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.
