# Jerm's Money



## Jerm (Jun 2, 2016)

Hi people,

My reason for starting this thread is twofold. 

1)	I’m a bit of a finance nerd and I have been for a while. I don’t know many people (in person) who share my views on finance so I’m starting this thread to get ideas, suggestions, criticisms, etc. 
2)	I’m a bit of an excel nerd and I like tracking my money. I know even fewer people (in person) who enjoy creating spreadsheets so I’m hoping to get ideas, suggestions, and criticism on my methods of tracking.

About me:

I’m 33 years old. I live in a fairly high cost of living area of the country but I have an above-average income which has allowed me to save aggressively for years. 2016 was my “year of becoming an adult”. I got married, bought a house, and my son was born. This aggressive saving took a massive hit during the past year or so. I used to be able to save >50% of my net pay, where recently I’m barely keeping my head above water. 

My wife is currently on maternity leave with no plans to go back to her old job. Our plan is to start a business in the near future where she’ll be handling the day-to-day aspect of running the business and I’ll be handling the back end – automation, inventory, accounting, etc. This business should allow her to take care of our son simultaneously until he is old enough to go to school. I will work full time while she runs the business. If all goes according to plan this should allow us to maintain a reasonable savings rate while living comfortably at the same time.

It’s worth mentioning as well that part of the reason I’ve been able to save so much is because I tend to travel to remote sites for work. This typically involves 12+ hour days for weeks at a time where all expenses are paid for. I’m starting to get burnt out on this lifestyle. Ideally our business venture will be successful enough to allow me to take a steady 9-5 type job in town. I anticipate a pay cut of approximately 30% in exchange for the luxury of sleeping in my own bed every night.

So that’s me in a nutshell. Big changes have been happening in my life lately and big changes are planned for the future.


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## Jerm (Jun 2, 2016)

Alrighty. My plan is to post status updates in the form of screenshots from spreadsheets. I update these spreadsheets monthly and plan on posting them monthly. 


Data input falls into two categories: 

*Investments *– I manually input three pieces of information per account monthly: deposits, withdrawals, and account balance. From this information all returns, charts, and statistics related to investments are calculated automatically.

*Bills* – My bank allows me to export account activity in the form of a *.csv file. I have a “raw data” tab that I continually append every month simply by copy/pasting the new data in. The spreadsheet parses this raw data and pulls out any charges relating to regular, ongoing expenses based on the “description” column of the raw data for each month.


So that’s the input. You won’t see any of that. What you will see is five screenshots that more-or-less summarize my finances based on the monthly input. 

These screenshots are as follows:

*Bills *– Nothing fancy here. Anything that can be considered a regular, ongoing expense is tracked. Monthly totals of bills and pay are added up on this sheet.

*Investment Calculations* – Everything on this sheet is calculated based on the three pieces of information per account that I mentioned above. This sheet is available on the bogleheads wiki.

*Net worth* – Assets - liabilities = Net worth. I include my bank account balances, investment, and house under assets. My vehicles are negligible. I increase the value of my house by approximately the rate of inflation every month. Liabilities include my mortgage and a line of credit that I managed to accumulate when I took some time off after my son was born (no regrets).

*Asset Allocation* – This sheet is what I use when deciding what to buy and how to rebalance. I rebalance the entire portfolio, not each individual account. I have a macro which pulls the latest price of each of my 5 ETFs from Yahoo! Finance and multiplies it by the number of shares in each account. I always “buy the dip” in the sense that any new money always goes towards the most underrepresented ETF. I have a dashboard at the top that summarizes my returns and a few stats (annual costs, annual dividends) just for the hell of it.

*Charts* – Anything that I can represent visually I put on this tab. Charts are organized into three categories:
_Net worth_ – One chart that contains assets, liabilities, and a line representing one minus the other
_Investments _– Four charts total including the portfolio balance, monthly growth/decline of the portfolio, growth of $10,000, and rolling 1/3/6/12 month returns.
_Bills_ – Many charts including my average monthly expenses, total expenses/pay per month, and then each bill is charted individually


Since it’s bound to come up – I’m sorry but I won’t be posting the spreadsheet online. I enjoy discussing spreadsheets and I’m happy to share any tips/tricks/formula. I’ll take this time to plug The bogleheads personal returns calculations wiki page. If you want to track your own investment performance - start with this spreadsheet. It *should* be able to track basically any portfolio as long as you’re able to provide three pieces of information per account monthly – deposits, withdrawals, and account balance.


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## Jerm (Jun 2, 2016)

May 1st 2017 update.

Yeah I know it’s not May 1st but the data is current as of May 1st. This is what I’ll be posting monthly. They’re pretty big images so I’m not sure what the best way to host them is. I guess I’ll try the board’s built-in attachment function. I suspect that posting them inline would probably break the thread. We’ll see. Worst case scenario is I provide an imgur link.

I’m not going to spend a whole lot of time talking about this post but first thing that people will probably notice is two HUGE spikes in the portfolio balance. The first (~70k) spike was due to some money being moved around when I bought my house. I took a chance and put it in the markets for a few months. I ended up getting lucky and making a few thousand on it. Score. The second spike at the beginning of 2017 is from when I integrated my main taxable portfolio into my current one and adopted the “couch potato” method across all my accounts. All money is now accounted for and there should be no more large drops or deposits in my future. The only exception may involve financing my wife’s business, but we’re leaning towards borrowing in her name rather than dipping into our savings.

Edit - hmm... the forum seems to be converting the large(r) images to *.jpg and reducing the resolution. Any ideas how to prevent that? I'll still come in well under the 5mb limit.
Here's an imgur link to the two images that are basically unreadable


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