Keeping Track Of Net Worth

One of the important need for building wealth is keeping track of your money invested in various places. You need to know how your investments are doing. You need to know your net worth at any point of time.It is not only useful for planning but also it gives a lot of pride, joy and sense of satisfaction seeing your wealth grow day by day.

There are various sites available today to track your portfolio. Major credit card companies present a portfolio view where you need to enter online user accounts (like Fidelity, Vanguard, ETrade etc). Once you go in to your portfolio it will fetch the records and display your net worth. Majority of these card companies uses service from a service, called Yodlee.

I use and encourage you to use Yodlee money centre to track your investments directly instead of going through third parties providing same service through Yodlee API. Whatever be the reason, I do not find few institution in American Express portfolio tracker, but I do find it in Yodlee.com. It might be a business strategy from those people, in my opinion.

Yodlee even lists the banks from my home country where I do remit money periodically. I can add my Car’s estimated market value. I have my money with 10 different financial institutions and till date I haven’t come across any bank account, health saving account, brokerage account or trading account which is not listed with Yodlee. It is very simple to set up well, you need to enter details about your online login. Since big names in banking world use their service, I do believe this is as secure as their own standards. I am using Yodlee for more than 4 years without a security breach. If you think a data compromise might happen and your id/password can be stolen, then this risk is there for any online account you have.

There are many competitors to Yodlee like mint.com, but mint do not have as extensive list of accounts as Yodlee has. I tried mint.com too, but I could not link all of my accounts, I never had this problem with Yodlee.

Every other day I log on to money center and get the current value of my savings, investments and credit card balances. I do get to see my net worth, I get to see my total debt, I get to see the rate of my net worth change, my spending patterns, I get to see up to 6 months of transactions on any of the Yodlee linked accounts. I do not use other features as bill pay, alerts and email etc.

One cool feature it has, is a graphical financial event calendar. The calendar has a list of all financial transactions that occurred on each day of month. While I am looking at the calendar, I know on Monday I spent $40 on gas, and took $100 from ATM, on the same day I purchased shares of COP in my brokerage account.

This is a cool website, recommend my readers to at least try it out, linking your accounts. I am sure you will find value in it. Do leave comments to let me know your thoughts.