to possibly research is protecting your customers and your own company from any liability issues associated with handling what might be considered personal, confidential information. Financial information is attractive to scammers or identity thieves. Hackers can use IP addresses and other matching techniques to link entries to the real identity of a user. If there is risk that information you handle could be misused it is something to protect against. For example, my broker sometimes asks me to describe a balance or provide financial information to verify identity. I would not want to enter my balances or accounts or my mortgage on a site without top notch security. Or if you store files locally on user devices, they should be encrypted, hashed, etc.
Accordingly I would explore:
* get legal advice on protecting yourself from possible liabilities associated with claims related to any data breach, security flaw or other site related negligence that could allow a third party to misuse any information you store. A well crafted user agreement is a good start. Also make sure you are familiar with any legal requirements. For example, merchant laws in certain states prohibit collecting and maintaining certain types of personal information without clear agreements proactively signed.
* hire a third party security expert to hack away at your site to find possible flaws before scammers do, so the holes can be plugged. Consider working with someone familiar with banking and related sites that are very secure. The big 4 accounting/audit firms and specialized security consultants are particularly good at advice in that area.
* encourage users to use ID and passwords that are unique and not personally identifiable, and to not enter exact figures so their information, if hacked, is not something usable by a third party.
Hopefully you already thought of these issues. The PCI DSS standard is a good primer on some important data security issues, and is free to download from VISA, MASTERCARD or related sites. Of course it is focused only in security for credit card related data handling.
Thank you PizzaSteve, you bring up some really important concerns. I just introduced new Terms and Conditions and I started taking the next steps.
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I go to the home page to check it out, and want to see what it looks like, but there's just a bunch of animated gifs that move too quickly for me to scrutinize.
I'm not done looking at one screen when it changes, and sitting through a cycle (and then doing that 4-5 times) gets annoying.
Can you replace some of those with screenshots, or slow down their animation at least? :)
What's your monetization plan?
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Loving this. I have been tracking my expenses with Excel but might switch to this.
1) Is there a way to import 3 years worth of excel data so I don't have to manually do it?
2) Although I track my networth in USD, I have recurring cashflows in different currencies. It would be nice to have a way to incorporate different currencies. The default currency can still be USD and in the end the tool could show combine everything into the default currency on the dashboard. (using oanda.com or what ever as a daily converter)
Good work, man! I am jealous of your skills. ;)
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I just made my second monthly entry, and I'm really excited to track my progress. One question, should I add debt payments to the monthly expenses?
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When I said adding expenses, I mean expense entries/transactions, not the categories.
If I purchase $8.05 worth of groceries tonight, I'll go back and add $8.05 to my october groceries category. I would prefer to type in $8.05 somewhere and click a plus button, and it's automatically added. Instead, I have to add it to my "running tab" in a calculator (or my head), let's say 250.25+8.05 and update the groceries category to be $258.30. That make sense?
This would be a nice little feature.
I went through my bank account transactions and had to keep busting out the calculator to add the next item that may fall in that category. A little box next to the main category box that you put your transaction total in and hit ADD and it adds it to the category total for you.
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This is an awesome tool, set it all up today. Will have more time to dig into it and give feedback in a few days. So far it rocks.
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This is awesome! I just started tracking my expenses back in March of this year and created my own summary document in excel that stores a lot of the same info, but this is much more flexible and is great at quickly visualizing important pieces of information.
I just have one piece of minor feedback (hopefully this wasn't already mentioned). Having the ability to load entries by account for multiple time periods instead of by month for all accounts would probably make it easier to load multiple months at once (e.g. when people are first setting it up). I think your current method is the best way to do it going forward when loading one month at a time, but I think the method I mentioned makes it easier to load multiple months at once.
For example, I have my investments, cash and income stored in different places but I had monthly views of each. For each month, I had to switch between these multiple data sources when loading my information, but it would have been easier to load all 8 months for cash then move on to investments, then move onto income, etc.
EDIT: I would also add that it would be good to be able to see my savings rate over time (sorry again if this was already mentioned).
