Yeah 
It’s basically just this, where A2 is the date / month of the report, Expenses!A is a date showing what month expenses come from, and Expenses!C is the amount.
=SUMIFS(Expenses!C:C,Expenses!A:A,">"&(A2-365),Expenses!A:A,"<="&A2)
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This is our third highest point (high point was Dec '21, and 2nd is Mar '22)
3.15% estimated withdrawal rate
weird that it feels less secure than Nov '21, I guess because volatility is more of a recent visceral thing, or inflation is biting more?
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Not as fun when it ticks down, though of course it’s still strong as a pure number. Just hard to hold on to that when seeing milk prices jump in the flyer more than 10% in a week.
3.23% estimated withdrawal rate.
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Very nice graph! It’s never fun when the NW ticks down, but such is the life of an investor.
We were flat for Feb. Technically we were down, but it was only really the magnitude of a small rounding error.
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we also notice the chart movements more now because we aren’t contributing on a regular basis any more, so there isn’t anything really to balance out the drops. Plus of course even if we were contributing, the size of the market shifts on the invested assets would overpower anything.
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Sharing my hieroglyphs.
(red) TTM + PI: The sum total of ongoing expenses from the 12 months leading up to the point in time, including the Principal and Interest of my mortgage. Basically a way to see rolling average annual expenses. Any one month can only pull the average, but consistent control of expenses is necessary.
(green) 4%: All invested assets, divided by 25 - an estimate of how much of my expenses those investments could cover if I stopped working.
Do not update market values / dividends except at end of quarter, so just reflects ongoing income/savings/expenses for the period covering the past 2 months. While account balances are affected - I don’t include certain “rare” major expenses in the red “expense” graph above, e.g. major pet medical expenses. We do not (at this time) plan to have another pet after Tinkerbell, and do not expect to hinge our retirement on being able to afford that kind expense. (We will continue to have an emergency fund, and we will have to account for a shift in where taxes come from, and health insurance, and travel…)
January was good for market indices. February not so much. Come on March, you can do better!
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Oh hayyyyyy
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I’ve decided to do net worth every 3 months instead of every month- sitting at $256k now! This is the first year I haven’t set a goal for nw and last year was the first year I didn’t hit my goal. I’m not sure how to goal set in the current conditions.
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When the market dictates your nw more than anything you can do, goals become sort of silly IMO. Do I sit there and will the markets to do well so I can hit my target?
At this point my goals are about a set $ amount moved into the markets or something else within my control.
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That’s true! The main reason I set net worth goals initially was to create a timeline for when dh could retire. It was a way to see if we were still on track to have him retire by the target year. This year I don’t think I can set a meaningful goal but I feel like without having any net worth goal (ever again, I mean) I won’t have a way to see if we’re on track. IDK maybe that doesn’t make sense, lol.
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It totally makes sense.
In my spreadsheet the future projections page assumes 7% per annum growth of all monetary investments. Each month I update it with the actual numbers. This gives me the most accurate possible picture of the future. I obviously can’t know what will actually happen, but with educated guesses I can do my best.
It’s not about goals, but I also really hate replacing the projected number with a smaller one. These past many months have been unpleasant.
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I log market changes every 3 months, after doing monthly for years before that.
No goals though I do try to spend less than I earn every month. Maxed available tax advantaged contributions. Ideally also some goes into post-tax brokerage but last several months haven’t been great. Not having a specific goal leaves me aimless and it means each optional spending decision is harder…
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@Smacky Good to know! I wasn’t sure if there was a smarter way to do it, although doing it how you do with percentage probably makes more sense. With a lot of my money management I started out doing things a certain way at age 23 (often a clumsy way to avoid too much math, or upkeep) and then I never finessed it further! So, I know what I do generally “works” for me but when I hit snags I’m always unsure if it’s because I’m doing things in a roundabout way or if it’s because it’s just a snaggy thing in general. I suppose I’m lucky I’ve gone this long without hitting an annual goal, all things considered!
