And I wish you all the joy in your spreadsheets! May your cells be…plentiful?
Haha 
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My formulas are abundant and my pages are many!
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I’ve gotten a lot of joy out of pet programming projects, and I built my first web application to track “every” transaction that occurs back in 2003, and I’ve used it ever since. (And I rebuilt it from the ground up with an import tool from the old one back in early 2017.) I tend to input stuff before it even posts, then I click the button by it when it does post. Once a month, I copy a few things into a spreadsheet, i.e. major expense category totals (barebones, lifestyle, optional) as well as account balances (bank, credit card, 401k) - but I only put brokerage/retirement accounts fees, dividends and market value changes into that web application once every 3 months. So those changes are reflected in a spreadsheet quarterly. (Conveniently, Vanguard does quarterly statements which helps me double check my dividend/market value numbers.)
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That’s amazing. A whole other level. I’m super impressed. Have you considered a career with computers?
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This was all done using woodworking tools. I wouldn’t know the first thing about com-puters!
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You are but a humble craftsman.
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I have one page that tracks income from each source and spending in each category. I can watch trends over time. My spending categories are very broad but as specific as I need them to be.
The second page shows my net worth, updated monthly. Each asset and liability is listed.
One page is for the rentals. It’s very detailed and kind of huge because that makes my life much easier at tax time.
One page is projections. It shows income from each source, as accurately as I can predict them. It has estimated annual expenses, adjusted for inflation. It has projected values of each asset. That page is more art than science, but when I’m panicked about money in the middle of the night it’s comforting.
I could merge some of these sheets but then they would be too big. I don’t like scrolling horizontally too much.
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So this is fun. Going back to a certain point in time, I normalized both the S&P500 and our NW and graphed it, The starting point is the same because they are both 100%.
It’s interesting to see that if you had ALL your money in the S&P 500 and never added or subtracted from it (including no dividends), you’d still be ahead despite this past year or so.
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I’m trying to decide whether to start a new spreadsheet or port and consolidate the old excel spreadsheet into google sheets.I don’t want to lose the years of tracking & trending from the excel spreadsheet, and the current google sheet is likely too granular. (I wanted to be very aware of spending the first few years after quitting my job so we could monitor the withdrawal rate closely.
My first response to moving to a quarterly view of net worth is that it would break my beautiful chart. The visualization only goes back to 2008, but I actually have some points to 2006. However, since I wasn’t consistent in the data being recorded, I can’t use it in my graph.
More importantly, I got into the habit of looking at the numbers regularly as a way to inoculate myself against rash behaviour when the markets drop - I have experience tracking that wiggly line and hunkering down when it drops. But that is just works for me. Quarterly has less wiggles, and that is generally better from a researcher perspective.
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Changing spreadsheets feels like altering the questions asked in the census, hey? Even if the old questions don’t really help anyone, they give continuous data.
When I simplified my tracking and spreadsheets I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of statisticians’ voices suddenly cried out in terror.
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We use a new spreadsheet every year to track expenses. The tab for net worth grows every year, but the monthly tabs reset. That was my solution to having a spreadsheet too large. Of course, it doesn’t go back as many years as yours does.
At the end of the year I always make a pareto chart for spending to see how we spent in terms of relative categories.
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Ok this had me cackling harder than the duke meme on the meme thread 
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Hahaha, I basically was Jen Barber. I love her.
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Mar 2023 is a titch lower than Mar 2022 and continues to trail the Dec 2021 high point. WR is 3.22% thanks to an uptick in spending vs. 3.14% in Dec '21.
I realized that we had some additional lucky timing from a psychological perspective with respect to this graph. You may recall that in Dec '21 my RRSP matching from that employer vested. I had not been showing the unvested value up to that point, so when things dropped in the beginning of 2022 the impact looks smaller.
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Q1 ending has us almost even with 12 months prior on net worth, though investments (brokerage + retirement) have not quite gotten there yet.
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Might be difficult to see, but this is an all time high - above Dec 2021. We have contributed since then, but it’s nice to finally go past a small round number that I really expected to hit last year.
Withdrawal rate is 3.17%, which is higher than Dec 21’s 3.14%, but considering inflation, I’m not unhappy. Our lowest was 3.11%, but that was reflecting lockdowns and shovelling money into buckets from the prior 12 months.
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How are you you calculating your withdrawal rate?
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Withdrawal rate is based on
- Rolling 12 month spend (Internet/phone/hydro/gas, Grocery & food, Books/crafts/gifts, Clothing/shoes, Transit, House misc, Health/personal)
- Annual lumpy stuff & sinking funds (Property tax, Taxes prep, Home insurance, Culture & Travel, Charity, House renos, TFSA). This is a hard number, not rolling, and gets adjusted when property taxes, insurance or tax prep increase - or if I think we will want to systemically increase how much we spend on travel regularly - stuff like that.
- Estimated taxes to cover the above if we were both taking out similar amounts from RRSPs - this is a lower tax rate than I pay right now because all the income is one person, and is not taking into account that some of the money will be taxed less as the Shadowy One gets tax advantaged Canadian dividends in their non-registered investment account.
That’s all the numerator.
The denominator is money in investment accounts - RRSPs, TFSA, and non-registered.
People taking close note will realize this is a false calculation - because the numerator includes a TFSA contribution for the shadowy one, which isn’t really spending - but I needed it for calculating the estimated taxes. Also, this denominator ignores our 2+ years of cash in a high yield savings account & GICs. So, if we remove the TFSA from the numerator, and add the cash into the denominator, we’re at 2.62% (!). But I haven’t been tracking that number - I only bothered to pull it this morning for the first time - and like I tell my clients, the important thing is to choose a number to track that is pretty close to the right thing, and not to worry too much about optimizing the exact right number to track because it’s rarely worth the effort. Basically, I was building in a couple of extra buffers. And yet, the IBL still in my head today niggling.
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