I also have one question for you - before using this website, I tracked student loans as an expense and in my spreadsheet I had a sum of expenses for the month that included student loan payments and one that didn't (I wanted to track when I made an extra payment but also not have that impact my overall expenses). Would you recommend I not enter student loans as an expense since it is tracked in my loan balance and so other things are calculated differently (savings rate and years to FI)?
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I entered in my info and the site is awesome. However, there's no advertisements and I didn't have to pay to use it. So, you do a lot of work and I get a lot of benefit??? That seems like a lopsided arrangement.
You asked for feedback. My suggestion is to fill the site with ads so you get paid and it remains free for me:)
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I entered in my info and the site is awesome. However, there's no advertisements and I didn't have to pay to use it. So, you do a lot of work and I get a lot of benefit??? That seems like a lopsided arrangement.
You asked for feedback. My suggestion is to fill the site with ads so you get paid and it remains free for me:)
That's why I asked about monetization, above. OP never replied. I'd be worried about my data being sold. YMMV. :)
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Can you replace some of those with screenshots, or slow down their animation at least? :)
Agree - they move too quickly.
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Before I sign up, is it this relevant when you're not a US citizen?
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On the subject of security and liability you really aught to consider setting up an llc to own this if you have not already. Better yet consult an actual legal professional about the best way to limit your personal liability in the event of legal action of any kind.
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following
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I just made my second monthly entry, and I'm really excited to track my progress. One question, should I add debt payments to the monthly expenses?
Hi Breadwinner, thanks for trying out trackFI! Regarding tracking debt payments, the way I do it is I add any debts I have as a new Account (credit card, loan, other liability). Then each month, I input whatever the debt repayment amount was.
For example, if I have a Chase credit card, I would create a new Account with a type of 'credit card'. Come January, I would input the amount I paid towards that debt in December. So if I paid $1230 for the December statement on that Chase credit card, I would enter that in January for the December entry.
If you paid for a certain expense with your Chase credit card, you would still want to keep track of that item as an Expense.
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Loving this. I have been tracking my expenses with Excel but might switch to this.
1) Is there a way to import 3 years worth of excel data so I don't have to manually do it?
2) Although I track my networth in USD, I have recurring cashflows in different currencies. It would be nice to have a way to incorporate different currencies. The default currency can still be USD and in the end the tool could show combine everything into the default currency on the dashboard. (using oanda.com or what ever as a daily converter)
Good work, man! I am jealous of your skills. ;)
Actively working on both of these features! The currency one is a big one I keep hearing! Thanks for trying it out and providing feedback!
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I go to the home page to check it out, and want to see what it looks like, but there's just a bunch of animated gifs that move too quickly for me to scrutinize.
I'm not done looking at one screen when it changes, and sitting through a cycle (and then doing that 4-5 times) gets annoying.
Can you replace some of those with screenshots, or slow down their animation at least? :)
What's your monetization plan?
Sorry that the images are moving to fast! They are actually html5 video files, which means, if you are using Chrome, you can right click them and hit Show Controls. This will provide you with a play/pause interface! See below for more instructions:
(http://i.giphy.com/l0MYJREHuLXXya8hi.gif)
Regarding monetization, I mentioned a few ideas on the prior page (see below for quote). Long story short, I'd love to have freemium model (pay for more advanced feature while keeping the basic app free). If that doesn't work, I might have to resort to display ads/affiliate marketing (credit card offers, personal capital, etc).
I've had great feedback from the MMM community but the user base is still really small, so monetization is very much putting the cart before the horse. I want to iron out all the kinks and make the platform as useful as possible before starting to think too much about how to make money.
On a more selfish note, I get to say that I built this web application that real people use :)
Regarding monetization, I have no immediate plans. I really, really, REALLY want to stay away from advertising as the monetization source at all costs. It just feels dirty and in my opinion cheapens whatever product you are using. I am hopeful that enough people find trackFI useful that I can build out advanced power user features, possibly some nifty importing, more customizable features, better control, insights, etc, and offer a premium version, at a very reasonable price (credit to fumanchu282 for the idea!). It would be totally optional and I plan to always have a free version that is very capable.
But adding membership is months off. My costs right now are around $200/month on server fees, plus around $3000 in sunk costs, so unless things increase by a factor of 10, I have plenty of runway to focus on building features and incorporating feedback. This does not take into account the literal 1000's of hours I've invested, but I look at that as more of a learning experience.
