YNAB You Need A Budget

[sarahs219]

I've been contributing to my employer's 401(k) plan for 2 full years now. I started contributing in Jan. 2010 by allocating 100% of my money into a target retirement mutual fund. Fast forward two years later and I finally am ready to take a little more control on this matter. I started by building my own portfolio, given the funds available in my plan. In December I spent a fair amount of time researching how to build a diversified portfolio for a person of my age (26) and I'm happy with the portfolio I came up with.

Here's where I need help. I'd like to track each investment from month to month so I can see how each one is doing at the end of the year re-evalutate my portfolio to rid myself of any funds that are underperforming. I cannot seem to decide the best way to do this. So far I have just been tracking the cost per share of each fund and the amount of shares I own. I have a spreadsheet that lists the funds down the left side and across the top I have the months listed out. The thing is, this does not seem very informative to me and I'm just curious if anyone has any other ideas about how to do this so at the end of the year I will have a clear picture of what has gone on.

So here are my specific questions:
1. Should I be recording additional information each month, above and beyond the cost per share and amount of shares owned? If so, what information?
2. What is a good layout in a spreadsheet to track this information? Specific examples greatly appreciated.

Normally I am the queen of spreadsheets and I have some great ones that I use all the time, but this particular type of tracking is just beyond me. I've tried researching online, couldn't come up with much though. This is not only for my 401(k). I'd like to do the same for my husband's 401(k) and an IRA we have.

[Turf_Hacker]

One very simplistic suggestion is to make use of an online resource like Morningstar (www.morningstar.com) to check on the actual performance of your funds. I would suggest doing this no more frequently than twice a year, annually is even better. If you're checking every month, you run the risk of dumping a great fund that has a very short-term bad streak. Since you (presumably) are investing for the long term, concentrate more on the longer-term measures of performance (5 and 10-year rate of return) rather than the short term measures.

Hope this helps!

[Budget_Ninja]

If you want excel, it gets complex to view you portfolio, record your transaction and record you share price history on top of displaying the data in nice graphs and charts.

For a simple solution I suggest 4 tabs.

Detail tab:
Investment Account, Investment Symbol, Date, Shares, Cost Per Share, Total Cost.

You would record all you transactions here. I would use positive values when buying shares, negative values when selling shares.



Current Portfolio Tab:
Investment Account, Investment Symbol, Total Shares, Total Cost Per Share, Total Cost, Market Value Per Share, Total Market Value

You then use SUMIFS formula (Excel 2007) to get you data from the detail tab to the portfolio tab. If your handy in excel you can get stock quotes to populate in a third tab and use that data to drive you Market Value Per Share cell in you portfolio tab. It would be helpful if this tab had a portfolio as of date so you could change it to see earlier time periods.




Portfolio Snap Shot Tab:
Because anything else I can think of would require complex formulas and perhaps some VBA coding, just take a snapshot of your portfolio at a specified interval (monthly) and put it on this tab with and additional date column that holds the date snapshot was taken, you can use this tab to generate your graphs and charts of historical performance.



Historical Fund Prices Tab:
Date, Symbol, Closing Share Price
Use this to populate your portfolio tab, I typically would take the closing share price for the maximum date on this tab that is less than my portfolios 'as-of date' for the symbol I am interested in. That way if I am too lazy to enter daily numbers it will get my most recent share price and use that.



If you like excel and want to set this kind of thing up that's cool, but there are free resources that could get you the same or most likely better. Does the institution that holds your investments provide a summary or access to a web site to view that information? It get more complicated if you want to track distributions & reinvested distributions or you want to capture specific performance measures. I used to do this to but have since opted for a simplified indexing portfolio that is rebalanced twice a year.

Buy low, sell high

Good luck!

[Kroneg]

I'd like to track each investment from month to month so I can see how each one is doing at the end of the year re-evalutate my portfolio to rid myself of any funds that are underperforming.

If you really mean to evaluate your portfolio at the "end of the year", then you've already answered your own question. Ignore the month-to-month changes - they are all short-term noise in a long-term investment. When you get your year-end statement for your accounts, look a the performance over the past year from that. Your year-end statement should have all that clearly laid out for you. You can look at your quarterly statements to keep an idea of what's going on through the year, but by not looking at the month-to-month "squiggles" in the data, you'll save yourself a lot of needless work. I did that exact thing recently - got my year-end statement on my 403(b) plan, readjusted my contributions and invested amounts based on that, and I can ignore it until next quarter - and probably not "do" anything until next year.

Charlie Munger (Warren Buffet's associate) has said his success has depended on "inactivity bordering on sloth" - i.e. set up things correctly, then don't mess with it.

[brad]

I'd like to track each investment from month to month so I can see how each one is doing at the end of the year re-evalutate my portfolio to rid myself of any funds that are underperforming.

Note that this effectively amounts to buying high and selling low, the exact opposite of what you should be doing. Your choice of funds may be limited by what's offered through your employer, but if you're investing for retirement you're probably best off investing in index funds for the equities portion of your portfolio and just letting them sit with an occasional rebalancing of your asset allocation (to maintain your desired proportions of equity vs. fixed income investments and also to maintain your proportions of domestic vs. international exposure, etc.).

