Money Progress

It has been a while since I have spent enough time working with my finances to write here about it.  The great thing though is that tools I’ve set up have automatically been keeping track of things for me.  I’ve mentioned before that I use Yodlee MoneyCenter to track my net worth and it is still doing so very nicely.

In my previous post about how to feel good about saving money I posted a screenshot from Yodlee with my net worth chart.  I’m doing so again here so that I can both have a personal record and to show you that while it is useful it does have limitations.  Take a look at the chart in the previously mentioned post and then look at the one here.  At a glance, they look surprisingly similar!  If you don’t look at the numbers or dates, they are not very different at all.

Now when you do look at the scales you can see that I have about nine months of new data in this chart and that my net worth has about doubled in that time period.  Yodlee has faithfully kept track of this for me by automatically updating the balances and transactions in all of my accounts over this time period.  The problem is that I’m stuck comparing charts like these two to try and compare my overall financial progress.  I can not view more than twelve months of data at a time, nor can I view data that is older than last year.

I said this chart was how I became interested in tracking my financial progress, and it is also why I’ve become interested in improving the process because of its limitations.  I obviously need to make my own charts that will show me the complete picture for all of the data that I have.

Since my last post and this one, the similar online financial tool Mint has also added a new net worth chart.  It looks extremely similar to Yodlee but it is a bit fancier.  They allow you to select more flexible time periods than Yodlee, which addresses one issue.  However you may notice that the Mint chart below has different data than my Yodlee charts.  This is because I have not had all my accounts on Mint as long as I have had them on Yodlee.

So while both Yodlee and Mint are very helpful tools, I think automatic solutions like this will always have some limitations.  It is clear that I’m going to need to spend time organizing my financial data so that I can create my own charts that will give me a clearer picture of my financial progress.  Jonathan over at My Money Blog has created his own charts and he accomplishes this very nicely.  It is one of my goals to do the same and I will share my results here so that hopefully I can help others in this process as well.

This post has been featured in the 85th edition of the Money Hacks carnival over at Dough Roller.  Go check it out!