I would love nothing more than to quit my day job (which I really enjoy), and focus 110% of my time on this but until I can prove out a sustainable business model, it will remain my hobby project for the foreseeable future!
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This is an awesome tool, set it all up today. Will have more time to dig into it and give feedback in a few days. So far it rocks.
Thanks for trying it out. Glad to hear you are liking it so far!
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When I said adding expenses, I mean expense entries/transactions, not the categories.
If I purchase $8.05 worth of groceries tonight, I'll go back and add $8.05 to my october groceries category. I would prefer to type in $8.05 somewhere and click a plus button, and it's automatically added. Instead, I have to add it to my "running tab" in a calculator (or my head), let's say 250.25+8.05 and update the groceries category to be $258.30. That make sense?
This would be a nice little feature.
I went through my bank account transactions and had to keep busting out the calculator to add the next item that may fall in that category. A little box next to the main category box that you put your transaction total in and hit ADD and it adds it to the category total for you.
This is the 2nd or 3rd request I've heard to this. Just bumped it up on the todo list :)
Thanks for trying it out.
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I entered in my info and the site is awesome. However, there's no advertisements and I didn't have to pay to use it. So, you do a lot of work and I get a lot of benefit??? That seems like a lopsided arrangement.
You asked for feedback. My suggestion is to fill the site with ads so you get paid and it remains free for me:)
Thanks aceyou! I am flattered you are liking the app so far! I do agree that its a little lopsided right now but its been a hobby project for the past 2 years. I eventually would love to make some money through either a freemium model (pay for advanced features) or advertising, but right now I am just happy people are using it and finding it beneficial!
It would have been a major bummer if no one liked or needed or found the site useful.
Luckily, not including sunk costs (around $4000 now), the site only costs about $150/month to run. While I don't want to be running in the red every month, I can float the site for the foreseeable future with no problems.
Right now, I am most concerned with delivering value via making the app more useful than I am about making money.
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I entered in my info and the site is awesome. However, there's no advertisements and I didn't have to pay to use it. So, you do a lot of work and I get a lot of benefit??? That seems like a lopsided arrangement.
You asked for feedback. My suggestion is to fill the site with ads so you get paid and it remains free for me:)
That's why I asked about monetization, above. OP never replied. I'd be worried about my data being sold. YMMV. :)
I have zero interest in selling information. I would rather beg for paypal donations and shut down the site than sell information. At most, I might run advertising as a last ditch effort to keep the site in the black if all else fails, but outright selling of information is off the table.
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Can you replace some of those with screenshots, or slow down their animation at least? :)
Agree - they move too quickly.
Sorry about that Tami, try this:
I go to the home page to check it out, and want to see what it looks like, but there's just a bunch of animated gifs that move too quickly for me to scrutinize.
I'm not done looking at one screen when it changes, and sitting through a cycle (and then doing that 4-5 times) gets annoying.
Can you replace some of those with screenshots, or slow down their animation at least? :)
What's your monetization plan?
Sorry that the images are moving to fast! They are actually html5 video files, which means, if you are using Chrome, you can right click them and hit Show Controls. This will provide you with a play/pause interface! See below for more instructions:
(http://i.giphy.com/l0MYJREHuLXXya8hi.gif)
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Before I sign up, is it this relevant when you're not a US citizen?
Hi Grogounet, anyone can signup and use the site! The only US centric item is that the site currently uses the "$" sign exclusively. I intend to internationalize the site but the math behind all the widgets, charts and tables doesnt change as long as you are consistent in using one currency.
For example, while the site might show dollar signs, if you enter all your information in pounds, the site will work great, just ignore the dollar signs (for the time being!).
Hope that cleared it up for you.
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On the subject of security and liability you really aught to consider setting up an llc to own this if you have not already. Better yet consult an actual legal professional about the best way to limit your personal liability in the event of legal action of any kind.
I did spin the website out into its own LLC, setup separate business accounts and have talked to a handful of lawyers on the topic.
Appreciate the advice!
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I entered in my info and the site is awesome. However, there's no advertisements and I didn't have to pay to use it. So, you do a lot of work and I get a lot of benefit??? That seems like a lopsided arrangement.