Many managed funds can beat the indexes in the short term (1-5 years, sometimes longer), but over the long term index funds almost invariably come out ahead, especially when you consider that the management fees are much lower. Since you're investing for the long term, that's where you should be if possible, and you shouldn't pay much attention to annual performance. The value of your shares now is meaningless: what matters is what they're worth when you get closer to needing the money (i.e., when you're nearing retirement age). In fact when my index funds' share prices decline, that's my signal to buy more of them. At this stage of the game it's not what your shares are worth that matters, it's how many shares you own.

Funds that "underperformed" this year could be winners next year -- for a long-term investment your goal is not steady growth because that's not how the market works. It's dynamic growth, which means lots of ups and downs from year to year with an overall long-term trend of growth. If you sell your shares of "underperforming" funds when their prices are low, you're locking in your losses.

[maxfax]

Posting the same info here as on other threads asking the same thing. Consider the discussion at http://www.retailinvestor.org/tracking.html and the spreadsheet at http://www.retailinvestor.org/Portfolio.xls

[planoi]

ส่วนแบตสมัยเก่าที่ตอนนี้น่าจะเลิกใช้ไปแล้ว คือ เมทัลไฮดรายด์ ซึ่ง "จำเป็น" จะต้องใช้ให้หมดเกลี้ยงก่อนแล้วจึงชาร์จ ถ้าไม่หมดจะต้องมีการ Discharge ให้มันหมดก่อน เพราะแบตชนิดนี้ สมมุติว่าเหลือ 30% แล้วนำไปชาร์จ (โดยไม่ discharge) มันจะจำว่า 30% คือตำแหน่งที่แบตหมด (บุหรี่ไฟฟ้าไม่ได้ใช้แบตแบบนี้นะครับ ไม่ต้องกังวล) บุหรี่ โดยปกติ บุหรี่จริง 1 มวนจะมีจำนวนครั้งในการสูบประมาณ 12-15 ครั้ง ในขณะที่น้ำยาหรือไส้นิโคตินของบุหรี่ไฟฟ้า (ในที่นี้ จะเรียกว่า E-Liquid) จะเท่ากับ 0.1ml (0.1 มิลลิลิตร) ซึ่งจะได้จำนวนสูบ 12-15 ครั้งเท่ากัน ดังนั้น 0.1ml ของ E-Liquid จะเท่ากับบุหรี่ 1 มวน eroll ราคาบุหรี่ไฟฟ้าพร้อมน้ำยา แพงกว่าในเดือนแรก เดือนที่ 2 เป็นต้นไป ต้นทุนจะค่อย ๆ ลดลง จนในเดือนที่ 3 ต้นทุนจะถูกกว่าครึ่งของดูดบุหรี่จริง ovale ราคา หากคุณกำลังมองหา บุหรี่ไฟฟ้า ทันสมัยที่ผลิตรสชาติที่ดีและมีการผลิตควันไอน้ำได้มากแล้วละก็ คำตอบนั้นก็คือ elips-C ซึ่งเป็นรุ่นบุหรี่ไฟฟ้าล่าสุดที่ได้รับการออกแบบมาอย่างสวยงามโดย ovale ที่ได้รับการยอมรับทั่วโลก และในรุ่นของ elips-C นี้ก็มีการปรับปรุงการไหลของอากาศให้ดียิ่งขึ้น ภายในก็มีการปรับเปลี่ยนมาใช้ Atomiser แบบใหม่อีกด้วย ovale บุหรี่ไฟฟ้าซึ่งใช้แบต Lithium-ion มีจำนวนครั้งในการชาร์จประมาณ 300 ครั้ง (จำนวนครั้งอาจจะแตกต่างกันขึ้นอยู่กับแต่ละรุ่นแต่ละโรงงาน) ไม่ว่าจะทะนุถนอมดีโดยใด ในที่สุดมันก็ต้องจากไปเพราะหมดอายุการใช้งาน บุหรี่ไฟฟ้า ที่มีผู้เลือกใช้มากสุดได้แก่ ทำให้ปราศจาก ทาร์ คาร์บอนมอนออกไซด์ บิวเทน แอมโมเนีย ไซยาไนด์ ไนโตรเจนไดออกไซด์ สารหนู ฟีนอล กัมมันตภาพรังสีและสารอื่นๆ ประมาณ 4000 ชนิด ควันที่ออกมาไม่เป็นอันตรายต่อผู้สูบและคนรอบข้าง เพราะ ไม่ใช่ควันจากการเผาไหม้ แต่เป็นโดยละอองหมอกที่เกิดจากสารโพรไพลีนไกลคอล เพื่อคงไว้ซึ่งสุนทรีย์ในการสูบ หลังจากชาร์จไฟเต็มแล้ว แบตเตอรี่แต่ละมวนจะใช้ได้หนึ่งวันเต็มแม้สำหรับผู้สูบบุหรี่หนัก