I think for this year I will suspend the goal and see how the year finishes out and then maybe I will reassess and figure out a way to set the next year’s goal either by number or percentage increase- do you think that makes sense? I guess my concern is- if we are way off on our goal I want to know so we can discuss options, because if we needed to we could make some big life decisions to lower our expenses. We’re not doing that now because I think our expenses are ok for meeting our goals, but I want warning if that’s not true. And I guess I’m not sure how many years of not meeting goals it takes to hit “DO SOMETHING DRASTIC” time.
I’m also glad to know this is a thing other people are doing! I started thinking about why I was doing it monthly and previously it was because we were low enough income that I really did want to track how much we saved every single month (since market gains were negligible due to total amount invested). Almost nothing was automated, savings wise, at that point- so I also got real info from looking at my monthly net worth changes. When we missed a month it was a big deal and I had to adjust immediately. Then I just…kept doing it.
One thing I’m (trying to be) aware of is my money owning me. I suppose I have Ramit to thank for bringing the commonness of this scenario to my attention. I would like to think this won’t happen to me but I’m sure no one thinks it will happen to them; everyone seems to assume they will feel calm and financially stable when they are, but so many people become owned by their wealth or overcome with fear or greed. I really like money and I am interested in it, and now I’m actively building wealth, so I worry I could be at risk of developing too much attachment to it, or identity around it. I don’t want to create problems where there are none!
When I asked myself why I didn’t want to stop tracking monthly, because I had an immediate aversion to that idea at first, all I could come up with was: for my spreadsheet! And some sense of pride at having always done it? But when I tried to come up with a way it would actually harm me financially to only look quarterly…I came up empty. I feel like I already had some weird attachment to the monthly tracking and I didn’t even realize it until I challenged myself! Anyway, I’m doing it 4 times a year now, which feels good to maintain a gauge of the market and where I am and helps me release a bit of the inclination to gaze lovingly at my pile of gold coins like that cartoon character whose name I can never remember.
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I need to do my numbers and it will accidentally have been quarterly. I think right now my goal is still to do it monthly but knowing that sometimes it’s going to end up being put off because life gets busy and in actuality look like 3 months, 1 month, 1 month, 2 months, 3 months, etc.
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As long as you do it regularly and consistently, it probably doesn’t matter too much the frequency at which you do your net worth tracking. The key is to keep doing it so you can see the trend. For example, we’ve been basically flat since the end of '21, which is not pleasant until you realize that the S&P500 index is down 16% over that same time period.
I track it monthly, mostly because my/our budget is on a monthly basis, so it’s a logical period. Some people need to look at their portfolio less often, especially in times of stress, but I’ve always found that tracking it at least monthly gives me a bit of a push to keep working at it. It helps to have strong convictions in a buy and hold strategy.
You know, now that I think about it, it may not be a bad idea to track the S&P500 on a monthly basis, too, for comparison purposes. Surprising that it never occurred to me.
Thank you @AllHat for getting those rusty gears in my head to start moving again. I just hope nothing breaks in there! 
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That’s a good point and makes a lot of sense to me.
Hah!
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I track weekly, and then have a chart for monthly YOY comparisons. I find watching the fluctuations quite interesting. It’s my Saturday morning thing to sit down for 5 min and look.
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If I didn’t do monthly the task of going through all my expenditures and categorizing them would be too big. I want to know what my monthly spend is in each category for a bunch of reasons, and it’s almost no extra work to update investment account values.
Allhat, do you want to redo your spreadsheets to something that better fits your current needs? That could be a fun project.
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For me, spreadsheets are a means to an end. The only spreadsheet I have at this point is net worth. I don’t do itemized tracking of spending or anything else! I guess what I’m saying is (not to yuck anyone’s yum) to me it would not be a fun project, haha. I hope that’s not rude to say!
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Not at all!
My spreadsheet had gotten unwieldy so this winter I focused on what I actually wanted to track instead of what I could track, and streamlined it. The new one brings me great joy, but I’m that person that feels joy from spreadsheets.
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