You asked for feedback. My suggestion is to fill the site with ads so you get paid and it remains free for me:)
That's why I asked about monetization, above. OP never replied. I'd be worried about my data being sold. YMMV. :)
I have zero interest in selling information. I would rather beg for paypal donations and shut down the site than sell information. At most, I might run advertising as a last ditch effort to keep the site in the black if all else fails, but outright selling of information is off the table.
I'm glad to hear that. :)
My concern would be if/when your site catches the attention of a company that wants to buy it, and makes you a good offer that makes you instantly FI that you decide to take. Who knows if that company feels the same way about user data as you--they may in fact specifically want that data.
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Love the website so far and I've spent some time creating accounts, and copying & pasting numbers from spreadsheet into the website.
May I ask if you can add edit and delete buttons in the Entries page (https://www.trackfi.com/entries) so that we can skip an additional step of selecting the entry and then clicking on the 'edit' button.
Keep up the good work!
Thanks!
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I entered in my info and the site is awesome. However, there's no advertisements and I didn't have to pay to use it. So, you do a lot of work and I get a lot of benefit??? That seems like a lopsided arrangement.
You asked for feedback. My suggestion is to fill the site with ads so you get paid and it remains free for me:)
Thanks aceyou! I am flattered you are liking the app so far! I do agree that its a little lopsided right now but its been a hobby project for the past 2 years. I eventually would love to make some money through either a freemium model (pay for advanced features) or advertising, but right now I am just happy people are using it and finding it beneficial!
It would have been a major bummer if no one liked or needed or found the site useful.
Luckily, not including sunk costs (around $4000 now), the site only costs about $150/month to run. While I don't want to be running in the red every month, I can float the site for the foreseeable future with no problems.
Right now, I am most concerned with delivering value via making the app more useful than I am about making money.
Glad to hear that. Ok, well my recommendation then for you to maximize profits would be to keep it add free for a while so it looks really clean. Basically, build up a very happy client base as quickly as possible. Then when it starts to get kinda big, start adding in ads, and possibly premium content for people who want very advanced stuff.
Honestly, you might want to look into creating a tab with links to credit cards. It seems like lots of financial leaning websites are doing that right now, so there must be a big financial payout to doing so. That way you get a potentially solid income stream without it really interfering with the users experience. Just something to consider.
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Love the website so far and I've spent some time creating accounts, and copying & pasting numbers from spreadsheet into the website.
May I ask if you can add edit and delete buttons in the Entries page (https://www.trackfi.com/entries) so that we can skip an additional step of selecting the entry and then clicking on the 'edit' button.
Keep up the good work!
Thanks!
Thanks for your very kind words mickeyj! Great suggestion, I've gone ahead and introduced that functionality. Please let me know if there is anything else that is bugging you with the app!
(http://i.imgur.com/w03Gf0W.png)
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Love the website so far and I've spent some time creating accounts, and copying & pasting numbers from spreadsheet into the website.
May I ask if you can add edit and delete buttons in the Entries page (https://www.trackfi.com/entries) so that we can skip an additional step of selecting the entry and then clicking on the 'edit' button.
Keep up the good work!
Thanks!
Thanks for your very kind words mickeyj! Great suggestion, I've gone ahead and introduced that functionality. Please let me know if there is anything else that is bugging you with the app!
(http://i.imgur.com/w03Gf0W.png)
Woohoo! Thank you very much! :)
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This is awesome! I just started tracking my expenses back in March of this year and created my own summary document in excel that stores a lot of the same info, but this is much more flexible and is great at quickly visualizing important pieces of information.
MFG_Hotspur thanks for trying it out. Your kind words are keeping me motivated!
I just have one piece of minor feedback (hopefully this wasn't already mentioned). Having the ability to load entries by account for multiple time periods instead of by month for all accounts would probably make it easier to load multiple months at once (e.g. when people are first setting it up). I think your current method is the best way to do it going forward when loading one month at a time, but I think the method I mentioned makes it easier to load multiple months at once.
For example, I have my investments, cash and income stored in different places but I had monthly views of each. For each month, I had to switch between these multiple data sources when loading my information, but it would have been easier to load all 8 months for cash then move on to investments, then move onto income, etc.
Completely agree. Being able to onboard data faster and easier is a major priority. Thanks for putting up with the system as is! I am still thinking through the best way to do it, but I am leaning towards a formatted csv import type system. Setup all your accounts, export the a templated csv, and then upload it. Something along those lines.
EDIT: I would also add that it would be good to be able to see my savings rate over time (sorry again if this was already mentioned).
Great suggestion! I went ahead and added historical charts for all the remaining metrics. Thanks for that feedback.
I also have one question for you - before using this website, I tracked student loans as an expense and in my spreadsheet I had a sum of expenses for the month that included student loan payments and one that didn't (I wanted to track when I made an extra payment but also not have that impact my overall expenses). Would you recommend I not enter student loans as an expense since it is tracked in my loan balance and so other things are calculated differently (savings rate and years to FI)?
The way I would handle that is to keep tracking the student loan payments as an expense. You will also want to track the outstanding balance of the student loan as an account (loan). If you wanted more transparency, you could create a second expense and track any surplus student loan payments there.
For example, let's say your student loan payment is $500 and the total loan amount is $10,000. I would create an Account called "Sallie Mae Student Loan" with the type of loan and an Expense called "Student Loan". Lets say the first month passes and I create an Entry where the "Sallie Mae Student Loan" Account has a balance of $9,500 (assuming you paid it) and the Expense "Student Loan" had a value of $500. If you wanted to pay additional beyond what you typically do and wanted more insight into that, you can create a new Expense called "Student Loan - extra payment" and put in whatever amount you paid on top of your normal amount.
You are correct in your assertion that additional payments (aka expenses) will impact Savings Rate and Years Saved as those are functions of expense. However, I'm not sure how accurate those metrics would be if you excluded your surplus payment (expense) as that is not a fair assessment of the truth either. On a positive note, the Time til FI metric takes into account networth, which will be improving as you pay down the loan.
With all that said, I think the real beauty of trackFI comes through after a few months/years of entries as you start seeing larger and positive trends.
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On charting improvements.
I'd love to use your charts for my blogs as well.
Most of the charts work really well, especially in the Overview section.
The tricky part comes when I dive into the Assets, Liabilities and Expenses, those chart need a bit more work because:
1) The pie charts have very similar colors that I can't really tell them apart and I'd really love to be able to just click on a checkbox to display the name of each slice, another checkbox to display the percentage, and another to display the value.
2) I have many assets (some of which are really saving buckets like Family Emergency Fund, Investment War Chest, etc.) and many expenses (some of which are broken down into Food - Restaurant, Food - Food Court, etc. to be more specific about where my money went).
For item 1, it's easy to resolve.
For item 2, it would be super cool to be able to group accounts together. For example, I'd love to group expenses like "Food - Restaurant" and "Food - Food Court" together under a group name called "F&B" and group assets like "Family Emergency Fund" and "Investment War Chest" together as "Cash" so that in the charts, we don't have so many items and it's cleaner.
I wonder if that's possible. The alternative is for me to have an account called F&B and sum up the food expenses from food courts and restaurants together. I kinda prefer not to as I want to be as consistent as my expense tracking app.
What do you think?
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Having to create a username and password for your site was a huge turnoff.
See: https://blog.codinghorror.com/your-internet-drivers-license/
Something to consider as you look at more features. I can't remember the last time I made a new account to log into a website.
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Having to create a username and password for your site was a huge turnoff.
See: https://blog.codinghorror.com/your-internet-drivers-license/
Something to consider as you look at more features. I can't remember the last time I made a new account to log into a website.
Counterpoint: As soon as you use an OAuth/OpenID provider as your login, people will complain "Having to have a <provider> account for your site was a huge turnoff."
I know this, because I've experienced it.
You simply can't please everyone. Do what works best for *your* site. For every person you accommodate for their pet peeve, you'll irritate another with the accommodation.
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Sorry if someone mentioned this, but my first feedback is the signup flow. One - I accidentally clicked Login instead of Signup. Then... when I did sign up, it took me to the home page with no indication of success. So I clicked "Start Now" and... I'm back on Sign up?! It's confusing.
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My second issue is that you disallow characters in username (i.e. you cannot use an email address) but then you go to Login... and it asks for Email and Password. Well... which is it. Do I enter my username or my email address? Maybe they should be the same!
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Expenses != Expense Categories, but it says Expenses and Add Expenses, and then I go back to the intro page and realize I've just created categories for every expense!
(OK I got lucky and only entered my mortgage payment...) but this is confusing.
Also why must I edit an expense (category?) to make it recurring? Why can't I check this while I add it.
ETA: Similarly, annoying that my income defaults to NOT recurring and I must go back and edit it.
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OK, now that I see how it works, it looks like a neat addition to what I already have/do but far from a replacement.
Currently I...
* Track all transactions in my own custom web-based software
* Use my software's end-of-month account values and budget categories totals
* Populate two spreadsheets with those account values and budget values
* Use the entries into the spreadsheets plus charts, formulas, etc to see income/expenses over time, forecast account values into the future, etc.
Given all those things, it was easy to take my November snapshot and copy it into your software (I've cheated and only did accounts and a handful of income/expense items so far) and then I can see what it calculates for me. But given all that I'm doing already, this is just a (hard-earned) bonus on top.
To remediate this (and I think other forum members have contributed similar ideas), you'd want to track transactions rather than month-end category totals, and those transactions would have to work with various time frames (weekly, bi-weekly, semi-monthly, monthly, quarterly, 6-months, annual) - then calculate the month-end category totals for the user. Obviously that's much bigger than what you're doing now; a lot of work to get there. This is simpler, and maybe should be. There's a place for that. But right now, at best, I would copy information I've already worked hard to get into your software once a month, and let it do a few calculations I'm not already doing. (Of course, I may not be in your target demographic.) I guess I'm having a tough time deciding who this would best suit, or how you could use this effectively without already having another tool that does most of the heavy lifting for you.
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Now that I've added all my income/expenses, when I add/edit entries, I'd love if those categories were in alphabetical order. Instead, they are the opposite of the order I entered them... and I entered them alphabetically! So I have to read up my spreadsheet entries instead of in order.
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So I'm obviously interested in your application to enter three months worth of data. So don't take all of my suggestions as negative :)
Anyway, some other minor observations.
I'm not sure redirects are consistent, i.e. I might click Add Expense and then be taken to the Expense itself after I add it. I might click Add Income and then be taken to the list of Incomes. This should be consistent.
Minimize clicks! Hovering over Incomes and then clicking View All is fine, but having to click Incomes and then View All is an extra (unnecessary) click. (This is also why I don't like when I'm not taking back to a list while I'm clicking Add Expense because I have to click two extra times to get back to the list.
"Recurring" is a little weird - most people just use this word to mean "it reoccurs" but the value can change a little or a lot each month. Also, it is using the first ever value I entered for something, even if it was the odd one out, so I keep having to overwrite it. If it's going to copy a value, why not copy the most recently entered value?
Is there overlap - i.e. you say that 401k is "accounted for" by 401k balance. But I also have an income entry for 401k contributions. Am I double dipping? Does this affect calculations? (Same with say Loan amounts and Expenses labeled Loan Payment - is it doubled up in calculations?)
As someone else mentioned, can you split "net worth" and "stash" up a bit? I don't want real estate to count as "invested, income-generating value" but I still want to see it in my "net worth." In my own parlance, I use the term "investable" (which is not a real word, apparently.) I do see you have things like "Income, Passive, and Portfolio" when it comes to Incomes, and you have assets that are "Property" rather than "Liquid", but it's not clear if these are taken into calculations.
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Having to create a username and password for your site was a huge turnoff.
See: https://blog.codinghorror.com/your-internet-drivers-license/
Something to consider as you look at more features. I can't remember the last time I made a new account to log into a website.
Counterpoint: As soon as you use an OAuth/OpenID provider as your login, people will complain "Having to have a <provider> account for your site was a huge turnoff."
I know this, because I've experienced it.
You simply can't please everyone. Do what works best for *your* site. For every person you accommodate for their pet peeve, you'll irritate another with the accommodation.
Many web apps offer both account creation or logging in w/ facebook/google etc. That's fine. But not having any sort of sane auth login option in 2016 is less so.
This thread asks for feedback so I gave it. I hit that and didn't bother to go further.
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I vastly prefer creating my own login to having to use Facebook/Google/etc. and having those accounts tied together. I'm tracked enough, thank you very much, and forcing me to tie a financial account like this site to another ID I have? No thanks.
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I vastly prefer creating my own login to having to use Facebook/Google/etc. and having those accounts tied together. I'm tracked enough, thank you very much, and forcing me to tie a financial account like this site to another ID I have? No thanks.
Same for me. I've started using LastPass recently and overhauled all the passwords in my existing accounts.
It's safe to say that apart from the Master password to login to LastPass, every single password in each account is different. I'd prefer to stick with creating my own login accounts.
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Chiming in to agree. I would not use this personally if I had to tie in Facebook or Google+. Just, nope.
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Having to create a username and password for your site was a huge turnoff.
See: https://blog.codinghorror.com/your-internet-drivers-license/
Something to consider as you look at more features. I can't remember the last time I made a new account to log into a website.
Hi Vilgan, thanks for checkout out the site! I understand that some people feel very passionate about this. Im currently a team of 1 and also work full time at a day job. The odds of me integrating OAuth/OpenID is pretty low as its a fairly technical undertaking and because of the ever growing backlog of work that is piling up.
To me, I always get creeped out by OAuth/OpenID. I never know exactly what information is pulled and I don't like that there is a hard link between accounts, especially something as content rich as Google or Facebook.
I do appreciate the feedback though!
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Sorry if someone mentioned this, but my first feedback is the signup flow. One - I accidentally clicked Login instead of Signup. Then... when I did sign up, it took me to the home page with no indication of success. So I clicked "Start Now" and... I'm back on Sign up?! It's confusing.
Hi neo, sorry you found that confusing. After you sign up for the first time, you are redirected to the homepage, and a message pops up at the bottom left corner, notifying you that you need to verify your email address.
Below is an example of the signup flow.
(http://i.giphy.com/3oz8xwYR6c4OFlW4kU.gif)
Let me know if it behaved differently for you. Thanks!
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My second issue is that you disallow characters in username (i.e. you cannot use an email address) but then you go to Login... and it asks for Email and Password. Well... which is it. Do I enter my username or my email address? Maybe they should be the same!
Good question that is not entirely clear at this point! The reason the sign up flow asks for a username is that I wanted to future proof the app. It's possible that in future versions of the app, users could create public facing profiles and blog about their entries, comment on other users entries, etc.
That is all long term stuff and would be 100% optional and would only be take effect if your enabled it.
To answer you question, login is done with email only.
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Expenses != Expense Categories, but it says Expenses and Add Expenses, and then I go back to the intro page and realize I've just created categories for every expense!
(OK I got lucky and only entered my mortgage payment...) but this is confusing.
Also why must I edit an expense (category?) to make it recurring? Why can't I check this while I add it.
ETA: Similarly, annoying that my income defaults to NOT recurring and I must go back and edit it.
Another great question! Thanks for really testing out the app. Right now, I've opted to not show the recurring option on new accounts/expense/income creations as I want to make the onboarding experience as straightforward as possible. I dont want to bang people over the head with a million toggle switches and options.
You bring up a valid point though, it does create more work after you are initially onboarded. If I hear more feedback, I will change it so you can set the recurring option when creating new accounts/expenses/incomes.
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So I'm obviously interested in your application to enter three months worth of data. So don't take all of my suggestions as negative :)
Great to hear! The app really starts to shine when there is more than 1 or 2 entries.
Anyway, some other minor observations.
I'm not sure redirects are consistent, i.e. I might click Add Expense and then be taken to the Expense itself after I add it. I might click Add Income and then be taken to the list of Incomes. This should be consistent.
I just tested this behavior, in all cases (accounts/expenses/incomes) I am redirected back to the listings page. The only exception is Entries. After you create an entry, you are redirected to the dashboard (intentional, you get to see all your updated info!).
Minimize clicks! Hovering over Incomes and then clicking View All is fine, but having to click Incomes and then View All is an extra (unnecessary) click. (This is also why I don't like when I'm not taking back to a list while I'm clicking Add Expense because I have to click two extra times to get back to the list.
Appreciate the feedback, but I'm going to require a click on the menu items. I don't like when UI elements move around without explicit action taken on them. To me, it makes for a messy feeling user experience.
"Recurring" is a little weird - most people just use this word to mean "it reoccurs" but the value can change a little or a lot each month. Also, it is using the first ever value I entered for something, even if it was the odd one out, so I keep having to overwrite it. If it's going to copy a value, why not copy the most recently entered value?
By default, all accounts/incomes/expenses are 'recurring' in the sense that they will show up when you go to create a new Entry (default behavior is with no value). If you select a account/expense/income to Recurring, it will then use the value of the most recent entry for that item.
For example, if I have an expense called "Cell Phone" that has an amount of $40 in Oct then $50 in Nov and I set it to recurring before I create the Dec entry, when I go to create the Dec entry, it will auto-populate the line item under Expense "Cell Phone" with the value of $50 as it is the most recent value for that Expense.
Is there overlap - i.e. you say that 401k is "accounted for" by 401k balance. But I also have an income entry for 401k contributions. Am I double dipping? Does this affect calculations? (Same with say Loan amounts and Expenses labeled Loan Payment - is it doubled up in calculations?)
That makes sense to me. Tdub's method of accounting for his 401k seems very reasonable as well. I think the only thing that differs between what you are doing and what Tdub mentioned below is that you are being more explicit, meaning, you have a line item that shows your 401k contribution.
I am putting my income as gross paycheck minus taxes. This means future 401k contributions that come from my paycheck are still counted as income, and will eventually show up as an asset, just as normal cash would. Any paycheck deductions that don't end up in a bank account (retirement or not) are considered expenses (e.g. health insurance excluding FSA/HSA).
As someone else mentioned, can you split "net worth" and "stash" up a bit? I don't want real estate to count as "invested, income-generating value" but I still want to see it in my "net worth." In my own parlance, I use the term "investable" (which is not a real word, apparently.) I do see you have things like "Income, Passive, and Portfolio" when it comes to Incomes, and you have assets that are "Property" rather than "Liquid", but it's not clear if these are taken into calculations.
This is a great suggestion. I have a lot of ideas to make the app much more customizable for power users. But for the sake of simplicity I don't want to overcomplicate the app for beginners. If I do roll out a freemium model, I would imagine a feature like this would make it into the premium version. I've added this to the backlog!
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Thank you for sharing this, it looks great from the screenshots!
Haven't had a chance yet to really dive into this, but went to sign up today and can also say that I was turned off by having to create a separate login. I totally respect those who don't like the idea of connecting a FB/Google login, but for me the OAuth protocol makes it pretty clear what data from your Google (etc) account is being shared, and as long as the permissions are reasonable I'd much rather authenticate through that instead of having to deal with another account.
Will post again with feedback once I have more time to dig into it!
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If you run ads, and I do suggest you run some ads, I highly highly recommend that you either use google ads, or some network where you can manually approve ads and those ads can't change when you've approved them.
I always disable my adblocker on sites I trust - but that requires the ads to be, at minimum, not injecting fucking malware and tracking (google excepted, tbh).
I would never, ever allow a financials website to simply sell out my web request space to any old ad network with all that realtime bidding shit, who put god knows what onto the webpage.
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Are there any plans to allow custom date range selection for overview and charts?
Now that we crossed to 2017, it will be nice to be able to select, say 1st Jan - 31st Dec 2016 to see all the information for 2016, for example. :)
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Awesome UI!!!
Basically i am just importing my personal google sheets to this.
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Just so you know, the site now throws up a warning saying it is not secure (no HTTPS)
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I'm getting a DNS error when trying to visit now - any updates?
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I've been really enjoying using this- but it hasn't been available in about 3 days. DNS error. Will it be back up? Thanks.
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@Kevin was last active December 16, 2017, 04:43:54 PM
Unless he has e-mail notifications enabled, we're probably out of luck getting support.
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Sent him a PM, the site is back up!
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Oh no! it's down again!
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I hope this is back up soon. Reading through the thread and checking the screenshots, this tool looks awesome.